You Tube on The Apple Tv & A Proposal For A Different Way To Interact With Internet TV

June 25, 2007

I've been playing around a little with You Tube on my Apple TV and had a few thoughts.

Short Videos Are Not As Fun In The Living Room

Short-form video in the living room just isn't nearly as enjoyable as on the desktop. With all the clicking through the menus and searching and all you get is a 1 or 2 minute clip of some little silly something? That's not a rewarding pay off. I suspect that once they put up their entire collection with its abundance of illegal, and often longer-form content there may be more enjoyable content to view.

A Library of Videos On The Web

It is, however, great to have a library of videos on demand stored on the web that is constantly updated to search through and discover things. I wish Apple allowed more of this searcing, discovering and managing with video podcasts. Imagine being able to search the iTunes podcast directory through your Apple TV - and to subscribe and unsubscribe through the device. And I suppose to download directly to the Apple TV rather than first to your PC. You would feel a lot less tethered to your desktop/laptop and feel like you have options in your living room.

So I think a successful living room internet TV MUST have: management of your media via the TV and NOT solely on your desktop/laptop like Apple forces for its podcast management.

Streaming vs Downloading

This video-podcast-management-through-the-tv proposal then begs the question: is instant-gratification streaming a la YouTube better than downloading a la podcasts? It is great to find something, click it, and have it start playing a few seconds later. I'd say it seems like it's more reasonable that you can get better quality, larger files via the download route. But it's not a technology issue - it's a user experience issue. You can get away with larger podcasts becasue you aren't waiting for them to reach you RIGHT NOW. But I think some type of hybrid would be ideal. Here's what I mean:

My Proposal: A Streaming/Download Hybrid

Search an internet-residing directory of podcasts and podcast channels. If you find a video you want to watch click download. And it will be added to your queue. You can start watching any amount of that video that has made it down to your box. Or you can continue searching around for more video. If you don't want just single videos you can search podcast channels and subscribe to them. Subscribing would do the same thing: start to download the latest video. And when you are done sniffing around the directory you can go to your download queue and start watching. And it would do the same file management that Apple TV currently does which is to dump old files.

This is what I would like to see in my living room: A Podcast Menu something like this:

• My Recent Podcasts (river-view of latest downloaded individual podcasts)
• My Podcast Channels (organize podcasts via the channels that I am subscribed to [like current Apple TV] - and allow me to unsubscribe here as well)
• Downloading (my active queue of downloads. I can start to watch videos from here - but only as much as I have so far downloaded.)
• Search
• Popular (A list of popular channels and videos)

YouTube on Apple TV (and Joost for that matter) I think prove streaming into the living room isn't perfect because the pipes aren't that fat. I think something like what I outlined above would be the best of both the "download & wait" and the "stream me now" worlds. Even for the "instant" stream of YouTube I find I'd like to have a "download basket" a queue to drop a bushel of things and once I'm done with my searching - come back to it. This is mostly due, I think, to YouTube's super short content which makes me want to aggreagte a bunch of little things into one, longer experience.

You Tube Is Not For News, Video Podcasts Are

News on internet tv is the #1 thing to get right first in my opinion. It's the one thing that I think can most easily make internet tv a go-to device - at least for people older than teenagers. Why? 3 reasons: 1) Because it's internet you can get the most timely info. 2) It's the internet you could get news on all the myriad topics that satisfy your specific interests that cable news would never be able to touch [Tibetan technology news?] and 3) News doesn't need to be large, high quality files to be compelling like other forms of entertainment may require - so viewers can be more forgiving.

While 10's of thousands of videos are uploaded to You Tube every day - it doesn't seem to be the best resource for news. At least not on the Apple TV. Again, this may just be due to their limited catalog at the moment - but I don't suspect so. It seems logical that YouTube content would be the go-to place to find out the latest news on virtually any topic. But it's not. There is far more 'date-unimportant' content cluttering the search results. This is less a technology issue and more of a philosophy issue. YouTube is a destination for interesting/goofy/humorous/etc stuff where page views and popularity trump timelines.

I searched news, tech news, technology news - among other tech geek searches to test it out. Surprisingly, video podcasts, delivered in their chronological episode/channel format are still the best way to get video news through the web it seems. At least via the Apple TV.

Permalink 6 Comments

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