Gruber: Apps Are the New Channels

Gruber: Apps Are the New Channels

Maybe. It makes sense as a logical extension of the iOS App Store.

The question is always, is the content going to be there? Will content providers be inspired to create their own apps? Will people be inspired to buy the device? Or will it be a chicken-and-egg problem, where content providers don’t bother to make apps because the demand isn’t there, and there’s no demand because the content isn’t there?

It doesn’t have to be an instant hit. Apple could run with this ‘TV App Store’ idea, test the waters, and give it time to see if it will build up steam on its own. That might work just fine in terms of being profitable and fun to use. Sure, Apple is happy enough selling the amount of little black boxes that they currently do, and maybe even selling a few more of them, but it really seems like their own measure of success is when they themselves no longer consider it a ‘hobby’. And I think that will only happen when you can affirmatively answer the question: Does it replace your current TV service?

Remember, most people aren’t looking to add yet another thing to their TV experience. The bar to meet here, for the amount of stuff you can watch, is still the one that cable TV has set. It seems like an impossible goal to meet, and yet we have come to expect Apple to do impossible things–so much so that it will be disappointing if they don’t.

Also, look at the state of video apps on the iPad. Netflix is great, but Apple TV already has that. ABC and NBC let you watch currently-airing shows going back a month. CBS has nothing at all. There are a few more premium or obscure networks that have apps, which Gruber mentions. And some individual shows have apps that are just weird amalgamations of ‘popular clips’ and Twitter streams. Yet, the iPad has been out (and popular) for a while now. This kind of support isn’t going to cut it for a TV. Yes, it’s happening, but it’s happening too slowly and too cautiously.

And if you compare video to magazines, as Gruber has, look at how they’ve done: some of them are great, and others are awful, as Marco Arment noted just today:

The newspaper and magazine experience on the iPad is … [that] they’re all individual apps instead of being built into the system reading environment. This can be good and bad: some of these publications, like the L.A. Times, TIME, Newsweek, and The Atlantic, have pretty poor iPad apps. Others, like The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Economist, are much better experiences …

Content providers are good at making content. They’re not necessarily good at making software.

More concerns I have about this:

1. How do the iPad and the TV work together? Would you have to buy one of these apps twice–once for iPad, and then again for TV? Would there be universal apps that work across both? Is it up to the content provider how they want to handle it? Am I going to have to manage many annoying external subscriptions like with New York Times et al.?
2. How am I going to find stuff? It’s annoying enough already to have to search for TV shows in two places (Netflix and iTunes) on the current Apple TV. Now there’s going to be a third separate place I have to search? Am I going to be able to search the App Store to find an app that contains a specific show?
3. Why would I even want to buy a hypothetical, say, Discovery Channel app, if I only want to watch Mythbusters? Do people frequently watch multiple shows on the same few channels, or do they watch shows across many different channels?

I don’t necessarily think Siri is the answer to any of this, either. A voice interface would be useful, but it shouldn’t be the only way to make sense of a (hypothetically) complex, fragmented interface where content is spread out across many different places with different UIs. ‘Siri, help me find The Daily Show because I just don’t know where to look for it any more…’

Still, all that said: Gruber’s prediction seems more grounded in reality than mine, because you can see the clear path of evolution from iPad to TV. On the other hand, part of the fun of these predictions is in saying something crazy and probably being wrong.