The Horrible State of IPTV Set Top Boxes or Why Apple Should Rethink Its Strategy

Everyone has a complaint about Apple. The company is too closed, the products cost too much, there is no Mac between the iMac and the Mac Pro etc. Endless articles have been written about any particular Apple failure but no one ever seems to challenge the company's near tunnel vision when it comes to selling directly to consumers

Why is selling almost exclusively directly to the consumer a bad thing for Apple? Well, from Apple's perspective it isn't. The company might be getting hammered in the stock market but Apple is holding a ton of cash so the market volatility isn't necessarily reflective of any innate trouble with Apple's business model. Okay, so selling to the consumer isn't a problem right? Wrong. By only selling to consumers, Apple is making life for a ton of people much worse than it has to be. This is where IPTV comes in.

IPTV, if you're not aware, is television streamed over the internet onto your television set. Kind of like VoiP except with talking heads and commercial interruptions. This, as you expect, requires a cable box. That you have to have a cable box is a problem, it's yet another bulky bit of electronics to suck down electricity and to clutter things up, but the real problem is the cable box on remote are stupefyingly poorly implemented

This came as a surprise, since the bar set by previous cable boxes was so low that it was on the ground the natural assumption was that an IP digital box could only be a step up. Wrong. Apparently, the company went out and found the bar, dug a six foot trench and dropped the bar in. What's so bad about the system? To start with there is annoying lag when changing channels, followed by a very distracting blue information screen that pops up as you are surfing. How the blue area of information manages to take up both half the screen while remaining illegible is a trick I don't quite understand. To make matters worse this blue rectangle of annoyance sticks around long after you're done changing channels. It is as if it is saying "I know you've stopped on this channel and want to see the show, now let me obscure the content for the next few moments just to remind you I'm your friendly cable box." As annoying as all that is it isn't as bad as watching TV and having the box suddenly decide it is time for a reboot and putting up with the ten minutes it takes to reboot and acquire the IP stream again

Very annoying indeed but it is just a box right? If the remote is easy to use it doesn't matter because you spend most of your time with the remote right? Ladies and gentlemen I give you the remote:

There's a lot going on there. You've got buttons, different colors, different shapes and the alphabet under the numbers. This isn't a remote, this is an abomination. Well, it wouldn't be that bad if it worked like you expected it to. For example, if you wanted to record a show you were watching you would hit the record button and the show would be committed to the hard drive in the cable box. Instead the record button serves no discernable function other than the joy of hitting a red button (oooh, dangerous) that actually does nothing. Then you've got the +,- buttons for volume and channels. And paging up and down in menus. Which makes you wonder  just what the hell the pointy buttons in standing guard around the OK button in the middle of the thing is for. Finally you have the button labeled VOD. One suspects that VOD stands for Video on Demand but underneath the button it says On Demand so it is actually VOD on Demand. I'm not sure what that does so I don't touch that button (maybe they misspelled Zod?). VOD might a great home robot or something but it might also shock someone far away for no reason

Out there someone is going to be familiar with this remote and think I'm an idiot. You're right, I am an idiot but that isn't the point. If you're designing something like this the goal should be EZ tv navigation first. Multiscreen and Phone might be nice but if they detract from the main purpose of having a TV (watching TV shows) then get those things out of the way

Which is why Apple's model of selling generally to consumers is a horrible thing. If Apple designed something like this it would actually work. Pressing the record button would record a TV show. Redundant buttons would be eliminated and the higher level functions would be easy to get in to but completely gone if you weren't interested in the difference between Guide and Menu. Of course, Apple isn't going to change anytime soon. There's no way Apple would crank out a box for the cable companies that makes your life easier. But I wish they would. And for the company's that do crank out dreck like this: go ahead, steal some ideas from Apple, consumers won't mind.