I just made a few bets on what will be announced at Apple’s September 1st iPod event. Curiously absent was any mention of “iTV”/Apple TV take four billonth, because I find no such joy in predicting its future.
Steve Jobs made it clear, as we all knew in our hearts, that the TV-related infrastructure is the worst clusterfuck you could wish for in terms of providing a coherent experience, and that there was no way around it short of demolishing everything and starting over.
This will eventually happen. There will be no such thing as channels, or prime time, or programming blocks; no such thing as physical disks hosting DRM and insufferable unskippables; no such thing as a stack of devices, some of which exist as standalone products to enable an architecture where you can pick your level of quality and ambition, but most of who cover up the lack of expertise and customer respect inherent in most consumer electronics companies; no such thing as seven remotes, six HDMI ports, five different sorts of audio outlets, four dozen cables running back and forth across your wall, three standards of digital television reception to choose from, two different boxes for viewing and recording different programs and one confused user in the middle of it.
The TV market is fucked up at every level. The TV itself doesn’t work, the standards are wild and varying, the extra boxes you need don’t even talk to each other, the networks sell your eyes for change to advertisers and that’s only the consumer end of it. Paving over it means starting from the shows and figuring out what can be added to them. If you could pick TV shows a la carte, you could have either no ads for a large fee, few ads for a small fee or the same deluge of ads for free, but the ads would be better targeted. You could tick a box and receive experiments; watch a pilot and tell the producers what you liked about it. You could tick another box and allow for an extra few programs each week that your friends recommend.
It’s not clear to me that Apple is willing to do this, or that they want to do it right now. The alternative is a cheaper version of the Apple TV. Maybe it could get better software, sure. Maybe it could turn into a gaming platform and a new console, okay, even if every cut of A4 to date lacks muscle when compared to the crop of consoles that are currently on the market, and that will be due for replacement in a while. You’re not going to see any substantial improvement in anything that matters about Apple TV unless they start paving. If you’ve already made the bet, great, it’ll get better. If you’ve been waiting for a shift in pricing, great, you’ll be able to afford them. They could sell twice as many and it wouldn’t do a whole lot.
The TV as we know it, along with every single ancillary construct save for shows and the production thereof, is dying out. The writing’s on the wall. There will come a system to throw everything out that needs throwing out, and that will arrange the pieces that are left in such stunning and efficient simplicity that we will wonder how we ever put up with what was there before. But it’s not a “media center” like anything you’ve ever seen, and it sure as hell is not the Apple TV. The Apple TV is to this revolution was the MiniDisc player was to digital music; still playing the same old game in the same old way, strapping inline skates to the horse, and maybe it’ll make a few people a bit happier, but it’s not what the world wants.