∞ Streaming live TV

Written by

John Gruber:

Apple is only going to get serious about TV if they find a way to get past that paradigm.

Exactly. The paradigm is traditional TV as we know it. Turn on the TV and watch whatever is there. Apple feels that model is broken and until that changes, the company won’t enter the market in a big way. However, if Apple has figured out a way around that model, look out.


Tags:

  • http://www.theuniversalsteve.com Anonymous

    I haven’t watched TV that way in well over ten years. Even before I got a TiVo at the beginning of 2001 (or 2002) I would video tape anything I wanted to watch and skip the commercials when I did watch it. TiVo was, of course a much better way to do that. My favorite TiVo trick was to start watching a baseball game about an hour after it started. By the time I skipped all the commercials and dead spots I would pretty much be caught up to real time two hours later as the game was ending.

    After a hard drive crash killed my TiVo a few years ago I decided that formatting a new drive and getting it all set up again wasn’t worth the effort and I cancelled my satellite service. At that point all my programming came from Netflix DVDs. Now that I have an Apple TV, 90% of my programming comes from Netflix streaming and the other 10% from DVDs when my rural Internet connection is flaky.

    Traditional TV would be wise to embrace on-demand viewing before they lose a significant chunk of their audience. But, for me, if on-demand viewing means I have to watch commercials I’m not going to use it.