“The trend toward direct connections between video content creators and their audiences is well underway, but the new Apple TV could finally push that trend into the living room,” Chris Young writes for TechCrunch. “Although direct-to-viewer relationships are the norm on the web, most premium TV content in the living room still passes through a cable television gatekeeper.”
“Does Apple finally have enough momentum to break the grip of the content middlemen for good?” Young writes. “Two months ago, Apple executives got on stage and proclaimed that “The Future of TV is Apps.” This should be a surprise to no one. Consumer demand for an unbundled living-room experience may have finally reached a groundswell. Mainstream audiences are realizing what geeky cord cutters and younger viewers have known all along: while TV shows have gotten better, cable TV interfaces and subscription bundles have become more frustrating. As more consumers become accustomed to browsing Netflix-style interfaces, the cable TV experience seems downright prehistoric.”
“There’s no reason to think that future TV apps will be limited to passive viewing experiences,” Young writes. “It’s more likely that the majority will be mixtures of both code and content. We know that the future of TV is apps; we just don’t know what those apps look like yet.”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple TV is the iOS device with by far the largest display.
If you think about what we started with phones, it let things be created that we couldn’t think of. In TV, that hasn’t been available. TV’s been a closed environment. You’ve been able to get the channels that were coming in, you had to get them through a single cable and satellite provider, and that was the ecosystem. And now [Apple TV] allows people like ESPN and CNN to create incredible apps that cannot just be viewing CNN live, but, for example, can make it interactive. SOmebody’s watching this interview and the app could do things like, people could give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. You know, you’re on-air live, if you were getting feedback from customers, they might be asking for more information… [so you might do a longer segment if people are really reacting strongly to what the guest is saying]. — Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services
