The future of TV
Our television died at the weekend, and it was high-time we bought a new one anyway. We’ve never bought a new television – there always seemed to be a free/cheap one going from friends or family, or even Gumtree. Inevitably the thing would start showing signs of decay, resulting in a high-pitched sound emitting from the box. We lived with this with our previous tv, but now, this tv was giving my wife a headache. We picked a nice looking tv off the Richer Sounds website and went down to buy and collect.
Arriving at the shop, we knew exactly what we wanted, model number and everything. Looking around the store, we couldn’t see the specific set, but a couple of others caught our eye. The weird thing was – they came with things we’ve never imagined possible – WIFI, a few built-in apps, BBC iPlayer, and even Skype. Impressive I thought.
After weighing up the pros and cons, we decided on the TV we wanted. Unfortunately, neither that, or the other TV was in stock (my wife thinks this is a good sales ploy to upsell to more expensive TVs). The guy from Richer Sounds suggested a TV that was above our budget, but was in stock, and because we came with the express intention of leaving that shop with a TV, we went for it. (Thus endeth the long backstory).
Now home, I was setting it up and flicking through the features, trying out iPlayer and generally being pleased.
A while later, at my computer, I was reading up on the excerpts from Steve Jobs’ autobiography, where he mentions that he cracked it when thinking of coming to market with an Apple TV.
“It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine,” Jobs said. “I finally cracked it.”
Read more: http://moourl.com/emz4o
It probably has something to do with Siri being the easiest remote available, taking the best from the current Apple TV and doing a deal with the broadcasters/iTunes providers to have the content stream from iTunes in the Cloud.
Then it dawned on me. When I watched the Steve tribute at the Apple campus on the Apple.com site, one tribute mentioned how he helped change specific industries with Apple products. With iTunes, the music industry would never be the same again. With the iPhone, the smartphone industry would never be the same. With all these rumours of Jobs working on an Apple TV, made me wonder how Apple would change the TV industry. If it followed a similar model with the iPhone and iPad, it would be based around Apps surely.
Another interesting point: Apple recently rewrote Final Cut. It’s now completely cocoa-based and 64-bit. Yes, some of the loved features from the previous version are gone, but it’s leaner, meaner and now has a promising future – development-wise. My first thought was that they did this so it could run on the iPad – colour correcting and grading on the iPad would be pretty neat – replacing the various contour controllers and boards.
Now, I wonder if there’s a bigger reason – to be a content creator for the new Apple TV. Yes, I know it’ll probably be done with Xcode and the usual bits – but think about it. Not simply to deliver video, but to incorporate new features such as augmented reality perhaps? Or some kind of Faces feature? I don’t like to guess, but makes the roadmap and future of Final Cut pretty interesting.
So my thoughts are – it’s a good time to be producing video and multimedia, because sometime soon, an Apple TV may come along with an App store of its own – and who is going to create the apps for that?
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