“Broadcast TV dies, while web video breaks through” was #9 on AdAge Digital’s list of ten busted predictions for 2008:
“It was a tantalizing prediction to make: In a year when the striking writers had brought Hollywood to a halt, an explosion in web-originated content would accelerate the shift of dollars away from the tube. One problem: It didn’t happen.”
I don’t believe web video is dead by any means, but it sure is not overtaking broadcast television like many believed it would.
According to Nielsen, 282 million Americans are watching 127 hours of television per month while less than half that number are watching under 2 hours of web video.
More troubling is the part of the report which shows that those tuning into the web are primarily watching content originally aired on broadcast TV.
This begs the question, why are they watching on their computers?
It turns out that a majority of Americans are watching web video during business hours, presumably in their offices away from their televisions.
Does video content on the web only have a future in a world without TVs and with broadcast quality content?
So it’s been over two months since I blogged my post about our Apple TV and Time Capsule and thought it would be good to give an update.
First, the user experience.
Apple TV has changed our TV viewing habits and we still have no reason to go back to cable/satellite. We have saved at least $100 by buying only shows we want to watch and having the Apple TV has re-energized my interest in the YouTube community and video podcasts.
Some people have emailed me and have asked how I watch live sports. The answer is — my wife and I don’t really watch many sports on TV. If you are an avid sports fan and need ESPN or some other live event coverage not available over the air, you probably couldn’t do without cable or satellite like us. The only sports we watch avidly are pro tennis and football which are usually on the major networks.
Our TV viewing habits have changed since Apple TV, particularly how we consume news.
Instead of having the cable news networks on in the background, we now tune into the ABC World News podcast. We have it marked as a favorite on the Apple TV and can stream it live anytime. Both my wife and I grew up with NBC news, but NBC does not release their nightly news broadcast as a podcast until the following day… when it’s not news anymore. In fact, ABC is the only major non-cable network in the states that puts out timely world news programming.
Our other major video news source is YouTube. This week, we watched YouTube for Olympic highlights, political blunders, remixes, and found even the Muppets are posting videos. We tend to browse the Most Popular, Top Rated, and Most Recent YouTube categories on the Apple TV on at least a daily basis. There is definitely more noise on YouTube than I’d like, but the variety and raw feel of the content makes it well worth it.
Now, on to the technology.
I’ve had a few technological quirks with my setup that I’m hoping will get resolved with software updates from Apple soon.
First, after I moved all of my music and video over to the Time Capsule, I found that iTunes worked slower and video playback from my MacBook Pro can be nearly impossible to bear because it freezes constantly using wireless.
Second, I have noticed that when I travel and come home with my laptop, I need to click on my HD icon, then the Time Capsule to sign back into it before I launch iTunes. Otherwise iTunes will pop up with disk error messages because it can’t find the content.
Third, if I buy a multi-pass (bulk discount on a regularly ocurring show) on the iTunes store with my laptop, I have to download the shows to my laptop before they will sync to the Apple TV. This should be an easy fix in the software on the Apple TV, it’s just a matter of when they do it.
Fourth, I have not figured out how to sync my wife’s laptop library (which is almost identical to mine) with the Time Capsule and keep our libraries shared and synced. There may be a way to do it, but I have not figured it out yet. What we do is just make my computer the master copy. My wife can buy music on the Apple TV or I can buy it on my laptop, then every few weeks I copy the new content to her laptop from the Time Capsule.
David from Houston emailed me today and asked two questions that I thought I would share for anyone else interested in doing the Time Capsule/TV setup.
Q. “Does Apple TV talk to Time Capsule directly, or does your computer with iTunes need to be active on the network in order for Apple TV to see Time Capsule?”
A. Apple TV works like an iPod in relation to your iTunes library on your computer. So yes, if you can fit all of your content on the Apple TV, you can shut your computer off and watch everything that is stored on the TV. If you choose to only sync a subset of your content to the Apple TV, then whatever is only in your computer’s iTunes library will be available on the TV when the computer is on and able to reach the Time Capsule. The Time Capsule does not communicate directly to the Apple TV.
Q. “When you sync your iPhone, how does it work having content stored on the Time Capsule?”
A. Syncing the iPhone and the Apple TV from my computer with the library stored on the Time Capsule works fine. I have not noticed a significant speed difference, but then again the new iPhone software is much slower than the first version.
In summary, I really enjoy the Apple TV, and while there are quirks, I don’t have any hesitations about recommending it. It’s re-energized my interest in independent media and it’s been a ton of fun.
I don’t complain much. Ok, that’s a total lie, but I am generally patient when it comes to technology services when they hit a wall.
After all, I’m still using Twitter.
As a long time .Mac user, I was affected by the extended downtime during Apple’s upgrade to the MobileMe service last week. It was not too bad even though it lasted days because they managed to keep my email working throughout the transition.
Fast forward to Friday.
Sometime in the afternoon MobileMe email stops working on my iPhone, via IMAP, and appears as a blank screen in my web browser. The support website says “1% of MobileMe members cannot access MobileMe Mail.”
It’s now three days later and the service is still out.
Seriously, what could possibly take three days to fix?
Unbelievable.
If you need to reach me, I’ll be over at Gmail.
[Updated: David Pogue picked up on this and supposedly there are 20,000 of us without service OVER A WEEK later. Read his take on it here.]
Something that I’ve come to absolutely love about Apple TV has been the ability to simply browse and stream audio and video podcasts on-demand. The traditional method of consuming podcasts through iTunes has been to download media to the iTunes library and then sync devices like the iPhone, iPod or Apple TV. This is an annoying process, especially for time consuming video downloads.
With the new iPhone App store and 3G bandwidth coming this week, my inner podcaster is curious to see if the iPhone will go the way of on-demand podcast consumption. The YouTube and iTunes applications on the iPhone already have streaming media, so clearly it’s possible. The new MobileMe synchronization service combined with an on-demand streaming podcast player would eliminate any need to regularly synchronize the iPhone. I guess all that would be left is purchased media content bought on another device through iTunes.
What I really want is an application that uses the iPhone’s internal accelerometer to make this application a reality:
With plans to move coming soon and the recent season finales of all the shows my wife likes to watch, I started researching Apple TV as an alternative to cable and our Netflix account.
Since my wife and I upgraded our TV (I think it was two years ago) to a big plasma, we’ve been paying $149 a month for HD cable service. That does not include Internet or other services. Just cable TV with a basic package for HBO, Cinemax, etc. I realized very quickly when I began adding up the cost to buy all the episodes of shows that we watch combined, we would be able to save at least $100 a month with some major advantages over cable.
So we went to the Apple store and came home with the 160 GB Apple TV and the next day I gleefully marched into the local cable company office and handed in our converter box. Now two weeks later, here are some observations about living with Apple TV.
All things considered, it has not been a one for one exchange for broadcast television, but it has changed the way we consume media, and I love it.
For this first of two blog posts, I’ll describe the shortcomings:
1. Miss out on local network broadcasts.
The first day without late night TV or broadcast news drove me nuts. I really did not expect it to bother me. I don’t actively watch much TV at night, but I do like to have Letterman and Ferguson on in the background while I’m working.
The solution to this was simple — a Terk HD over the air (”OTA”) indoor antenna. By the way, this $40 Terk antenna is not your mother’s rabbit ears… it looks like a ray gun that mated with robot reindeer antlers.
It was a breeze to connect and we now get full digital HD versions of CBS, ABC, PBS, FOX, NBC, and two 24 hour weather news channels. The video and audio quality is not intermittent like analog antenna reception, you either get an incredible signal (as good as HD cable) or you get nothing at all.
2. This is not an iTunes library storage solution.
One of my motivations for the Apple TV was to get my entire music collection off of my laptop and USB hard drives and have it centralized. The Apple TV certainly has a drive big enough to do this, but that’s not how it works.
The Apple TV behaves like an iPod in your iTunes application. This means that, with the exception of items that you purchased on the Apple TV, when you delete something from your iTunes library, it is removed from the Apple TV (just like the iPhone). This was a big let down but I realized quickly that 160 GB was not going to be enough space for our music library plus the video content we were going to be storing.
The solution was to buy an Apple 1TB Time Capsule. The Apple Time Capsule is a WiFi router with a built in printer server and network hard drive. It works flawlessly with Mac OS X 10.5’s Time Machine backup software.
I moved our entire library off of my local hard drive to the Time Capsule and then pointed iTunes to the Time Capsule for accessing the media. There is one drawback in moving your iTunes library to the Time Capsule or any network drive — when you are not on your home network, you cannot access your media. I found this is completely tolerable as long as I sync my iPhone before I leave for a trip.
Note: There is currently a bug in iTunes that resets the location of your library to your hard drive whenever you are not authenticated to the Time Capsule. The work-around is to create a symbolic link (Apple calls them aliases) in your local iTunes folder that points to the folder on the Time Capsule. Google it, you’ll find the step by step.
3. Apple TV is not passive enough.
It’s amazing how accustomed one can get to having a TV decide what we are going to watch. Using Apple TV makes you have to think and act frequently enough that it is sometimes annoying.
With broadcast television, viewers can autopilot on a channel and be guaranteed a constant stream of media. In contrast, Apple TV breaks down channels to individual units (episodes) of media, making it necessary for viewers to constantly be switching to view the next thing.
I wish there was a way to have Apple TV group together channels I like to watch and just loop whatever is new so I don’t have to be constantly babysitting it. This is particularly annoying when we are in the mood for YouTube videos or video podcasts which both tend to run shorter than regular television shows.
In a Part 2 post, I’ll explain the positives which far out number these drawbacks. Stay tuned!
There seems to be a hot new social network aggregator being launched now for every dancing animated GIF image posted to the web during the 1990s. Ok, maybe not that bad.
Social network aggregators are sites that consolidate activity across multiple social networks and RSS feeds. Some make it easy for users to quickly syndicate an update to all of their online profiles while others are focused on aggregating feeds of information as form of lifestreaming (or lifelogging) with a friends list and comments.
I find it surprising that the recent Google acquisition Jaiku, a service that combines Twitter with friendfeed, is not getting more love from the social media inner circle. The functionality is nearly the same so I can only guess that people like a blue color scheme more than green.
I blogged yesterday that News Corp was going to be announcing quarterly results and speculation was that social network advertising (and usage) is falling flat.
It seems that the pundits were right, because News Corp and their ad partner Google are not giving specific numbers on the last quarter for MySpace. The WSJ reported this morning that “Google declined to comment on MySpace specifically last week, but hinted the revenue from such an arrangement wasn’t covering the guaranteed payments.”
Last week, Amazon announced its acquisition of Audible, signaling their continuing interest in digital goods. This is a great move competitively and it compliments their existing digital delivery of movies, TV, music, and their digital book reader.
Amazon clearly wants to be a formidable player in the digital delivery arena. I am most excited about this move because every step they take into digital delivery is one step closer to selling virtual [world] goods.
Om Malik has a good write up on the acquisition if you happened to miss it.
