[opendtv] Here’s Comcast’s Version of Apple TV
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2013 22:12:51 +0000
http://allthingsd.com/20130612/heres-comcasts-version-of-apple-tv/
Here’s Comcast’s Version of Apple TV
June 12, 2013 at 5:34 am PT
We still don’t know what the “real” Apple TV will look like, but by now we’ve
seen a lot of other people’s versions of Apple TV: Everyone from heavyweights
like Microsoft to upstarts like Roku are pushing boxes and software that meld
traditional TV with Web video.
And Comcast, the country’s biggest pay TV provider, says it will do the same
thing, along with lots of other ideas you’ve seen elsewhere: Voice control,
integration with third-party apps like Pandora, “social TV” features, etc.
Here’s Comcast CEO Brian Roberts previewing his company’s upcoming X2 platform
yesterday at the cable industry’s annual convention. If you want to save time,
you can skip the preamble and move ahead to the 3:48 mark. And if you’re in a
real rush, you can skip the video entirely and skim the press release.
The one thing that X2 won’t do, of course, is give customers the ability to
watch TV without paying for a TV subscription, or let them break the TV bundle
into smaller chunks, so that people who don’t care about sports don’t need to
pay for ESPN, etc.
But then again, none of the pay-TV outsiders that want to wrest control of your
living room from Comcast have done that, either — not even Google.
Improving the TV’s interface is an engineering problem that you can solve with
time and talent; remaking the TV business is the truly difficult task.
--------------------------------------
Not such a difficult task, if the FCC redefines what constitutes an MVPD.
This quote:
"But then again, none of the pay-TV outsiders that want to wrest control of
your living room from Comcast have done that, either — not even Google."
continues to make me wonder, why should they? Why should the hardware companies
have any part to play, other than playback?
This X3 device is a super fancy STB, designed to accept those Comcast one-way
MPEG-2 TS broadcasts (how quaint to see the daily broadcast schedule, for
instance), and make them available with a real fancy UI, locally recorded, well
organized, comments, preferences, ratings, etc.
Hey guys. It's time for a paradigm shift!!
These days, you don't need to create all this localized storage and localized
processing. You don’t need to depend on broadcast one-way streams. This is the
era of "the cloud," remember? The content owners do not have to depend on these
third party attempts, especially when that third party isn't even associated
with the MVPDs they do business with (like Apple, for instance, or Microsoft).
A major TV content creator is certainly capable of hosting its own web sites,
or use OTT sites, with the content available on demand, with your preferences
stored when you log in, without going to great lengths to compensate for the
scheduling artifacts created by MPEG-2 TS broadcast streams, and without having
to obsess if some third party box designer will do something against the
creator's best interests. The more the content creator can use "cloud
services," the less he'll be vulnerable to the whims of STB designers
(especially third party ones).
Bert
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