Apple, in a rare pre-announcement of a product, said today that they’re working on a little box that lets you stream video, photos, and music from your networked computers to your TV. This is not a DVR. It doesn’t record TV, because that’s not how Apple sees the future of media working. Broadcast media doesn’t fit into their model.
Think about how you use a TiVo. You go through a menu, pick a show you want to watch, and watch it. Pretty simple.
Now think about how a TiVo works. It has a set schedule. When a show you like comes on, it switches to the right channel, sits there for the appropriate amount of time recording the show, then switches to the next show on its schedule.
The user interface of TiVo makes it seem like shows are discrete files that your TiVo has access to, but you’re really just watching slices of time from earlier in the week. This becomes jarringly apparent when a TV show flashes a weather advisory for a storm from last Tuesday, or when you sit down to watch a program only to discover that the cable went out while it was being recorded, or when a football game ran over time. You’re not actually watching TV shows. You’re watching what TiVo was watching while the show was supposed to be on. TiVo is a very well-designed halfway point between broadcast television and à la cart television. It turns broadcast into à la cart, but it’s still a recording of the broadcast.
Apple’s model is entirely à la cart. It has strongly defended this model against the desires of the suits in the record industry for years now. You buy a song at a certain price, and you own that song. Now, with TV and movies, they’re doing the same thing. The reason that the iTV doesn’t have a TV-in port is that Apple doesn’t care about broadcast TV (and, well, they don’t get any money for broadcast TV, only when you buy shows from them). The Apple model is that you’ll pay them to subscribe to a TV show, and they’ll give you the download whenever a new show is up (think paid podcasts). The iTV is a box that lets you watch it all as if it were normal TV. In other words, it’s a TiVo without the clunky need to record the show on a channel first.
There are some problems with this. First and foremost, there’s no capability to watch live TV. As an assimilated TiVo user, I rarely watch live TV, but having it there is very, very important for coverage of live events (and sports, if I cared), weather reports, disasters, and breaking news. Second, Apple doesn’t offer the season pass option on all of its iTunes shows. And even if it did, the present model requires pre-paying for a season of a show, which means that if I were to buy all my shows from iTunes, I’d be shelling out a very large sum of money all at once in September when all the new seasons debut. I’d prefer a discounted weekly bill to a pre-pay model.
So what is the iTV (or what will it be when it comes out)? It’s the hunk of plastic that actually makes all of Apple’s work in the digital media field useful. It’s great that I can download movies to my computer, but when they’re stuck on my computer, what good do they do me? Being able to watch them on my TV means that they’re actually something I’d watch at all.
I’ve written before of what I think the future of media is going to look like, and with iTV it’s pretty apparent what Apple thinks it will be. You won’t subscribe to broadcast TV and you won’t buy DVDs or CDs. Everything will be on your computer, but you’ll be able to watch it on your TV, on another computer, or on your iPod. Plus, you’ll own it, so if you want to go back and watch a re-run of a TV show, you’ll just pull it up from a menu.