While news publishers have been looking for a while for the means to exploit the audience potential, new applications based on Apple’s dual screen technologies have the potential to take the market in a new direction.
In the streaming market, the Apple TV box continues to evolve but is not without competition… a good thing since despite its elegant remote, its clunky user experience is far from being the most satisfying the iPhone, iPad and Macintosh computer maker has created. And it is still hamstrung by a shortage of content provider partnerships.
Recent weeks have seen a number of interesting commercial developments, based both on Apple technology and that of its competitors.
Now News appears to be having a dollar each way, with an investment in Roku, said to be the Apple TV’s only real competitor. Its streaming box system operates in the US, UK Ireland and Canada at present, and the $45 million it raised last month from News, BSkyB and others will help it develop a simpler USB stick-based device.
But with News’ chief digital officer Jon Miller joining the board, it’s likely the global giant – one of the world’s biggest film and TV producers, as well a major news publisher in the UK and US and the dominant player in Australia – also has content synergies in mind. This month News gained approval for a takeover of Packer’s Consolidated Media Holdings in Australia, which would bring its share of pay-TV company Foxtel to 50 per cent.
In addition to these boxes, internet-connected ‘smart TVs’ also offer content, with LG having attracted Australia’s Fairfax Media, which has smh.tv and theage.tv offerings, to its app store.
There’s a school of thought however, which believes that this connectivity – internal or external – may just be a sideshow, as phones and tablets get more powerful. Cloud-based content services provider Brightcove, which launched a dual screen solution for Apple TV in June, certainly thinks so.
The challenge, especially now, is to get inside Steve Jobs’ head… and that of his successor, Apple chief executive Tim Cook. Brightcove chairman and founder Jeremy Allaire picked up on the Jobs remark in Walter Issacson’s biography that Apple had “cracked the code” on TV, and Cook still describes it as an area of intense interest. Cook’s comment a few weeks back was that Apple would “keep pulling the string and see where it takes us”.
Allaire’s bet, reflected in his company’s announcement, is that the iPad maker isn’t going into the pay TV business, and will rest the power in the iPhone or tablet itself and its associated, very profitable app business. Instead, he says Apple will seek partnerships with top cable companies in which they open up their APIs for their electronic programme guide, VOD libraries and network DVR infrastructure so that Apple can offer a superior user experience on top of those services, “in a carrier/operator independent manner, much as they did with the mobile services of the leading telephony carriers in the world,” he says.
The Apple TV device would be used in concert with an existing subscription from a TV operator, with the TV functionality accessed as an app. In what is basically a ‘TV as monitor’ scenario, the iPhone or iPad becomes a next-generation TV set-top box, but one which is both highly personal and highly social.
Technology Apple has already released prepares for this: An upgraded AirPlay released in iOS 5 last year – and set to be part of the Mac OSX this year – allows users to beam any content or application to an Apple TV box. A mirroring feature which will duplicate the content of the phone or tablet screen on TV, while using it to browse and navigate, can enable ‘dual screen apps’ and it is this area Brightcove aims to develop for publishers.
Allaire says after putting an Apple TV box on each of the sets around his house, he’s using it instead of the ‘smart TV’ or cable device interface. “Even now, it is a highly compelling product,” he says. “I’m playing games on my TV with my kids, watching movies, streaming live broadcast TV using authenticated TV apps from companies like CNN and ESPN, and with dual-screen MLB it is hands down the best way to watch baseball with an iPad app in hand.”
So if Allaire is right, Apple’s next step will be development of the Apple mobile platform as part of the “core focus” of extending the iOS and iTunes ecosystem onto TV. A commodity add-on peripheral – “the fastest way to accomplish this” – could be a smaller box including a camera, motion sensor and speech processing as well as power and HDMI connections, he speculates. Oh, and a TV monitor with those capabilities plus a design and form factor in keeping with the Apple brand, “because they can, and it will be gorgeous and include the latest innovations in display technology, and will sell at a premium price that ensures a reasonable gross margin for Apple”.
With updates to its iOS mobile operating system and APIs, there will a demand for apps which exploit the AirPlay capabilities and add to the 500,000 TV apps, with cable content just another app.
“What matters is that soon potentially tens of millions of HD-capable monitors will become a screen for the hundreds of thousands of apps running on devices that are already in people’s hands,” he says.
Apple, which was this month granted a 2006 patent application on an iPod-like video control interface, looks positioned to take yet another leading role, begging the question of where that leaves smart TVs and competitor boxes. With or without Apple, the opportunity is to capitalise on the up to 80 per cent (according to a US study) of smartphone users who are already using these devices while watching TV, and provide them with a whole new contextual experience.
Comments