There’s been buzz lately about Apple’s “new technology to deliver video to televisions.”
Really? Apple is going to do better than Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video and so many other streaming services? These guys have been refining their offerings for years. Netflix streaming is already awesome. Is there really room to do much better than the beloved Netflix?
Yes, lots.
A radically improved video delivery mechanism could:
- Let you download the entire program locally, not just the next minute. This eliminates pauses for rebuffering when the network connection gets flaky.
- Have continuous high speed fast forward, not the jerky frame skipping that we’ve become inured to on both video and digital audio. DVDs are better than streaming; analog VHS tape was better at this than DVDs, but continuous fast forward and rewind has the potential to be cleaner, smoother than streaming, DVD and analog tape.
- Let the viewer instantly, continuously rewind to catch that moment one more time. Have you noticed that you rarely rewind anymore? The pain of rebuffering makes it rarely worth it.
- Play that scene in continuous slow motion. This is another feature we haven’t seen since the VHS days.
- Establish a queue of top titles to trickle down while you sleep. After a couple of days of background downloading you will have weeks of programming available to you.
- Allow the video content to be viewed without any Internet access, (not even for DRM checks) for when you are in the subway or at the cottage or overseas.
- Provide a hybrid of streaming and offline download. You might, for instance, preview a title and if it’s worthy, click a Download button to add it to the download queue. Or, go down your list of movies and click the download button on those that you wish to bring locally. Better yet, have the top 20 titles in your list download automatically.
- Download the highest resolution. Individually paint every pixel on all 1040 glorious lines of resolution on that expensive high-def TV.
- Provide full 5.1 Dolby surround. Please? My receiver, speakers and ears are feeling neglected.
- Download and access the entire content of DVDs. I want my DVD extras back, and multilingual subtitling, and alternate audio tracks of director’s commentary, and other languages.
- Let the viewer switch between different aspect ratios for when the movie’s dimensions doesn’t match your TV’s ratio. Do you want the bars along the edges and a smaller image? Or a full screen image that cuts off some of the periphery? It’d be ncie to have that choice again.
- Let the viewer zoom in to part of the action to study it closer.
- Proactively download programming I will probably like. Advertise this content to me on the video perusal experience to entice me to it. If I ignore it, replace it with something else.
- Proactively download subscribed TV shows. They’re on your devices automatically, they day they’re released, ready to watch in full HD after you’ve had dinner. This would obviate 80% of the reason to pay for cable.
- Stream live events. Live events are the last bastion of cable programming. But 200 channels with cable? Pshaw. How about providing a selection thousands of live events happening worldwide. Any match, any sport, live: American football, Irish soccer, Indian cricket, Australian Rugby, Chinese ping pong, Japanese sumo — you name it. When there is a crisis, watch local coverage live.
- Synchronize your viewing position across all of your video devices. Pause the video on your big screen, pick up your iPhone and continue where you left off while on the subway.
- Transfer video peer-to-peer within the house. One device downloads it; it syncs to other devices directly over the LAN, much more quickly than downloading it again from the mother ship.
- Download directly to the NAS (Network addressable storage; essentially a huge hard drive with brains) The NAS then serves the video to all the devices through your house. It’s like your own internal mini-cloud in your closet (a.k.a. fog or mist) that wirelessly serves terabytes of video to all the TVs, tablets and phones in your house. (A 2 terabyte hard drive can hold 40 blu-ray discs and today costs about $80.)
- Point out to your friends which parts of the show you thought were amazing. Skim to segments of So You Think You Can Dance that the mob thought was amazing.
- Have a shared playlist with select friends. in the old days when millions watched Seinfeld simultaneously and discussed it the next day. This has been lost in a world where no two people are watching the same thing at the same time. Create your own film festival centered on Marisa Tomei, WWII, or 70′s sci fi. Have a closed discussion with your friends. This would help make watching video a more social experience again.
- Make the content available worldwide. Bandwidth and connectivity limitations around the world can make reliable streaming an issue. But they aren’t an issue when you are trickle-downloading. Give it a couple of days and plenty of video content can be collected in a couple of days.
- Provide all of these capabilities free in exchange for mandatory advertising. The consumer gets access to any content, for free, conveniently, in exchange for their eyeballs. With all these features, even pirates might lift the eye patch and check it out.
- Have the advertising be interactive, targeted, choose-able by the viewer. Advertisers get far more effective ads that they know are being experienced, and feedback about what’s viewed. Consumers get more tolerable advertising that they may even enjoy. There are many
As you can see, there is plenty for a radical innovator to upset the applecart in video.
What’s amazing from a product vision standpoint is that these have been possibilities for years. All the big players who attempted to take on Netflix – Walmart, Blockbuster, Amazon – could have been working towards many of these unfulfilled needs. Instead, they chose to copy the leader rather than innovating themselves and coming up with a differentiated offering. Now, if the rumors are true another industry has left it to Apple once again.
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Philip Haine is VP of User Experience at SuccessFactors, where we are hiring world-class user experience designers. Please contact me if this is you! (email: phaine at successfactors dotcom)
