g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

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James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
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.clue
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Cartago Delenda Est




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Friday, October 14, 2005
11:19 - What's next?

(top) link
Perhaps more significant than any of the actual announcements that happened on Wednesday, regarding the video iPod and video downloads in iTunes, is what was not announced.

The new iMac G5, with the FrontRow media-center software, is neat... but what's it for? You know there's more to Jobs' vision than a single Mac in the lineup with a remote and these kinds of features:

In fact, Front Row is home media done right. (Or at least as right as it’s been done yet.) If you’ve ever used a computer running Windows XP Media Center Edition, you know that although it definitely makes a PC more appropriate for use in your home entertainment system and has a number of useful features—especially its DVR functionality—it’s still klunky and, well, not that fun to use. Front Row, on the other hand, is the iPodification of the concept: It may not have every feature you might dream up, but it has most of the ones you need and it provides them via an elegant and easy-to-use interface.

To use Front Row, you simply press the Menu button on the Remote; your computer screen switches smoothly to the Front Row screen, which displays iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, and DVD icons. You use the left or right key to choose a mode and then press the Play key to enter that mode. Every mode works similarly, with an iPod-like menu system that lets you browse playlists of music, albums of photos, folders of movies, or a DVD’s menus, respectively. When you’re done, you exit Front Row and you’re back to Mac OS X. This is the best “home media” interface I’ve seen. Period. (And by “best,” I mean one that anyone in my family could sit down and use without reading a manual and without feeling overwhelmed by menus, buttons, and obscure settings and dialogs.)

What’s Front Row missing? TiVo-like features for watching and recording live TV. However, these would require additional hardware (a TV tuner) so I’m willing to overlook them for now. As popular as TiVo and similar DVR devices are, they’re still a long way from being as pervasive as DVD players and VCRs—far more people use their TVs for watching DVDs and have digital photos photos and music. I’ll feel differently in a few years, I’m sure, but for now, a device running Front Row would be a welcome addition to many homes.

So, yes, it's a cool piece of software... but it's only available on one model of Mac (not the cheapest one by a long shot), and it doesn't do DVR, and it doesn't output to TV easily. What's the deal here?

Apple doesn't do things half-assed, these days. There's no way this video-downloading business is just an afterthought made possible by bigger iPod hard disks. With iTunes the powerhouse that it is, especially, Steve Jobs has no reason to compromise or negotiate in order to get his foot in the door of any adjacent market. But FrontRow is just that—a foot in the door. So where's it leading?

There's plenty of evidence that there's more to come, after all. The /movies URL remains a tantalizing 403, hinting at some kind of movie-downloading store that's in the final stages of live-URL testing. Nobody (I hope) expects people to buy iMacs for the sole purpose of setting them up next to their TVs so they can use them as media centers, or forcing the family to crowd around a 20-inch computer screen to watch Lost. And five TV shows from ABC/Disney? There's no way that that's the extent of this feature's potential, hits though they might be. As Bill B. says, who forwarded me the article linked above:

A true killer ap would be a mac-mini with Frontrow capability and video outs. Put a faster hard disk in it and you literally would be printing money.

This HAS to be coming next from Apple. They can't expect consumers to watch dvds, home movies, and videos, and photos exclusively on their 17 inch iMac screen. The iTunes movie store would BOOM if you could buy back episodes of tv shows and play them on your big screen at home.

DVR functionality is a no-brainer for the next iteration of FrontRow, if Apple is (as it seems) committed finally to the media-center concept. But what if that's only a means to an end, as far as Jobs is concerned?

What if he intends the Mac not to just be a player in a crowded home-media market, but to dominate it with a whole new media-consumption paradigm, the way it has with iTunes?

Sure, recording shows and navigating them at will with TiVo is great—but it's old news, and it's not without its limitations. You can't skip ahead in a show that's still being broadcast. You can't organize and archive your shows in a way that you can wholly control or that everyday users can grok. And—crucially—you can't request specific shows or episodes to just pop up on demand. This last shortcoming is the reason why cable companies offer "On-Demand" services in addition to DVR functionality—you really need them both, once you've decided to take the plunge into fully interactive TV viewing.

Maybe what Apple wants is not to integrate into the new TiVo world... but to replace it.

With the ubiquity of iTunes and an all-encompassing TV programming library in the iTunes Music Store, with a downloadable movie store at apple.com, with FrontRow available for specialized video-archiving Mac minis (and/or with an AirPort broadcaster allowing you to turn any computer—PC or Mac—into an iTunes-based media center streaming shows to your big-screen TV)... you know, TiVo would become obsolete. For that matter, so would the cable company.

If the iTMS started selling everything from Howdy Doody to Adult Swim in neat little per-episode packages for $1.99 each, which you could buy and download on demand and play forever from your Mac (or PC) using only that cute little remote, it would really be the ultimate in active-viewer TV: it would be the end of the passive viewing experience. It would also mean the end of advertising as a revenue stream, which leads me to wonder what factors have gone into that $1.99/episode calculation. The cable companies would probably not be thrilled either. But the studios would probably love it.

It's a long shot, and a lot would have to change before it became feasible. For one thing, the shows currently available are hardly what I'd call "high-definition"—they're sized about right for the Video iPod, but too small even for broadcast-quality TV. Apple would have to get all the studios on board, not just Disney, and newly broadcast shows would have to be released simultaneously on the iTMS. FrontRow would have to be made available for Windows, unless Apple doesn't want to keep feature parity across platforms in iTunes anymore. None of it looks like a slam-dunk.

But if they pulled it off, Apple wouldn't have to march to anyone else's beat—and they'd pull so far ahead of their competitors in the entrenchment game that they'd have to worry less about people like Microsoft and Napster, and more about antitrust lawyers.

What a position for Apple to be in, huh?

UPDATE: Don't miss the demo of FrontRow, and turn up your speakers—it's very, very slick. Also it shows that Apple doesn't consider the lack of an iPod scroll-wheel to be an impediment to navigating long listings of artists or titles with acceleration; that makes my in-dash iPod dock idea all the more tantalizingly realistic...

UPDATE: Bitweever has related thoughts.

UPDATE: Looks like some companies are beginning to produce AAC-playing in-dash CD players after all. Not as cool as a dedicated iPod-docking unit, but it's a good stop-gap...

(Via Tilman B.)


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