“Let’s face it. From the customers’ perspective, the TV business sucks. Some shows are on Netflix, but sometimes they’re not,” David Gewirtz reports for ZDNet. “Or some shows are there, but not certain episodes. Hulu Plus has a lot of good material, but only certain seasons.”
“Then there’s the whole ‘clips-as-feature’ malarkey, where networks and stations appear as apps, but don’t provide access to full shows, but really only teaser clips. They’re a waste of customer time and provide little to no value,” Gewirtz reports. “Where does Apple excel? Finding an area where the customer experience sucks and making it a lot better. They did it with phones. They did it with music… Apple even did it with computers and tablets.”
Gewirtz reports, “It’s a very big market with a very crappy user experience. This poorly-integrated consumer-hostile market has ‘Apple’ written all over it.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: 26 days to Apple’s WWDC 2015 keynote address.
Even a ZDNet writer appears to jump on the Apple bandwagon, he’ll must have gotten real cold.
“It’s a very big market with a very crappy user experience.”
Amen to that.
Recently, there was a story on the Yahoo news feed that listed the myriad of television content that will be cancelled this season. I never have heard of any of those shows. In fact, I rarely watch broadcast TV any longer because watching on-demand content on the Apple TV is much more convenient. The idea of broadcast TV is completly horse and buggy now. Watching broadcast is like having to schedule a specific time every week to play a game on my phone, which is crazy. Additionally, I have almost stopped watching local news and live sports because of the inconvenience and the fact that any video advertising has become increasingly annoying.
The way to discover content in the past was via channel surfing or word of mouth. Who has the time or patience to do this anymore? I think the networks/channels are running on borrowed time, so maybe the new Apple TV service will help these guys stay relevant/solvent.
“… Apple even did it with computers and tablets.” Sheesh. Yeah, he gets it, but what an afterthought.
I look forward to seeing what Apple will offer (although who knows when it will become available in Canada).
The biggest problem is that the wide-bandwidth ISPs are also providers of broadcast TV. Where I live we have access to fibre optics to the house and hybrid (fibre to pole; cable to house). These companies won’t have to raise prices on wide-bandwidth internet if people start cutting the cord (and fear a backlash or anti-trust investigation) – they’ve already done it. They keep the price if you buy Internet by itself high, but discount it heavily if you bundle it with TV and home phone services. I would happily get rid of home phone and only have broadband internet with Apple and Netflix, but it would end up costing me more. It only costs about $25 extra to add both HDTV with PVR and home phone services to the cost of broadband internet by itself (at my current speed – if I drop speed, having internet by itself would save $40). That means that, if Apple comes in at $40 to $60, I would have to pay more to enjoy freedom from the antiquated broadcast TV system (and lose home phone – no problem with cell phones), if I stay at the same bandwidth I have now, or, if I cut bandwidth (still fast enough for everything I do), it would be, at best, a wash, if Apple comes in at $40.
I do think the era of broadcast TV (except for live events/news) will go away – but the broadcast giants will do everything they can to keep the status quo. Since, they also represent a lot of the content creation as owners of networks, they will starve Apple where they can as long as they can.
It would be nice if the old rumours that some of these behemoths were working with Apple to let them create the user experience would still come to pass. It would be great to see them, for once, align with what consumers want instead of continuing to try to force the status quo – go with the flow, not the status quo… (sorry…).
A bigger problem we all face is that we are running out of bandwidth. Scientists are saying that that will happen within 6 years unless new fibre optic is laid (driving the cost of service way up). We are almost at an end, they say, of the technology advancements that allow us to cram more and more in that same fibre optic cable – it is coming to a theoretical limit.
Of course, they may be wrong, and we will figure out how to do it.
“I do think the era of broadcast TV (except for live events/news) will go away-”
I, for one, hope not, as this is the only TV I currently watch.