I wish I could rediscover this news clip but I swear it’s true.
In the early days of television, the Waldorf-Astoria contemplated putting sets in rooms, but in anticipation,
asked guests if they’d prefer calling downstairs to ask the front desk to switch the stations, or try to do it themselves. As I recall from reading a vintage story about it in
Broadcasting magazine, the guests voted to have the hotel to do it for them.
That seems hard to believe, because operating a TV, even back then, was pretty easy. But
if you didn’t know how and someone was offering, well, why not? Nobody wants to work hard to be entertained.
Online video viewing is, by comparison, a lot harder.
The
user interfaces from various operators, are still awfully clunky and pretty uninformative. The hunt-and-peck search for content can be time consuming and, often, a wasted effort. Amazon’s
voice-recognition service is pretty dandy--it does understand most queries--but it only selects movies or television shows that are in Amazon’s library, not in any of the other services, like
Netflix or Hulu.
And that makes that Amazon service only half useful, if that.
That might be why the migration from cable to OTT devices is not a real
stampede — yet.
It’s not easy. I don’t know if it’s more time-consuming if you access content via apps more frequently than you watch on a laptop or a
connected TV, but in all those instances, that which should be fast, vast and liberating instead takes minutes of possibly fruitless searching.
And that’s why the new Apple Tv
set-top box, out this month, will at least takes a giant step forward. According to BuzzFeed, Apple CEO Tim Cook says the new box will offer a universal search function. If you’re
searching for something, Apple will tell you in one inquiry who’s got it, even if it's not them.
“I think that many, many people will want to be in that search,” he said. “And that’s great for users. Think about your experience today. Even if you’re fortunate
enough to have the content you want to watch in an app, you sometimes don’t remember exactly where that show is, so you’re going to Netflix or Hulu or Showtime. You shouldn’t have to
do that. It should be very simple.”
What’s more, since BuzzFeed asked, Cook said Apple will be able to distinguish between which service has Year 3 of
series and which one has the other seasons, and be able to tell you that, again, in one inquiry. If that story is true, that’s great.
Apple TV will include Netflix, HBO
Go, Hulu and Showtime on its service, but Cook told BuzzFeed that’s just for starters. That’s a pretty good start.
pj@mediapost.com