Can Apple do to the television market what it did to music and movies? As rumours about Apple's widely expected move into the murky TV market continue to swirl, it's a logical question to ask. It's also logical to ask why Apple is getting into the space in the first place.
The answer, of course, is simple: Apple can't afford not to. As the evolution of online distribution and consumption continues to break down traditional barriers between conventional media, companies looking to plant a stake in the ground here can't afford to pick and choose which media they will or will not cover. The era of the pure-play music distributor, for example, is over thanks to seamless, Internet and mobile-driven convergence. The pop radio star of yesterday long since evolved into a video-recording, television-appearing, Internet-tweeting multiplatform entity. Consumers, in turn, now experience these properties via whatever medium makes the most sense at any given moment.
The companies that control this process must adapt to this reality, and Apple, which aims to lead them all with a common platform that serves up a full palette of entertainment-related content, can hardly afford to not be a player in any given medium. If it doesn't make a move to control how we consume televised content, someone else will.
Against that backdrop, Apple's efforts to-date have been less than spectacular. Its Apple TV product has been available since 2006 and redirects downloaded and streamed content to a conventional television set. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs once called the product a "hobby", but before passing away in October reportedly told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that he had finally figured out the secret to next-generation television.
"I'd like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use. It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud," Jobs told Isaacson. "It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it."
He may have cracked it long ago with the first iteration of the iTunes Music Store, as the basic ingredients for turning formerly complex consumption processes into seamless ones were all there. Before iTunes, the process of purchasing, downloading, managing and interacting with music was best left to the geek set. Combining feature-limited, cleanly-interfaced devices — iPods — with similarly seamless software and online retail capability made for an end-to-end process that anyone could take advantage of. The recipe made the iPod a mainstream success story and iTunes the standard for simple, effective online fulfillment.
Subsequent extensions into movies and apps further validated the model. Sales of television episodes have opened the door for Apple into an even broader range of coverage, but it's a big leap from selling individual shows to controlling the end-to-end process.
Lessons learned as it built its iTunes brand into a global powerhouse of content distribution could certainly be applied here. But there are gotchas in the television business that Apple couldn't have dreamed of when it was first entering music and movies, peculiarities to the TV industry that could make this next expansion the most delicate in the company's history:
Conflicting personalities
Television distribution is easily the most convoluted of all entertainment industries. Studios, carriers and distributors constantly bicker over cost structures, technical standards and access to content as they fight to protect their individual business models. Apple may still be collecting accolades a decade after getting the once-warring music studios to agree to a series of online distribution deals that made the first version of the iTunes Store even possible, but that achievement would pale next to a similar agreement among even more deeply entrenched cable and satellite distributors, carriers and other television industry stakeholders.
Technical distribution standards
Choosing which audio standards to support, such as MP3 or AAC, for example, is a relatively easy process compared to the rabbit's warren of technologies required to deliver televised content to an end-user's screen. In an industry where warring sides spend decades moving toward common standards — the just-completed switch from analog to digital broadcasting should serve as fair warning to the complexity of even the most seemingly straightforward transition — it takes a whole lot of arrogance for one company, even one as powerful as Apple, to think it can corral everyone into agreement.
Consumer standards
Technological barriers exist in the living room, too, leaving huge question marks around how content downloaded or streamed from the Internet can be ideally fed to a conventional television and controlled from the couch. Various solutions, like Boxee, Slingbox and Apple TV aim to simplify the process, but no one standard has emerged. Instead, vendor after vendor tosses an endless stream of new offerings at the wall in the hope that some of them stick. As tepidly received Google TV and Smart TV solutions can attest, there's still too much blood in the water to know which of these, if any, will emerge intact.
Ultimately, Apple enters a TV market much more saturated with noise than the music market was a decade ago. Admittedly, much of that noise is being generated by products and, in some cases, entire companies without enough critical mass to survive the transition. But Apple faces the prospect of climbing a higher mountain to get more — and more entrenched — players on-side, then reining in a witches brew of competing back-end and front-end standards to create the kind of elegant solution that's made its existing i-based brands leaders in their respective markets.
As the rumour mills point toward 32- and 37-inch all-in-one television sets, set top boxes, iPhone-based remotes and a whole host of other fantastic-sounding solutions, one thing remains clear: Apple can no longer afford to relegate this effort to "hobby" status, and it can't afford to fail. It's as close to a bet-the-future move as Apple has ever faced, and serves as new CEO Tim Cook's first true test.
Carmi Levy is a London, Ont.-based independent technology analyst and journalist. carmilevy@yahoo.ca
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