May 26, 2005
 Forget the Video iPod, I want my Apple LCD TV.
There was rampant speculation a few days ago that Apple and Intel were in talks to bring OS X to the Dark Side which makes sense in a way that's only interesting to Wall Street. When folks realized that it was a story over a thousand years old, alternative theories emerged, like the one from Merrill Lynch, supposing that Apple was building a video iPod.
Apple had just quietly released an update to their iTunes software, allowing for the purchase of music videos. When you pair that with their recent introduction of their highly-scalable H.264 video codec, the idea of an Apple video device starts to make sense.
Only thing is, I don't think it's mobile. Or at least, i don't think it should be. If Apple is going to do something for consumer video, it needs to be big, take advantage of existing consumer behavior, and it needs to be audacious enough to change our definition of what watching video could be.
I've been spending a lot of time transcoding video on the PSP lately. Turns out it's a really nice way to watch short form video but the variety and selection of long form UMD stuff kinda sucks. PSPs are portable, with a nice screen, and I can whip one out and catch up with my favorite videoblogs whenever I want (although lately for me, 'whenever' seems to be standing in line at the DMV.) The whole process works rather well, except for the all important social aspect (unless you count the guy turning in his license plates behind you.) Folks like Justin Hall think that we'll figure that one out soon enough, and I agree, but in the meantime, I can't help but think of Drazen's little gem that politics happen on the couch. I don't watch much TV, but when I do, it's always with someone else in the room.
TV watching is social behavior and that's why I wonder if Apple's next big move isn't a WiFi-enabled, OS X-embedded LCD TV, with a hard drive to cache content. Think iMac G5 starting at 42 inches. Think of something big enough to be a TV, that takes coax in from cable or satellite, but network-enabled to allow for either the caching of HD content to it's hard drive, or the streaming of lower bitrate content from somewhere else on the network. Give it an interface that works either with a traditional "TV" remote for basic functions or with a desktop app for more advanced playlisting capabilities and suddenly Apple could have a dream device for the living room with predictably high margins.
Although the current crop of wireless media gateways and set top boxes are pretty cool, our home entertainment centers are getting kinda cluttered. Who wants yet another box in their living room? Besides -- how are you gonna set a set top box on top of your LCD TV ;) Bringing these functionalities into a single box could turn some heads. Using existing hardware as a hub to sell through your existing content marketplace would turn a tide. (And after a little searching, I wonder if folks are already thinking the same thing.)
I used to joke with broadcast engineers that one day, the TV would be little more than a really big peripheral device. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe TVs could end up being a lot smarter than I think.
Posted by yatta at 05:36 AM
Interesting but I think you are wrong. There's no way Apple is going to sell TVs. Dell is already doing it and Gateway has Plasma TVs as well so there is no money in it. Even HP sells TVs so there is to much competition for Apple to make a profit.
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unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
Featured Project
Berkeley Conference: Online Video and the Future of Television - Friday, September 30, 2005
This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse – and until now, largely disconnected – specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.
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Interesting but I think you are wrong. There's no way Apple is going to sell TVs. Dell is already doing it and Gateway has Plasma TVs as well so there is no money in it. Even HP sells TVs so there is to much competition for Apple to make a profit.
Posted by: Camacho at May 26, 2005 11:09 AM