![]() ![]() Then there’s Microsoft’s Kinect, which uses gestures and voice to the same end. Others like LG are looking to a purely pointer-based interface. Google’s answer to this has been to turn the remote into a full-blown keyboard. Instead of a browse paradigm, cloud TV will work under a query paradigm, for which you need a rich, capable interface that lets you construct queries and filter the results. And when the browse paradigm no longer works, interfaces that are built around selecting from a menu of limited options (i.e., the now-ubiquitous up-down-left-right arrow or joystick on today’s remotes) ceases to provide enough input resolution for the paradigm that replaces it. a “favorites list,” the Netflix “Instant Queue,” a voting + social recommendation engine combo), the “browse” paradigm no longer works. But when the TV becomes a thin client that connects directly to a massive, cloud-hosted datastore that you do minimal curation of (e.g. This paradigm has stayed with us through the initial transition to digital TV, where the resource pool is now a library of files and metadata is expressed as in file metadata and a user-curated organization structure (e.g. Under the original TV paradigm, the resource pool was a set of live channels, and the metadata pool that indexed it was a few pages in TV Guide or the local paper. If I could summarize all that I learned from all of this coverage in one super-long sentence, it would go something like the following: the traditional TV interface paradigm is that you browse finite collection of resources using as a guide some limited, easily managed pool of metadata that doesn’t refresh too often but to navigate “TV” as it has been redefined by the cloud, you need to be able to query an infinitely larger, dynamic pool of metadata that indexes an infinitely larger resource pool. ( Disclosure: I’m an investor in Aza’s new company, Massive Health, but I wasn’t at the time of the interview and, indeed, wasn’t even aware that he was leaving Mozilla for that project.) For instance, out my CES coverage on this issue, and also this interview with Aza Raskin, who was the UI guru at Mozilla at the time. I’ve written a lot at Ars about web TV interfaces, and the different ways that companies have tried to turn the marriage of the web and television into something that’s actually useable. ![]() No, there’s one place where Apple will not only innovate, but where the company also has an existing, very substantial edge over the competition: the cloud TV user experience.īut before I talk about the 200 million reasons why an Apple TV will be a formidable force in the TV market, here’s some background to set the context. Embedding this very compact, common, ARM-based hardware platform in a flat-panel TV would be trivial from an engineering standpoint, to the point that if all that Apple had in mind were “we took an AppleTV and stuck it inside a TV”, then they could’ve launched this product last year.īut barring some kind of crazy hologram technology (see the BW link above), it’s unlikely that the hardware is really where Apple hopes to innovate, here. The hardware underneath them all is essentially the same, they all run apps, and they all act as a portal through which the user can access cloud-hosted storage and compute cycles. The AppleTV, iPad, and iPhone are all cloud thin clients in the classic sense-just a chunk of flash, an ARM chip, and a network interface. I won’t recap any of the article here, because I absolutely believe that Apple will do this (I said so on Twitter back when A4 launched, but I can’t find the tweet and Twitter user found it), so I want to focus on the why’s and how’s. Today is a big day for cloud + TV news, but even more interesting (to me, at least) than the Netflix/Qwikster split is a new Businessweek article, “ Here comes Apple’s real TV.” The report rounds up some rumors and evidence to the effect that Apple will indeed launch a TV soon. Simultaneous with TV’s rise as the premier content venue is a redefinition of the term “television” from “a device with a screen and a set of channels” to “a growing pool of cloud-hosted, episodic content that’s generally available on any device with a color screen and a network connection.” - from Leaving Las Vegas: a look back at CES 2011 Skip to: Start of Article.Ģ00 million reasons why Apple’s upcoming TV will win the cloud TV wars ![]()
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