'Capocalypse' when?
Once again, the content on AppleTV that is traditionally associated with a cable subscription requires one. That means, to watch the new Disney and Disney XD offerings on AppleTV, you'll need a subscription to one of the 7 supported cable companies (which include
And that archaic nature is why you also can't buy any of this programming directly from Apple to run on top of your internet service, but without a cable subscription -- the kind of offering that might truly begin to bring about the "capocalypse" that destroys the industry. Earlier this month, I looked at a plan from Sony to offer just such a service and it's definitely possible Apple is working on one of its own. If it is, though, these apps are a strange stop on the road to such an offering. In fact, Apple already has a dichotomy built into AppleTV. The sports apps for Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association, for example, can be ordered without a cable account, but that isn't true of Watch ESPN, which pays those leagues a fortune to carry their games. ESPN relies on getting its $5+ every month from your cable provider and doesn't want to upset that relationship.
But what about Apple? If it wants to follow Sony, it's hard to make sense of the rumor that the next major launch will be an app that lets you turn your AppleTV into a Time Warner Cable set-top box. That functionality just rolled out on Microsoft's Xbox 360 and provides access to all 300 channels a Time Warner customer would normally get. Adding it to AppleTV would certainly provide additional functionality, but would further muddle the box's identity: "It's a cable add-on". "No it's a cable-box replacement." "No it's a source of direct content." Flexibility is good to a point, but a really mixed message is less than likely to truly change the way people watch television.
Not a great box yet either
The other thing Apple needs to do if it wants to create a revolution in TV watching is to decide how to make the user experience of AppleTV great, because it isn't at the moment. And new content isn't helping it get much greater. The "wall of icons" approach that has served the iPhone so well is less appealing on the TV, especially when one compares it to the traditional cable guide that has the advantage of showing you what's currently on. And that's an interesting conundrum for this kind of device. The Disney Channel on AppleTV, along with WatchESPN and even The Weather Channel, have this combination of live programming and on-demand offerings that make them very cable-like, but in a way that sometimes forgets that people just like to sit down and watch sometimes.
Even Netflix is coming to realize with its new queue system, that sometimes we want to turn on the TV and let the programming come to us, without having to think about it. Live TV streams do this well and AppleTV is getting more of them. Vevo will just run music videos in pretty good quality HD on a channel that recalls the early days of MTV. But until I click through to that channel (or any other), I have no idea what's on. And with AppleTV there is a lot of clicking to move between channels. It can take a half dozen button presses to move from one program to another, during which no video is playing in the corner like on my normal DVR. On top of that, there's a decent delay for most streams to start showing video when you go to a new channel (or app really) which makes the normally interminable DirecTV channel changing seem lightning fast by comparison.
When AT&T was preparing to deliver U-verse, one of the design goals was to have the channel changing be nearly instant, even though the system was based entirely on internet protocols, which could have led to a slower-than-cable experience. With the help of Microsoft, they mostly succeeded and while U-verse isn't perfect by any means, it does deliver on the expectations of TV viewers. The counterargument will be that Netflix doesn't, yet it's still wildly successful. But it's important to remember that for all the people you know who supposedly have canceled cable and only have Netflix or Hulu, the reality is that's still a small minority of people. None of this is to suggest that Netflix isn't great at what it does, just that kind of slow navigation won't cut it for a multichannel TV offering. Things like using the iPhone as a remote can help, but currently it offers nothing more than a touchscreen version of the simplistic AppleTV remote so you're still left pressing the same button over and over to achieve simple tasks.
Whatever Apple's goals are in television, the company is likely guided by what CEO Tim Cook said in May at the AllThingsD conference, "I think many of us would agree that there's lots of things about the TV experience that can be better." So far, AppleTV offers some niceties in the way on-demand content is accessed, although not many of them are unique and there are bizarre omissions like the lack of proper queue management in the HBO Go app that had be reaching for a laptop with a web browser. Still, as I finish this, I got to hear some Pink and Justin Timberlake. Then I had to grab the remote when Miley Cyrus "We Can't Stop" came on. Progress comes in fits and starts.
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