Macopinion

Fixing AppleTV: Part 2: It’s the Bandwidth, Stupid

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

Critics of AppleTV generally blame two reasons for "slow" AppleTV adoption. The first is that the iTunes Store does not sell High Definition content. The second is that AppleTV is missing key hardware features, like a built-in DVD player or DVR capabilities. Let's address these topics.

Low Def
Daniel Eran Dilger of Roughly Drafted Magazine has a great article on the advantages of low-definition video. To summarize the article, Daniel concludes that people don't want high definition video. Sure, it sounds great: who doesn't want a clearer picture? But the realities of high def make it unattractive.

High-definition video is massive. It is complicated. It is slow. It is highly copy protected. And few of us have the right equipment to properly display it anyway.

What people really want is low-definition video. We want control. We want to be able to watch what we want when we want it. (Imagine that -- what a concept!) We want to move our video around: see it on our laptop, our phone, our iPod, our bedroom or kitchen TV. We want to be able to burn it disc and store it away or send it our friend.

The interesting thing is people are willing to pay for content they can do this with. People are becoming less willing to pay for content they can't do this with. Soon it won't be a matter of paying a premium or not, but merely paying for it at all. After all, if I can obtain the content illegally via P2P for free, your price for offering me the same thing at a little more convenience had better be good!

Instead the studios are trying to jam high-definition content down our throats: competing disc formats, really expensive movies, and restrictive copy protection that limits what we can do with our purchase. Is it any wonder HD is a flop?

Now Apple is set for HD. AppleTV supports it already -- it's just the iTunes Store doesn't sell HD content. Yet. The critics think that when that happens people will rush out to buy AppleTVs. Ridiculous!

Yes, HD support might sell a few more AppleTVs, but only a few. AppleTV content right now looks great for most people (it is far, far better than the compressed Tivo recordings I generally watch). But HD content will take oodles longer to download -- and it already takes too long for standard def! Are people really going to put up with that? No. People are accustomed to live TV delivery and want their content immediately, not four hours from now.

And think how Internet delivery of video will effect our lives as more and more of our household depends on our Internet connection: our VOIP telephone service will get choppy, our web surfing will slow, etc. Just think what happens with multiple TVs in a household with different members downloading multiple high definition movies and TV shows!

In the future, with faster Internet and cheaper bandwidth, downloading HD movies might make a lot of sense. Today it does not. Apple's waiting for the network technology to catch up.

The Bandwidth Solution
But in the meantime, there is something Apple can do to solve the bandwidth problem. Why aren't people buying iTunes videos? Simple: obsolescence.

In the late 80s and early 90s, I invested a ton of money in VHS movies. I'm a movie fanatic and bought hundreds of films on VHS (I also recorded thousands from pay TV services). But when DVDs were released, not only did my VHS copies suddenly look crappy, but they took up a lot more space, degraded over time, and weren't random access. Even worse, my VHS collection devalued to nothing as the demand for VHS waned. I eventually got rid of my VHS movie collection and replaced them with DVDs (yes, many I rebought).

Today I'm in the same boat again: I own hundreds of DVDs and now Hollywood is trying convince me to rebuy them all in high-definition format. Fat chance. While the differences between DVD over VHS were night and day, there just isn't enough improvement between DVD and high-definition. If the cost were the same I wouldn't rebuy, and yet the costs are dramatically more (both for the players and the content). To make things even worse, there are competing formats, and some movies are exclusive to one or the other, meaning either choice is wrong. So smart consumers do nothing: we wait for the winner of the format war.

Consumers have done this before and are tired of it. They are tired of rebuying content for each new change in medium (cassette to CD, VHS to DVD, etc.). So when you offer them DVD-resolution videos from the iTunes Store, people hesitate. What about the future? Will I have to rebuy when high-definition is sorted out? While the resolution of iTunes videos is fine for today, it won't be fine for the future, and people want a solution that works for the long-term.

So there's the problem and the answer: to fix the iTunes Store problem, Apple merely needs to sell videos at today's resolution with the promise of a free upgrade to a higher resolution version if and when it is released!

This would appease customers that hesitate investing in yet another limited format. It would also solve the bandwidth problem by postponing it: people can buy and use the standard resolution videos for today, and in the future, when HD is available and higher-bandwidth networks are available, the improved video can be downloaded.

Next Time: Part 3: Keep It Simple, Stupid

macopinion@designwrite.com