Mantic Media

It looks like Apple is getting closer to replacing my television as requested. Here are some sketches of the Apple DVR interface from a recent patent filing.

As I said in the GoogleTV post, I fully expect web video to converge with television. In 10 years the two will be nearly indistinguishable.

This is going to require a new viewing device with loads of storage and access to the internet. This new device has been a long time coming. Think of the iPod replacing the CD player. We need something to house all our digital media. Music, TV shows, DVDs, something to make all those discs obsolete like they should be.

Apple has practically done this already with the iMac, and frankly I don’t know what they’re waiting for. Just make an iMac with a huge screen, TV card, a cable hook up, the same functionality as AppleTV, a wireless keyboard/remote, and an interface that’s usable from the couch. Let’s call it iTV just for fun.

Wouldn’t you pay 3-5 grand for something like this? At least 1-2 grand more than you’d pay for a plasma or LCD TV?

The future of media is convergence.

When you hear about people watching more online video and less television, the choice they’re making isn’t necessarily computer monitor vs television screen, it’s professional vs amateur generated content. Or maybe it’s a matter of convenience.

The web belongs in the living room. How many of you are already connecting your laptop to the TV and watching old episodes of South Park or YouTube videos?

The problem is that doing this sucks. It’s a pain to hook up and a pain to operate the computer through the TV. This is going to change. Before long there will seamless integration of television and web video.

The only question is who is going to make it happen. My money is on Google.

Could you imagine navigating your TV through a beautiful, intuitive, googly, interface? Switching instantly between network programming and online video sites like YouTube. Searching a massive database of archived TV shows, movies, and web videos. Having all the entertainment in existence at your fingertips. Wouldn’t you pay a premium for a service like this? Wouldn’t you leave your cable company?

It makes too much sense not to happen. Even if the networks and the cable companies don’t want it to. The consumer does. People are willing to pay to get what they want. The companies that put together the right product first will be the big winners in TV 2.0.

This is where Google makes a play, and it’s already in the works. They have YouTube, the engineers, and the advertising technology to make this incredibly profitable. They are ideally situated and have the brand mojo to bring users running.

I think there will always be a demand for big budget high production value TV shows like ‘Lost’, but how do the studios recover their costs and who distributes the programming? Does it all come online eventually? Is there enough bandwidth? Will there be a subscription model, or will it be entirely ad-based?

Difficult questions all. But I don’t think any of them are big enough to stop GoogleTV from becoming reality.

The only thing that’s really missing is a next generation device to view all this next generation media, and for that I’m looking to Apple.