Commentary

Three Screens And Counting

I am a total podcast slut. From the time I bought my video iPod I quickly veered away from the enticing $1.99 TV episodes and embraced the video podcasts that were dripping onto the iTunes podcast library. "Lost" and "The Daily Show" were nice to have at hand, but Tiki Bar TV, RocketBoom, GeekBriefTV, and Diggnation were the kind of compelling public access programming that drew me to oddities like the "Uncle Floyd Show" in the '70s (about three of you raised in the NY TV market probably remember this). For a refugee from the high school AV Club like me, this was so much more interesting to watch than prime-time content. Vodcasting now has become a robust channel that mixes table scraps of mainstream media with great and meatier alternative programming. When vodcasting comes to my TV, the networks and cable can automatically deduct an hour from my nightly mind share.

And now that day has arrived. Imagine my glee last week when I fired up the Apple TV box and got all of these vodcasts, plus my iTunes library of TV episodes and feature films piped directly to my HDTV. Apple's foray into the living room is what drew most of the media attention, and in many ways it is superior to Microsoft's execution via the Xbox 360. While Xbox Live does allow HD-quality downloads, Apple TV allows streaming via iTunes. This means that you can sample media on the fly. I spent a good hour rifling through the top ten tracks, music video and film trailers that the Apple TV box accesses on the spot, and I expect it to become a part of my media rituals. This is a tremendous media marketing vehicle -- on-demand previewing in the living room.

But as a devotee of disconnected media and time-shifting, what really grabbed my attention was the fluid mobile-PC-TV connection. The most impressive aspect of the Apple TV device is that it makes your content ubiquitous. What the device does is not much different from many streaming media players before it. But in combination with iTunes and the library of media I have already purchased, AppleTV's real significance is that it helps us think about our content differently. Once properly synched, all of the shows, movies, vodcasts, music and podcasts you access via iTunes are all present on mobile, PC and TV.

The effect of this, and the potential here, is not to be underestimated. I now know that I can drop into the same well of personalized content on any of my three favored platforms. The content is now ubiquitous. Like a natural resource, I can turn it on and it pours out. Arguably Slingbox does something like this as well for its niche of devoted fans.

To be sure, the pieces are not all there yet. I can preview only select content from the AppleTV interface, and I cannot buy anything from the store directly. Likewise, the iPod is a dumb receptor of content. Ideally, we want some way to browse and buy at any node in the system and have it appear everywhere. As well, the technical issues of synching are far from Apple's "It just works" mantra. Getting the AppleTV box to recognize my wireless router was a project in itself, and the set-up process requires dancing back and forth between PC and TV. Then there is the resolution problem. Pretty much the same files are moving across the three platforms. They look stunning on an iPod, good on a PC -- and sometimes atrocious and woefully uneven on the HDTV for which AppleTV is intended. It is very nice to have content flow easily across platforms, but I think some allowances will have to be made for the different resolutions.

And the big missing piece is the fourth screen in this cluster, the phone. It is still unclear to me how the iPhone will interact with iTunes as a sampling and ordering mechanism. The grand slam would be having genuine access to all of the same media even on the phone or to be able to order up a track, a podcast, an episode or a movie from iTunes and have it appear on the other screens.

Personally, I think that one of the surprise strengths of the phone is as a media sampling and marketing device. The mobile music services from Sprint and Verizon, for example, both have very good directory and search architectures. I use both networks to try a lot of music tracks I would not necessarily want to buy and listen to on the phone-based media players. I can see myself using an iPhone (if Cingular and Apple would get their 3G act together) to sample multimedia and then order it for viewing later on any of my other three screens. It almost goes without saying that this fantasy eco-system makes me pay only once for access to a property. As far as I am concerned, when I pay for a CD, DVD or iTune, I buy a site license for my brain. It shouldn't matter which screen I use.

But for all its weaknesses and incomplete pieces, AppleTV offers a glimpse of how we get beyond discussing "converged technology" and instead talk about ubiquitous media. In this future, having all platforms converge on a single device is less important than the content becoming independent of the device. Convergence is where the tech companies wanted us to head. Ubiquity is where I think consumers want it to go. The devices should matter less and less. There should be a persistent but customized flow of content we simply turn on. The goal of media technology should be invisibility, being less of a "platform" and more of a spigot.

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