Steve Jobs: We Still Haven't Figured Out The Living Room
alleyinsider.com
alleyinsider.com
Now realistically forget the 'ever made' part, and focus on classics + all recent content, there's no reason why cable companies shouldn't be able to deliver this soon. Merge the on demand libraries with streaming video sites like Hulu, and we're almost there already.
And yet both hate to share profits, additionally the content owner are still trying to find out what price the markets will bare.
To do that they start high and slowly work their way down. And that slows down adoption.
Actually I think with record producers, video content owners & to an extent, publishing giants are all in a similar (leaky) boat. They are in a situation where life has been good, they are on top of the world. Only way to go is down.
Any move in the directions that technology is pushing towards like better, wider distribution, reduced production costs & power to the consumer is troubling. For one thing, they have a better hold on the here & now then the long tail. Sure they own most of it, but better distribution opens the doors to a groundswell of small producers. Expensive special effects, 1000 actor scenes, are no longer as big a differentiator. Now you want to give these $100k budget jokers access to living rooms?
Will better distribution make people watch more TV? probably not. Why take a chance?
On demand is lean forward with the viewer having to think and decide explicitly what they wish to watch.
With TV you can lean back, not think too much and watch whatever the channel has chosen for you tonight.
Supplemented with Easynews and basically you can get anything you like on-demand.
I'm ok with paying for TV shows ala-cart with no monthly subscription. With how little I watch it would probably be cheaper anyway. The only reason we have cable is for football and a handful tv series.
Microsoft is unwilling to give the 360 killer features (such as internet browsing, being a media center without Media Center) at the risk of canibalizing Windows Media Center and Windows sales
Sony just doesn't have the software development expertise that Microsoft has. This is compounded by the dificulty in programming for their Cell architecture which has resulted in delays in many products.
The Xbox is already pretty good for watching paid movies/TV shows, and will be pretty cool for watching Netflix stuff in a month or so. I'm guessing it's more that no one wants to surf the web on their TV.
For me 360 is still too expensive to watch TV shows and movies; and I'm not really excited about the Netflix deal considering you still need to be some premium Netflix subscriber for it to work.
The industry has before been isolated because of the lack of content. However, more recently there has been an explosion of content availability. But further adding to the problem has been the usability of that content.
I, personally, own a Media Center PC which I built myself for the purpose of exploring the idea of accessing my TV over the internet. I must say that I've gone away from that route because everything was bulky and much more complicated than using my Satellite receiver that I already had. This is a problem that could be overcome if the effort was put forth to actually overcome it.
What needs to be done is someone needs to create a single simple box that includes the DVD player, USB ports, infarred, Ethernet port, various A/V input, and S-Video, Composite, and HDMI outputs. On this device load a very simplistic, efficient software base which can do the following... Load DVD, Load External Signal, Load "Full Internet", Watch "NET TV"... I quoted NET TV because it is something that would need to be treated different than the Internet. NET TV we could think of it as going to certain content website (like Hulu, YouTube, or even iTune's music store, NetFlix, etc.) and browing them through a simplified interface (rather than their traditional interface) and navigating through them to find the shows you want. This would be done, in a way, like tailoring sites to mobile phone users, only this would be to TV users. Included could be a new service which is truly "Live Stream" from the various news sources.
Just a concept btw...
I generally love Apple stuff, however I'm already using my Xbox 360 to stream DLed video content from my desktop, so it's hard to justify getting another device that just does that. If I could replace my DVD player or another device, that'd be something to consider.
While the page was loading I imagined a discussion on the current paradigm of entertainment focused on individualism (think mp3-players and computer games where you basically lock yourself out of the world). Traditionally, the living room has been about socialising, spending time with the family etc. Here is where a lot of improvement is just waiting to be done. I was hoping he wasn't going to talk about TVs and movies though. The real question is: What will kill the TV in the living room?