Today in Connected Consumer
The Wall Street Journal wins the morning with its report on Apple’s discussions with the major media companies about its plans for the long-rumored Apple-designed TV. Among the features Apple hopes to include: voice-controlled channel surfing, streaming sync with live TV across Apple devices, DVR recording in the iCloud, and streaming of content from mobile devices directly to the TV. I think Om gets it just about right in his takeout on the report: Apple is being Apple. Its goal is to knit together a coherent and seamless TV ecosystem across Apple devices by leveraging wireless streaming and cloud-based storage and syncing. The special sauce will be a new type of user interface for the TV based on voice recognition, just as the iPhone’s touch-based interface, and later apps provided the special sauce for Apple’s entry into the mobile business. Whether the media companies are ready to cooperate with Apple to enable its vision remains to be seen. Right now, I don’t think most TV programmers see their business as particularly broken, which means Apple will need to dangle a pretty fat carrot to get what it wants.