Can you cut cable's cord?
As I’ve written before, what you’re really paying for when you shell out big bucks for cable TV is the convenience of having everything you want to watch in one place. Cable TV brings organization to content chaos, using hardware and software to make it easy to find the shows you want to watch.
When you stop paying for cable, you have to keep track of it on your own. For some, that will not be too difficult, depending where you get your TV shows and movies. If you mostly stick to Hulu, Netflix and, say, Apple’s iTunes, keeping track of what’s where will be simple.
But if you’ve got multiple streaming boxes and are subscribing to several sources, it can quickly become bewildering. For example, I’ve got a Roku 3, Apple TV and a Fire TV, and currently have subscriptions to Sling TV, Netflix and HBO Now, and have access to Showtime Anytime. It’s no wonder that I suggested in my cord-cutter’s FAQ that the best way to keep up with it all is to build a spreadsheet.
And this problem is only going to get worse. With Sling TV offering much-wanted channels like ESPN, CNN, AMC, TNT, Disney and more, and HBO finally breaking free of the cable hegemony with a standalone service, there are cracks in the dam and it will soon burst. Showtime has said it’s working on its own standalone service, and more are certainly in the works.
Clearly, it’s hoped that some company will step up and provide cord cutters with organizational relief. The obvious best hope would be Apple, which is rumored to be readying a long-awaited update to its Apple TV hardware this summer. But in March, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple was working on a subscription service that would offer cable-like bundles of channels for between $30-$40 a month. This sounds like a case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.
In the April 2015 issue of Wired, Joe Brown writes that what is needed is a “Sonos for video”, referring to the music product that streams audio wirelessly throughout your home. Sonos works with all types of audio – it’s file-type agnostic – and Brown writes that someone needs to do this for TV shows and movies. I can’t blockquote the key takeaway, but here’s a screen capture from Wired’s iPad edition:
Brown is right in that, so far, Apple has not succeeded at this, and the Wall Street Journal’s story doesn’t make it seem like Apple’s headed in that direction. That’s sad, because if anyone could do a slick, unifying back-end for TV content, it would be the gang in Cupertino.
But let me direct you to a blog post I wrote back in 2013. In August of that year, Apple acquired a small company called Matcha. Here’s how Venture Beat described the company at the time:
Matcha.tv was an iOS app that provided a comprehensive overview of everything that’s available to watch via cable TV providers (Comcast), streaming video services (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime), and digital video stores (iTunes, Amazon). Additionally, you could manage what you watched from a universal queue, get video recommendations, and connect with social networks to see what your friends were watching/liking.
Doesn’t that sound exactly like the product that Joe Brown, me and every other cord cutter really wants? Now imagine Matcha’s technology linked to Siri’s voice recognition, allowing you to tell Apple TV what you want to see, and it finding it and playing it for you. If it was truly service-agnostic – accessing Sling TV, HBO Now, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime and, of course, iTunes – then Apple would, as Brown puts it, “pwn the home”.
Of course, in order to do this, Apple would need to suppress its instinct to stay proprietary. Right now, for example, you can’t watch any Amazon Prime content on Apple TV (unless you use AirPlay to stream it from another device). And Apple’s plans for its own faux-cable service may be why Sling TV isn’t yet on Apple TV. But if Apple unclenches, then this could be a powerful product.
There are a lot of big “ifs” in that previous paragraph. But Apple clearly has the technology to make it happen. Now, it just needs the vision.
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