The mess of TV today

Yet again there is a rumour that Apple will get into the TV business. This is really just a hope by many, many users that someone will sort out the mess that exists today. (And get rid finally of the awful remotes that every maker forces on us!).

What is the mess?

There are three, the content creators and rights holders, the delivery merchants and the viewers. Let's take these one by one.

Content creators are strong individualists and cannot for the life of themselves see why they should use any standard way of creating their art, delivering their art, nor handling their copyrights. There are three content issues in today's world: TV/, movies and documentaries; data/VOD and text; and copyrights. And of these probably the worst problem they create is that of rights management. Just like old fashioned street traders with a stall full of wares, they hawk them around giving every tom dick and harry limited use of the creations, by geography, by time and by delivery channel - you know, program XYZ can be seen in UK only on July 12 2011 at 14:00 on Channel 341 of Sky satellite and viewed only on a big screen TV (not a computer or iPad). Ludicrous! Second is the technical specs, film, HDD for cinemas; Flash, MP4 or other video for the internet in many resolutions; plus the plethora of national TV standards. Ludicrous!

Delivery merchants are in constant negotiation with creators to carry the material. Often having it then not having it. The worst problem however is the multiple channels for delivery. These divide into two main ones with lots of variants: one way, like TV, cinema and VOD; and bi-directional like data and text on the internet. There is today a complete unbalance between the bandwidth available for TV (the cost of satellite channels is quite low) and this has lead to many, many channels of complete rubbish. Compared to the rather poor bandwidth of the internet, except in a few nations like Japan and Korea. UK where I live is very poor for a developed country. But one of the main problems is what I call synchronisation between the material delivered by TV and that delivered by Internet. Viewers more and more watch TV but at the same time browse the web. Take an example, some bigwig politician is letting off steam on Question Time, but you doubt his statistics. So you go on the web to get some facts. Now wouldn't it be great if the broadcasting company had an internet feed of data synchronised to the TV broadcast, that would be very convenient!

Lastly there is the viewer. By this I mean the screen you view on, and the feed you have, VOD or sequential programming. TV today is costing too much and investing too little, the result is many repeats and little good new programs. The wider spread of VOD (i.e. internet delivery not satellite!) would be a life saver for makers, they would both have a specific income stream and a way of measuring their success. Things which sequential program delivery needs extra audience surveys to find out, and where the rewards are not proportional to the costs. But for most users there is one great big viewer problem: it is an everlasting joke, and thus true, that most of us cannot understand or use the remote controls on our TV, set to boxes or DVD players. And they are not compatible so that you have to have three of them lying around. Synchronisation of control through your WiFi would sold this problem, just as it would offer synchronised deliver services.

So that is it. My take on why Apple should not make a TV. There are areas here which even this great disruptive company cannot change the way things are done. Or can they? Would it be enough to build the system and let the users come?