Whilst driving the other day I overheard some NPR “experts”
decrying the state of the cable/TV industry, and citing as an example that
one’s elderly relative could use the Internet but not the TV remote. Immediately, I asked myself a naïve
question: Why can’t the smartphone be a
remote?
And so, I did my usual due diligence, and discovered that
there are indeed some apps out there that purport to do just that: allow the smartphone to switch cable channels,
and the like. But I also found that
there are some surprising limitations at present, which seem as if they could
be overcome in a straightforward fashion if someone really puts an effort into
it. And it seems well worth the effort for some entrepreneurial person or
business.
Let me therefore state the problem as I see it, the solution
and why the smartphone should be part of it, and the things that need to be
accomplished.
The Cable Navigation Problem
Over the years (as the “experts” noted) access to TV
channels has become dominated by 2-4 cable companies, which decide to some extent
what you see. Initially, their offerings
proliferated to 200-odd distinct channels.
Over the last few years, according to the “experts”, the cable companies
have discovered that there’s money in sitcoms and dramas whose characters
actually evolve over time, because a loyal band of watchers creates buzz over
the Internet about the characters – but those series are expensive, and so the
rest of the shows per channel must cut expenses to the bone. In practice, that means thinly disguised
reality shows (and, secondarily, reruns; but those have a half-life on the
order of 2-3 years).
The result is almost stupefying: almost universal prime-time programming of
reruns, rehashes (true murder mysteries resliced ad nauseam), and reality shows
in the oddest of places. The Learning
Channel does not feature learning. The
Discovery Channel does not feature science, and the Science Channel is going
the same way with science fiction (read:
horror movie) reruns. Animal
Planet spends endless hours with real-life searchers for Bigfoot; National
Geographic Channel does the same with prison reality shows. Biography Channel? Not really.
It isn’t just that these bear no relation to their name and what they
originally set out to do; it’s also that they bear a great deal of resemblance
to each other. And so,
counterintuitively, the TV watcher seeking something new needs to do a lot of
searching. In fact, the watcher needs to do a lot of digging when he or she
finds an innovative show, as the TV screen provides barely enough information
to be misleading: “Dangerous
Attractions: Relationships that test
the limits of …” turns out to be about dogs and cats being pals.
At the same time, the goal of a “universal remote” still
seems far off, if the cable company and TV manufacturer offerings are any
guide. Often TVs have their own remotes,
which do things that the universals don’t, like handle various types of HD
display. If there is interference, the
TV may turn on and the cable not, or vice versa – and what’s happened is not
that obvious. If one accidentally starts
talking to the TV rather than the cable, changing the channel knocks the viewer
out of the cable universe entirely. And
don’t get me started on attached DVD players.
So there are two basic problems:
- 1. Turning TV and cable on is typically a complicated pain in the neck.
- 2. It’s hard to find the right show, because it takes channel surfing through 200-odd channels with no good descriptions to hand.
A Proposed Smartphone Solution
The solution seems straightforward: a flexible piece of software on a remote that
gives you one button to push to turn both TV and cable on and off, the usual
channel-changing keys, and the ability to semi-automatically display adequate
information about the shows, singly or summarized in the traditional TV-Guide
timeline. Oh, and the ability to share
short comments about shows as they unfold would be nice.
Yes, but what’s the form factor? Today, the universal remote is a single-purpose,
inflexible piece of extra junk. What’s
needed is something truly programmable, easy to upgrade, handling all the
little subcases that universal remotes vainly try to do now, plus be used for
other tasks yet to be determined. In
other words, something like the smartphone or laptop.
Those of you who follow my blog posts are aware that I have
spent a great deal of effort pointing out the things that the smartphone will
probably never do, that make it unlikely to take over the computing world. However, in the TV-remote case, these are in
fact virtues. We don’t need acres of
space to see a blog post or long essay on a show, just enough information to
tell if it’s really new and interesting to the viewer. We don’t need to write that long essay,
either, just to share a few pithy comments.
Now that, imho, the Samsung Galaxy SIII and other Androids have fixed
the iPhone-type interface that was likely to put you in an odd part of a task
with no obvious way to escape, the user interface to do both turn-off/turnon
and search/texting is at least adequate.
And it’s just easier to lug the smartphone into and out of the family
room than do the same for a laptop.
State of the Art
Anyway, I had reasoned this far when I looked at available
offerings from folks like Dijjit and Beacon, and it became clear that there are
some pesky details that still need to be solved. It
appears that some cable boxes and TVs talk WiFi or Bluetooth, and some talk
infrared in their own code. Thus, not
only does the smartphone, TV, and cable need to connect via WiFi to a home
network for one-button “on” to work in some cases, but the smartphone actually
has to generate infrared signals in multiple codes in some cases. The result:
a “dongle” on the smartphone or an attached “rock” a la Beacon for
channel surfing, and no one seems to handle the full case of cable/TV on/off.
Then there’s the nagging question about what to display
about the channels one surfs. It seems
that apps are only at the point where a raw download of some cable channels’ TV
guides is supported, and even those are designed for less detail than a
smartphone user – or a user in general – needs.
And, of course, there is no connection between tweeting and channel
surfing; but I regard that as a minor inconvenience, since when you tweet you’re
going to be typically stuck on a particular cable channel anyway.
Last and least, the vendors seem to be doing iPhone first
and then Android – perfectly understandable, given market sizes, but it does
delay (again, imho) user friendliness of the smartphone “remote”.
All of these things seem straightforward to fix, with the
possible exception of the infrared communications. It just takes time, and will on the part of
app and smartphone vendors …
The Bottom Line: The Potential Lies in the Computing
The key to the potential superiority of the smartphone over
traditional TV remotes, I believe, comes down to the fact that its pedigree is
in the software-dominated software-hardware partnership of computing. A TV’s interface is just plain stodgy, and in
attempting to make it a veneer for both shows and the Internet, cable companies
are forever playing catch-up, and forever falling further behind. By contrast, the main difficulties from the
smartphone side are ones caused by the rigid interfaces of the cable/TV
hardware combo.
And yet, the cable companies badly need to attract the
generation in its 20s right now – which by all accounts is barely buying cable
at all. The prices are certainly too
high for a large proportion of this generation, which has been hit hard by the
recession; but there is nothing showing their buying behavior turning around
soon, and at a certain point, they may conclude they don’t need cable at all;
and that could be a death knell. A
smartphone remote may seem like an odd place to start; but if it means that
this generation finds it interesting to tweet on programs, there is real hope
that cable will not destroy its seed corn.
As for advertisers, if there is a better connection between the Internet
and cable, some of them may well start spending on smartphone ads connected
with cable ads – the tail wagging the dog, so to speak. And that should slow the bleeding of ad
dollars from TV …
Or maybe not. In any
case, it seems to me that we do too much contrasting between smartphones and
the computing industry, when it seems to me that the real difference is between
these two, who share via Steve Jobs the same software-driven computing DNA, and
traditional media – and yes, by now cable is traditional, not too long after
actors and actresses started seeing it as more interesting than the movies. I’d
love to see the smartphone as TV remote; I think it’s an idea whose time has
come, and I would dearly love to deep-six the five remotes (two cable, two TV,
one DVD) for two TVs I presently have to have.
But even if it doesn’t, similar ideas are happening all the time, for
both the PC and smartphone/tablet form factors.
Vive la difference et l’identite! Vive le smartphone remote!
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