Apple TV came out almost five years ago. Since then, it has become a moderately successful product; not a failure the iPod Hi-Fi was, but not an industry-shattering success like the Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
Apple doesn’t have to cause a revolution with every product it makes. But the living room, the TV set, and the television industry all crave upheaval. As Asymco’s Horace Dediu has frequently noted, these revolutions tend to be brought on by new input methods: the mouse, the click wheel, multitouch. It’s not just the inputs themselves that enable these platforms to flourish. It’s that new inputs provide new conceptual frameworks for everything else about the system: how close you are to the data, how much of it you handle at once, what functions are deemed not important enough to worry about.
Apple TV currently uses two input methods:
- Apple Remote, a tiny, 7-button device
- Remote app, with a touch-based version of the above remote, and an iTunes-style browsing interface
Both methods have been improved in the last five years. In my subjective opinion, they are still among the worst control/input methods Apple has to offer. In the market’s objective opinion, they’re not doing much to attract hordes of Apple TV buyers. Of course, people don’t currently buy TV equipment based on the input method. And that’s my point: they won’t, until there’s one that’s compelling enough. If done right, this new UI would enable previously unseen interactions, use cases, and even content. Those are powerful reasons to buy.
Here are some common suggestions for new and old input methods Apple could use:
A Better Remote
Maybe the Apple Remote could be beefed up. More buttons, more responsive? This seems extremely unlikely to me. The current remote gets its simple (and unimpressive) job done; beyond that, it has no future.
A Better App
Apple could improve the Remote app in many ways. They could make it a system service, reducing the time it takes to pull out your iPhone, find the app, launch it, wait for it to connect to the Apple TV… That might help.
It still doesn’t address the main problem with a touch-device-based approach: you tap here and look there. iOS benefited by moving away from this decades-old idea. It’s not just a matter of pride in not turning back the clock, either; this disconnected, split-screen experience is slow and confusing, especially to new users. Put an iPad-remote in the hands of someone who hasn’t tried Apple TV before and see where they look: at the iPad, and only the iPad. Why wouldn’t they? It’s a gorgeous device, a hundred times more interesting than the boring old TV we’ve all been staring at since the 50s. You touch it and it responds. In your hands, it’s as large on your retina as the twelve-foot-removed TV. It wins.
Siri
It’s not only possible, but almost guaranteed that some version of Apple TV will include Siri, the voice-activated assistant feature. And that’s fine. But the idea that Siri would be the main interface of Apple TV is as silly as making Siri the main UI for the iPad. Siri is good at letting the user submit hard-to-categorize, multi-part, uncertain inputs in the most expressive and effortless way we humans have: spoken language. I think TV mainly revolves around a different kind of input: direct, immediate commands.
Put another way, Siri is good at forms; TV is a bunch of action buttons. Imagine browsing the web with just Siri. “Go to The New York Times website. Let’s read the big story about union rights. Oh, I want to read the link to health care law later. Go to the next page.” This is all fine, but it’s slower than direct clicks or taps. (Compare that to navigating a form consisting of a lot of structured-data inputs; not fun for users, because we spend most of our time parsing the data types the computer wants, and comparing available options. Better to let Siri convert however we phrased it.)
There are practical issues with voice-controlled TV: what if it’s noisy? From, you know, the TV itself? What do I do if the Siri network is down? How do I activate this input mode - do I start sentences with “Siri…”? These issues could be addressed, perhaps.
Here’s a stumper: what about games? Apple would be crazy to even consider an Apple TV reboot without a big focus on games. They’ve been successful beyond all hopes and dreams on iOS, and there’s no real reason why they couldn’t rule the living room as well. As long as we have a cool way to control them, that is. Siri for games? No way.
Goulash
Perhaps Apple could simply combine these three methods: a better remote, a better Remote app, and Siri. That would be fine, but it would not shatter the market. Most users would struggle with the lousy physical remote; we’d sometimes pull out our iPhone and iPads, especially while playing games; and we’d ask our living rooms to play ‘My Mother The Car’. Most of this is possible today… and it’s selling like lukewarm cakes.
Bonus: Kinect…?
Microsoft’s Kinect has had a successful year. It remains to be seen if it will stick around or fade away the way many of Nintendo Wii’s motion applications have. We have little evidence that Apple is working on a touch less, gesture-based technology of this sort. It’s the right kind of solution, though; I’d be more excited about it than any of the above options.
Here’s my test for any input method for a TV set:
1. How quickly can you turn down the volume?
2. How quickly can you pause the show?
3. How do you find a particular episode of a particular show?
Apple Remote does well at 2). The Remote App is good for 3); Siri might handle 3) also. A theoretical Apple TV set with an Apple Remote could do 1) and 2) nicely. Some combination of updates to all these features could ace all three requirements.
Let’s not forget this one, however:
4. Do something never done before.
That’s what industry changes are made of.
