• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, January 3, 2017

One of the next battlegrounds for streaming services is making them far simpler/faster to use than they are now, and some of the first bullets in that battle started flying at the CES show started in Las Vegas today.

The major workaround these streaming services can’t easily work around is giving customers local over-the-air TV stations as well as Netflix, Hulu and the rest, without making it seem as hard as reassembling an old watch.

Right now Playstation Vue, Directv Now and Dish TV can’t necessarily add local TV service to their menu if the network station is not actually owned by the network. And that’s a problem.

Today at CES, Sling TV, whose streaming service has been around for more than a year but still seems to be the most awkward, introduced the AirTV Player. With it, you can get a nice basket of cable channels and Neflix etc, placed next to local stations in a guide on your screen and on your remote. And all you need then is a over the air antenna for those local channels. (Oh, one of those.)   

“AirTV Player simplifies what has been a fragmented viewing experience and integrates a customer’s entertainment options in one easy-to-navigate app,” said Mitch Weinraub, director of product development for AirTV. “AirTV Player is a versatile platform that unites live, local over-the-air channels, Netflix, Sling TV, YouTube and the Google Play Store with the click of a button.”

The promo material says, the AirTV Player is  “Make complex entertainment simple” (You just want to add “again” to that slogan, I just realized. Trump.)

Meanwhile, Amazon announced it will market some 4K TVs with downscale Chinese TV makers. These babies will be packed with the Amazon Fire OS and again, if you can also tune in regular old TV via an antenna, that can fit with the rest of the  Fire apparatus. Plus you get Alexa jabbering all over the place, too.

This is all so clumsy, the 21st century version of rabbit ears. But in the transitional phase, brands in the OTT space are trying to appeal to traditional TV viewers and non-traditional viewers who couldn’t care less. Chromecast and Roku already have versions of something like that out. Everybody’s trying to make that user interface easier, including Playstation Vue or DirecTV Now.

“The experience matters,” Joe Atkinson, the U.S. entertainment, media and communications advisory leader at PwC, told TheWrap. “How I get the content.”

Significantly, he says when PwC polled viewers, asking if they thought they’d still be traditional pay TV customers a year hence, 70% said yes. That was last year. This year, they're not so sure. It’s up to 84% who think they're staying put indicating that either there’s been a miraculous consumer attitude shift toward cable or it’s an indication that when they study it, consumers conclude that pulling the cord seems pretty damn hard.