US viewers can watch this outstanding recent Donnie Yen movie (full title Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen) for free courtesy of the good folks at Well Go USA.
I'm not sure if I've seen Yen's fists faster, and I defy you to not smile at the Bruce Lee homage.
Late last night, All Things D posted the full video of yesterday's Tim Cook interview.
At the ten-minute mark, they dive into discussion of TV. I found it interesting that All Things D themselves omitted "very" in quoting Cook on what Apple is doing about "fixing television". Following Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo playing their hands in the set-top space, Cook was exactly as cagey about TV as he was last year. Of completely inconsequential interest: the roadblock ads that are running on All Things D this week appear to all be for new $7000 Sony 4KTVs.
I'm fairly convinced that at some point in the future, Apple is going to release both a revamped "hockey puck" and a physical TV set.
Look to the iMacs and the Thunderbolt monitor released over the last couple of years to see Apple refining glare, viewing angle, and contrast quality. The radically slim profile of the newest "Late 2012" iMac displays reveals a continued drive toward thin, colorful, and beautiful monitors.
What no one really talks much about are the aspect ratio and resolution of the 27" iMac and the Thunderbolt display, which both feature a 16:9 panel that runs at 2560x1440. It isn't an enormous leap over 1080p, which is where it appears the vast majority of 22-inch and larger computer displays are bizarrely (to me) topping out. Jump down to the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, and you have a 2880x1800 display.
The resolution of 4KTV is 3840x2160.
I would be surprised if Apple didn't wait to release a TV until it could be more than "just" an overhauled AppleTV puck crammed into a 1080p display. It has to be more than a gorgeous aluminum and glass shell. I don't know why Apple would release less than a 4K television.
Apple is pushing all of its products toward the Retina ideal. No matter what unfounded "channel sources" tell some analyst who gets quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Apple's own product evolution patterns have proven time and again to be the best way to read their moves. Apple plots a very steady, concerted course, and that's visible in that for two straight years, we've gotten the same kind of dodge at All Things D from Tim Cook on TV. Frankly, we got almost the exact same rhetoric from Steve Jobs at D8, with some adjectives swapped. Based on their overt focus on "resolutionary" devices, I'm going under the assumption that the Apple "iTV" is a matter of when, and not if. They're massively bought-in with the display industry, and the TV is the one mass-market screen they don't make as of yet.
So, when do we get this fancy Apple television? Everyone, including Kara Swisher on stage, has been pulling a Veruca Salt and demanding it now. Since Apple talks like they're waiting on something, my assumption is that it's for 4K panel pricing to go down. That way, they can sell a TV at a price that people will actually pay. No matter what vestiges of the Apple Pricing Myth still exist, they won't put a TV on sale that costs $7k, no matter how pretty it is.
The AppleTV, as it currently exists, could very well be what we have through the end of 2013. They may finally do a substantive overhaul of the OS. They may add more apps (channels). I hope they at least take a cue from Roku and add system-wide search. Maybe they'll rev the device again with a yet-faster processor.
The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will both cost around $500 this fall. The Wii U is not likely to budge from $350. I got a hearty laugh this week from well-heeled game and media industry columnists who bent over backwards three times to explain how badly their tech-averse parents will be desperate to pay $500 for an expensive, aircraft carrier-sized bloatbox. For $350-500, my mother would much more likely get an iPad and, depending on the iPad model, an AppleTV, both of which she would actually use.
The sound logic for leaving the puck in play is that it's the actual TV's Trojan Horse, thanks to an extremely low cost of ownership. Even after the introduction of the full-on TV set, it turns any non-Apple TV into most of whatever that thing ends up being and doing. This disparity already exists traditionally in the Apple ecosystem, with the best example found in comparing the iPod touch and the iPhone.
The two devices are much closer in feature set and software support than ever before, but the iPhone is always king when it comes to internals, most prominently in the processor, RAM, and camera. The question then mutates into pondering what Apple will add to the AppleTV to make it more compelling, as well as what they will hold back for the actualt TV hardware.
Let's start with a couple of things that Apple will not do.
Unlike Xbox One, there won't be some sort of ever-present, "always listening" system in a physical or functional form like the Kinect 2. That sort of surround-speaker-sized box would never get into (much less past) the concept design phase. The moment I saw that bit in Microsoft's keynote, I could instantly picture Phil Schiller's takedown: "the new AppleTV is only listening when you tell it to listen, and it won't track your heart rate, the number of people in the room, or whether you're in your underwear".
Tim Cook said himself that Apple is not in the content creation business, nor does it want to be. That's a smart move on Apple's part.
Indicative of what I think they will do on the TV side of things is the way in which Cook chose to answer a question regarding "new services" late in the interview. He indicated that Apple is more focused on finding more applications of existing services than they are in creating new niche services to see what sticks (like Google has). He made specific mention of Siri, FaceTime, and iTunes.
The AppleTV puck needs better navigation control than the gumstick remote it comes with currently. "Just get an iPod touch/iPhone/iPad" is not a solution to this. I don't see them going bulkier with something like Roku's RF-based, accelerometer-enabled Wiimote pseudo-ripoff...but maybe Apple will at least make a new RF-based remote that finally frees us from the tyranny of line-of-sight.
With that addition, AppleTV can have Siri, which would be activated by a button press and hold on the remote, just as on iDevices. The key is not having a remote that does not require line-of-sight. Siri has to "just work", right out of the box. System-wide search ("Siri, I want to watch The French Connection") should be part of that. Why else did they spend so much time working on and showing off Siri finding info about movies, actors, directors, and so on? Why stop at buying movie tickets? Why not build on this function in a different application?
There's no way the puck gets a FaceTime camera. People would have to attach it to the top of their TVs like the original iSights. The FaceTime camera will go right where it is on Apple's existing displays when they make the TV. Gesture control could theoretically be implemented, but it would be odd of Apple to require that the camera be on at all times. They actually care about privacy and design things around that, instead of constantly tying themselves in knots trying to look like they do (see Microsoft's last week of press).
The question mark for me is iTunes, and what "iTunes" continues to mean. Cook talked about it as this massive content ecosystem full of this and that, but functionally, it's a storefront.
Apple likes to throw around the buying power their users offer with record labels and studios. Apple would face anti-competitive inquiries if they fully blocked other storefronts from AppleTV, but they haven't opened the platform to very much paid video content outside of iTunes. Those few include Netflix, Hulu Plus, MLB, and NHL apps.
Amazon Instant is still missing from the AppleTV app list, even though it's on all other set-top app boxes. It presents the best cross-section of problems. Unlike Netflix and Hulu, there is "purchase and own" content in that Amazon service, which is protected by Amazon DRM. It would be inelegant if the Amazon Instant app for AppleTV lacked all of those purchase options (just like the iOS app does), only giving Amazon Prime users access to their free streaming content. Then again, "inelegant" has never stopped Amazon before.
Will we see Apple open up so that channel apps like Warner Archive Instant, Acorn, Crunchyroll, and others could pop up as they do on Roku, Blu-ray players, and so on? I don't see how they can avoid that, but they will do everything possible to delay that for as long as they can, and make sure that the interface defaults to driving people to spend money with iTunes. If there's any monopolistic thing Apple should be worried about, it's limiting which services you can buy or rent content from on their set-top service. Their saving grace on iOS has been the 70-30 split standard, which puts it on the vendor to choose whether to accept those terms.
By iTunes, did Cook also mean the App Store? Apple has admittedly never been serious about console-style, "real" games, but their iOS game developers already speak the language that the TV would. It would be interesting to see what they could come up with that isn't just an iPhone or iPad game over AirPlay. All three major console manufacturers have multiple things going against them in the indie developer space.
This is very much an open topic, and it won't be closed anytime soon. I'll revisit all of this after WWDC and E3.
Don't expect any direct TV talk at WWDC. See Jim Dalrymple's excellent summation of where your expectations should rest.
What you should pay attention to is the further convergence and interaction between iOS and OS X, which will take center stage. The design and UI choices found in both iOS7 and OS 10.9 will be especially indicative of however it is that Apple is actually thinking about TV. Remember, they've been working on this for years.
This piece at Deadline is half informative, half pot-stirring.
When CEO and caretaker Jason Kilar left, that was a big sign of uncertainty and instability. This compounded concerns after rumors spread of News Corp and Disney possibly pulling out their 1/3 ownership stakes due to disagreements over the focus of the business (paid vs. free). The idea being that with them, their content would also go. Either or both would be a critical blow to Hulu.
Now, eight entities are actively bidding for the service, including an unnamed pay-cable channel. Wouldn't it be crazy (or great) if that turned out to be HBO? Amazon is nowhere to be seen. Some entries on list aren't terribly exciting:
KKR & Co.
Silver Lake Management with William Morris Endeavor
Guggenheim Digital
Time Warner Cable
The first three (SLM and WME bidding together) are private equity firms. They're odd fits or not likely to bid for the amount or package that it's speculated Hulu's board will go for, just as in the previous bidding process. Time Warner Cable is bidding to buy in an ownership stake, which is allegedly the opposite of the full buyout that Hulu's trio of stakeholders want.
On the very interesting side:
DirecTV
They have a very dedicated satellite TV customer base, but they want a piece of the streaming business. This could be a good asset for that, but only if they go with massive-scale thinking. My assumption is that they would want to use Hulu as an enhanced pipe that offers the content Hulu already has in addition to DirecTV's cable channel offerings. Content deals for "Hulu" would be lumped in with their existing negotiations, with the paid Hulu service effectively becoming the infrastructure of "DirecTV Instant".
For example, they could ditch DVR recording and shift to cloud-accessible files that don't need a hard drive or massive box like they do now. Instead, an XML file lets users pick up where they left off, wherever they log in. The bad news for existing users is that, in theory, the Hulu they know now might cease to exist, just like Blockbuster rental stores have.
On that note...DirecTV's ownership of the flagging Blockbuster service could piggyback into this, making a revised Hulu UI the unified DirecTV interface for cable subscription, clip videos, and VOD. There are so many options on the table, there's no solid way of knowing what DirecTV is thinking of for sure. If they're really in the game, they have to be thinking of something this big, rather than an acquisition that would leave Hulu largely untouched.
Chernin Group
Peter Chernin helped start Hulu by both bringing in capital partners and taking Jason Kilar's side every time that it mattered. I would be surprised if he weren't going for the whole thing, with an eye to run it in the successful way Kilar did. The open question then (and for any all-in buyers listed here) is how steep a price current Hulu owners Fox/Disney/Universal will ask for the content they are currently licensing to themselves after offloading Hulu itself.
Yahoo
This could be a great addition to Marissa Mayer's Yahoo-from-the-ashes campaign, in a mold that I would hope is different than the Tumblr acquisition. I'm not the only user who thinks that Hulu needs a big UI overhaul, across set-top devices and native apps alike.
Pushing all of Yahoo's exclusive video content to Hulu and leveraging Yahoo's existing advertising business feels like an excellent match. YouTube has an uphill battle in getting people to pay for anything, but Hulu has a multi-mixed model that encourages users to pay for Hulu Plus. Yahoo would then have a long-term model for their funding of original content that doesn't involve it getting lost in the glut of "anyone can upload" that is YouTube.
Yahoo-exclusive series like Electric City and Burning Love have been seen, but not as broadly as they could have been on a hybrid Ya-Hulu service. If I ended up coining that "Brangelina-ization", I hope someone credits me.
More interesting to me than all of that? Former CEO Kilar and former CTO Richard Tom have been recruiting for a new stealth startup in Los Angeles. Kilar's brilliant blog post about the future of TV still resonates:
Distributors will certainly play a role in the future of TV, but we believe that three potent forces will be far more powerful in shaping that future: consumers, advertisers and content owners.Consumers have spoken emphatically as to what they want and what they do not want in their future television experience. What we’ve heard:
* Traditional TV has too many ads. Users have demonstrated that they will go to great lengths to avoid the advertising load that traditional TV places upon them. Setting aside sports and other live event programming, consumers are increasingly moving to on-demand viewing, in part because of the lighter ad load (achieved via ad-skipping DVRs, traditional video on demand systems, and/or online viewing).
* Consumers want TV to be more convenient for them. People want programs to start at a time that is convenient for their schedules, not at a time dictated to them. Consumption of original TV episodes will eventually mirror theatrical movie attendance: big opening Friday nights, but more consumption will be in the days and weeks afterward. Consumers also want the freedom to be able to watch TV on whatever screen is most convenient for them, be it a smartphone, a tablet, a PC, or, yes, a TV.
* Consumers are demonstrating that they are the greatest marketing force a good television show or movie could ever have, given the powerful social media tools at consumers’ disposal. Consumers now also have the power to immediately tank a bad series, given how fast and broad consumer sentiment is disseminated. This is nothing short of a game-changer for content creators, owners, and distributors.
After what seems like forever, Hulu and Apple have worked things out so that Hulu Plus can have a little jellybean button next to Netflix on AppleTV. The app has been ready to go since last fall.
Mark my words: this is the beginning of more things like this arriving of the tiny sleeping giant that is the AppleTV hockey puck.
Like Netflix, Hulu is $7.99 a month for all-you-can-eat access to loads of content.
For me personally, this means I finally have a box connected to my TV that can access Hulu's Criterion Collection channel full of all sorts of movies that you can't even find on disc.
Unlike Netflix, Hulu's TV library leans toward the much fresher end of things, but does contain commercials to keep the pricing at 8 bucks.
I signed up for Hulu Plus the moment that I fired up my box this morning (after a reboot late last night) and saw the button in the listing. Try it out with their two week free trial and see if you like it.
So...when do we get Amazon Prime and their exclusive access to The West Wing?