Dave Winer posted some interesting thoughts at Scripting.com today on the current state of television:
I read this piece on TechCrunch last week, in which a Samsung product manager says this about Apple and their TV.
“TVs are ultimately about picture quality.”
Okay. That marks Samsung as one of the pigs in an Angry Birds game. Like Kodak and Blackberry in years-gone-by.
I was watching the Knicks game on Time-Warner cable last night, and remembered why TV sucks, and it had nothing to do with picture quality. The picture quality was absolutely fantastic. If you had time-transported me from ten years ago to my couch last night I would have been blown away. HD is great. Unbelievable how beautiful it is. And the sound quality was great too. I have some very nice Polk Audio tower speakers, and a very powerful receiver driving them, connected optically to the set-top-box. Amazing audio experience.
Yet the whole overall experience sucked.
And that’s it, in a nutshell. People have known that Apple is working on an improved approach to television for years. Competitors have had the opportunity to make television work intelligently.
Yet most of us are still struggling with three remotes, every time we want to watch something. And no Internet integration. And no gaming or social media. No support for broadcasting your own channel from your home.
Apple just dropped the ‘Mac’ From OS X. There’s a reason for that.
Expect the next version of Apple TV to wreak havoc on the TV and broadcast industries, just as Apple has done with the PC industry, the MP3 player industry and the phone industry.
