The Apple TV is a device with an interesting history. For years now, the tech industry has tried time and time again to re-envision the future of the living room experience. As we’ve talked about in the past, no one has truly tackled the set-top box. Different vendors have simply brought pieces to a puzzle that no one’s been able to solve.
After news broke that the late Steve Jobs felt he had finally solved the puzzle, the rumor mill went into overtime. If you checked out my piece on iOS 5 Notifications, you know I often try to envision what’s next, and the Apple TV is no exception to my enthusiasm for conceptual design. So I spent some time seriously considering what the next Apple TV could and should be. We’ll start with the hardware.
Hardware: Set-Top Box vs. HDTV
A lot of analysts have Apple changing course from their previous Apple TVs in that they’d be selling an actual HDTV as opposed to a set-top box. Apple would undoubtedly make a strong competitor because of the high quality displays they tend to use. Apple’s Cinema Display, for example, is often written off by most people as being an overpriced monitor, when the truth of the matter is that it’s one of the highest quality displays that you can get. That’s why Apple’s displays are even found on the desks of some avid PC users, because they’re users who want or need a display with that type of color accuracy, etc. Point is, a good number of people already have HDTVs, making an Apple HDTV a product that serves to a smaller group. To customers who don’t already have an HDTV, the Apple HDTV might be appealing if they’re willing to spend more on it than they would on a competing set. An Apple would have it’s benefits (which I’ll come back to), but the majority of people will opt for the revamped set-top box instead.
On the outside, the Apple TV looks almost identical to the model that Apple’s shipping today. Inside, the Apple TV features an A5 processor for 1080p playback, and some other spec bumps. As with most Apple products, the focus here is software.
Software
When Apple introduced the iPhone, it wasn’t the introduction of a smartphone that made it so popular, it was the fact that smartphones up until then were comprised of complicated, ugly menus and limited input methods (styluses and fixed buttons). TVs today are the smartphones before the iPhone; they’re functional, but they’re not beautiful, not engaging.
So, how do you make TV software engaging? You take it off the TV. Even people I know that have 20/20 vision and 40+” TVs still seem to find themselves squinting to read ugly, unintuitive menus. It’s an annoying experience, and with more “smart” TVs coming onto the market, buyers now have even more to squint at. These smart TVs seem to have forgotten what the TV is truly about: consuming media. So, if you take the software off the TV, where do you put it? The answer is, you put it right in the user’s hand, you put the software right on the remote.
Apple revolutionized the phone market with their multitouch experience, and so there’s no reason why they shouldn’t bring that same experience to their TV remote as well. Given the remote’s limited hardware requirements, it wouldn’t cost Apple much to build a multitouch remote. Essentially, it’s much like building an iPod Touch without a lot of the hardware that an iPod Touch requires.
Like the TV it controls, the remote runs a modified version of iOS, which makes the user experience extremely familiar to anyone who’s ever used an iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad. Even the setup experience is similar. Upon first boot, users are asked to pair their remote with the TV, creating a private wireless connection between the TV and the remote. After the remote’s connected, the rest of the iOS-like setup process happens on the remote, asking users if they’d like to enter their iTunes/iCloud/iTunes Home Sharing credentials so that all of their content automatically starts becoming available to the TV or set-top box.
The setup process does this so that all of your content sources are integrated together. For example, the movies app on the remote lets you tab between the movies from your computer, the movies stored in iCloud, the iTunes Store, and even Netflix. By integrating the different content sources, it makes it easy to search for a movie, and check different services all at once. Apple TV also builds a “content quilt” that displays a mosaic of your album art, movie posters, etc, to display up on your TV while the user is picking content. When a user pauses content, it scales down like a window, and hovers over the content quilt. This makes it easy to remember what you were last watching, and even easier to pick right back up where you left off. When you hit play the content simply scales back up to normal size.
However, there is one final service to setup before users are ready to use their Apple TV. That step is choosing a TV provider. Providers spend exorbitant amounts of money on set-top boxes, and broadcasting infrastructure. If Apple played their cards right, they could cut a lot of costs for both TV providers and consumers, all while taking over the living room. Choosing a TV provider works a lot like choosing a cell carrier, you tap it, and select a plan. However, your plan is delivered over your network connection, this saves the carrier from having to provide a set-top box, saves the carrier money when it comes to actually providing the content, provides a lower cost to the end-user, and finally, allows users to easily subscribe to more than one TV provider if they want. TV content has both on demand and on air options just like cable and satellite users have now, but now the TV content comes to users in a way that’s easy to browse, and easier to enjoy. At the core of it, Apple TV gets users back to watching content in a simple and elegant way.
Once set up, users are greeted with a home screen that’s almost identical to the one iOS users have now, except for the fact that the remote features playback controls on the home screen and that the remote features different applications. By default, the user gets apps for Movies, TV Shows, Photos, Music, Netflix, Internet (a folder which houses the apps for YouTube, Vimeo, NHL, MLB, NBA, and WSJ Live), FaceTime (an Apple HDTV only feature), and Settings. A lot of people who have anticipated the revamped Apple TV have made bold claims that the TV will feature a touchscreen or run apps out of the App Store. Ultimately, this only clutters the TV experience and contributes to the problem Apple TV needs to solve. A touchscreen TV would be horrible for end users, asking them to get up and switch apps, not to mention it would result in a fingerprint covered TV. This is why a touch-based remote is a much more natural experience for the users.
As for third-party applications, most applications would only clutter the TV viewing experience. Simple applications like FaceTime make sense for when users aren’t watching TV, but other applications that we’ve seen demoed don’t make sense. If users want those kinds of tools they’ll use their phones, tablets, or computers, not their TVs because people turn on their TVs to unwind and consume content, not do the things they’ve been doing all day on their other devices. In the future, Apple might open up a type of SDK for the Apple TV for content consumption applications like Pandora or iHeartRadio, but as of right now, they need to focus on perfecting the core experience before moving onto that. Just like they perfected the iPhone experience before launching an official App Store for that.
To recap, this remote redefines how people get to their content, it makes for a much more intimate and personal content-choosing experience in a way that users are already familiar with. It also allows users to browse content without interrupting what they’re already viewing.
Siri
Then there’s Siri. Holding the home button on the Apple TV remote triggers Siri in the same way that it does on the iPhone. Overall, Siri acts the same way, but with the Apple TV, Siri gains a partnership with IMDB, meaning users can ask Siri questions like, “who’s that actor?” Siri will check what film’s playing on the TV at the time, and pull up the corresponding cast information.
Benefits of an Apple HDTV
The new Apple TV software makes content viewing easy in a way that really plays to Apple’s strengths, and the Apple TV’s cheap entry cost makes it more accessible than ever. However, for those who haven’t yet upgraded to an HDTV, Apple’s set might be worth considering.
The set features a few advantages, two of which I’ve already mentioned: a higher quality display and FaceTime capabilities. The base of the TV also has a dock for charging the remote when its battery finally dwindles down. (The set-top version of the Apple TV just comes with a basic cord and wall adapter.) When you dock the remote, the TV turns off by default, just like undocking the remote turns it on by default. However, this feature can easily be turned off.
Finally, the Apple HDTV has a feature called SmartConnect. Like any HDTV, Apple’s HDTV would have various inputs for different external devices. However, unlike regular HDTVs, when a device is plugged into the Apple HDTV, it comes up as an icon on the remote’s home screen. The user is then asked if they’d like to name the device. For example, someone might have an Xbox hooked up to their Apple TV, instead of switching inputs, a user simply taps the Xbox “app” from the remote, and just like that the user can see their Xbox. SmartConnect only expands on the idea that users shouldn’t have to jump between different devices connected to their TVs for different kinds of content. The Apple TV is the ultimate hub for entertainment content.
Accessories
Like with any Apple device, there are a few accessories that can be bought for Apple TV devices (both the set-top box and the HDTV). The first is a remote dock. The remote dock is much like Apple’s iPhone dock in that it provides a more elegant charging solution, but with a device like the Apple TV, a dock makes much more sense since users might have their Apple HDTV in the bedroom, and want to turn off their TV by keeping a dock on their nightstand.
The second accessory is the MacBook Air SuperDrive that Apple already offers for their MacBook Air and Mac Mini customers. However, the SuperDrive would come with a microUSB adapter so that it can plug into the port on the back of the set-top box or the standard USB port on the back of the Apple HDTV. This allows users to easily watch DVD content as well as their digital content. (Now if we really started dreaming, Apple would throw in Blu-ray support, but we’ve not heard anything from Apple that revokes their previous “bag of hurt” label that they’ve put on Blu-ray.)
Pricing and Availibility
The Apple HDTV would probably have a starting price around $1099 thanks to its high quality display, which would make it a little more expensive than competing models, but not so expensive that no one would ever buy one.
The Apple TV set-top box, however, comes in two models, the regular $99-129 version that you’d buy in an Apple Store or other retailer like Best Buy or Target. This version can subscribe to any TV provider like I mentioned earlier. However, a secondary provider specific model would be available as well. This means consumers could get an Apple TV set-top box through their TV provider like they do now. This creates a cheaper way for Apple to get the Apple TV into the hands of customers, while carriers still benefit from loaning out more reliable, easier to understand set-top boxes, and the fact that Apple TV streams TV content over a user’s internet connection (which would also be a sales incentive for TV providers that offer broadband services). The only difference for the end-user is that if they get a set-top box through a specific TV provider, that model is provider locked, meaning the Apple TV won’t let users unsubscribe from the carrier they’re renting the set-top box from or subscribe to competing providers.
Overall, that’s my idea of what Apple TV should be. I know there are a lot of people who think it should be more app-focused, but I can’t help but feel that the living room experience should be more dedicated to watching content instead of trying to make it a smartphone-like experience. This experience that I outlined above just seems to be a more natural way of watching content that just feels right, and everyone who’s heard the concept until now seems to agree. If any of you have questions or comments about the concept, feel free to leave them below, and I’ll get back to you.
Source:http://bytenow.net/2012/01/03/designing-the-future-of-apple-tv/
