I bet Newton Minow liked Apple's announcement of the iTV contraption yesterday. Minow is the guy who branded television a vast wasteland in the 1960s. Today he mostly likes television mainly because the amount and variety of programming available to the public has increased vastly.
Apple's iTV is a device that gets video off of computer networks and on to your TV set. One of the cool things about that is that you can watch what you want, when you want it.
What's the big deal about that? I mean, don't we already have DVDs, on-demand tiers on the cable box, TIVO, VCRs and stuff like that. Well, yes, but they are not always so easy for most of us to use. It's not easy to couple together set ups that can include cable boxes, TVs, stereos, satellite receivers and who knows what else. And once they are integrated into a system, they may not be easy to control - at least by a single, simple remote. Stephen Johnson described this in a Slate article last month.
Apple's iTV will bring hopefully bring the kind of plug and play simplicity (and reliability) from computer systems to the living room. And, this is the important part, without forcing us to use a computer to do it. We know how to watch television already; something like iTV will just get us off the TV grid model of programming and open up the variety available to us.
Leander Kahney sees even more Apple visionary stuff in all this in a Wired article. iTunes 7, released yesterday, contains a feature that lets you browse your iTunes music library by visually flipping through album covers. Kahney thinks this would be a pretty nifty way to look at the TV shows available on an iTV. It's even better than TIVO, and it's only a matter of time before it shows up on the iTV, he says.
So maybe Minow's wasteland isn't so vast, or maybe it spans even more territory with these sorts of distribution technologies. They may not be as easy to use as getting up and twirling a knob to select one of three stations as it was when Minow first revealed the vast wasteland in 1962. It's cool to be free from the programming grid model of television, but it's really cool that the ease of use barrier won't be quite so difficult to get around.
Tags : television tv video apple itv