Tag: Appletv

Apple TV+ Announcement is Apple’s most uninspired ever

The March 2019 Apple event announced 3 things:

Apple Card
a credit card with no fees and the sort of spending tracking that a dozen other apps offer. It’s a partnership with Goldman Sachs and MasterCard.

Apple Arcade
a paid subscription service (price not announced) that gives you an all-you-can-eat style access to a list of premium and paid games on the app store.

Apple News+
a subscription service for digital versions of newspapers and magazines.

and…

The Big Announcement!: An unexciting mainstream version of what is already available to consumers with no advantageous features or innovation

Apple TV+

The main attraction! And what is it?… It’s an app.

It contains Apple Channels which does what Amazon Channels service and Hulu both do. But now its by Apple!

This is like how early DVD’s would try to stretch out their non-existent “Special Features” with checks like “chapter selection” and “dolby digital audio”

In addition to the ability to buy channels through Apple, there will also be original programming at a subscription price that was conspicuously absent from the event… Whatever that price is, will it be worth it? Here’s what we were given to make that determination:

The Original Programming on the debut of Apple TV+ is a snooze-fest

The shows in this announcement are nothing special. That doesn’t mean any of them will be bad – it just means they’re not exciting.

Stephen Spielberg’s Amazing Stories… basically another Twilight Zone style anthology “but with SPIELBERG!”…

The Morning Show… A Comedy(?) or Drama(?) or Both about a Morning Show… Reese Witherspoon & Jennifer Aniston & Steve Carell do a show about a morning talk show. No clues as to what kind of show it is except the painfully unfunny “oh, hey guys, am I late??” bit that ushered in Steve Carell to the presentation stage after Aniston and Witherspoon had said a few words about their involvement in the series. That clue suggests that the show is a comedy but who the hell knows. There was no detail about it. We don’t know if this is going to be a goofy reboot along the lines of Back To You (a show that barely lasted 1 season, literally no one knows about, and I’m only mentioning here because I kindasorta almost got a speaking role on it) or if they are going for more of an Alan Sorkin tone like HBO’s The Newsroom. Probably the latter, but only because that’s a safer route to take and Apples other lineup items look equally bland and pedestrian.

Something about Immigrants… I guess its a docu-series? The Indian fella from HBO’s Silicon Valley (Kumail Nanjiani) introduced it but what exactly his role in the series is wasn’t made clear. I guess he hosts explorations into immigrant-centric human interest tales or something? Whatever it is – this was the peak of his career as his dramatically lighted face recieved equal billing with Spielberg, Anniston/Witherspoon, Big Bird, and frigginOprah, so good for him at least even if the show looks uninteresting.

A Sesame Street Spinoff… This segment was so horrible and so indicative of everything wrong with this event that I had to spin it off into its own post about how awful it was…

A Science Fiction drama about blind people… Jason Mamoa stars in series that is a new spin on the essential concept of “A Quiet Place” in where a tribe of people live in a dystopian future where a handicap is the central driving plot contrivance.

Little Voice… I have no idea what this is but director J.J. Abrams pitched it alongside a singer-songwriter I’m not familiar with named Sara Bareilles. Are you excited yet?

2 Oprah Documentaries… one about sexual harassment, and one about I-already-forgot-cuz-no-one-cares.

Any of these sound like must-see-TV to you?…

The entire Event was among Apple’s most dull ever

Product announcement events for tech companies aren’t expected to be entertainment. Except Apple’s. They decidedly are supposed to be exactly that.

How terribly, painfully, cringe-ily ironic that *this* – an announcement of a video entertainment service – of all Apple’s events, would be it’s most boring.

Chris Evans and Michelle Dockery, who will star in the limited series Defending Jacob, that wasn’t even talked about at the event (or if it was, it was so brief a mention that I didn’t notice), sum up the excitement level of the event perfectly in this GIF:

the face you make when you’re contractually obligated to be someplace that suuuuuuuuuucks...

^That’s at an applause moment, mind you… and they look like they’re at a school assembly having to humor a motivational anti-drugs speaker who is doing zero to change your opinion but you don’t want to make it any more awkward than it already is.

It didn’t need to be like this…

The absolute bone dryness of this event was an unforced error. At Apples 2017 product announcement event, they kicked off with a cold-open presentation of a funny, fast paced, inventive, high-budget comedy sketch depicting how civilization would collapse without any apps. It was legitimately entertaining, fast paced, and took some risks in the places it was willing to go to dredge for comedy in just a short little bit that was exciting and made people want to watch again and show other people who didn’t see it.

That event announced the new/upcoming iPhone X, an Apple Watch with cellular connectivity, and the Apple TV box finally getting 4K capability.

So… if Apple kicked off a presentation of routine hardware upgrades with a such a high-end, high-concept, pizazzy video, you can only imagine what kind of epic excitement stirrer they cooked up for an event that announces their streaming Hollywood style video service… except you can’t imagine it… because you would never in a hundred thousand years guess that this trillion dollar company entering the entertainment video space would ever ever ever make such a bizarrely wooden, nerdy, socially awkward, WTF choice of an opening for such a release…

This Apple event opened with… I kid you not… a slideshow… (which is bad enough, but hold on – it gets so much worse) that led a discussion of CEO Tim Cook lecturing about what a “Service” is… conceptually, and philosophically….

Apple… What. The Motherkking. Fkk. AreYouDoing??

Apple TV remains unimpressive

Apple interrupted my stream of Dexter from my laptop to television to let me know that an update for the device was available and I got excited thinking I was in for the awesomeness I’ve been waiting for: Apps on the AppleTV. FINALLY, Hulu, ABC video, news – and eventually games like Angry Birds where you use your iPhone or iPad as the controller will now make this $99 device a little black brick of bodaciousness.

Alas… it was some meaningless bug fix. DAMMIT Apple… what is taking you so long to make this device something noteworthy? what is the wisdom in letting GoogleTV upstage you with these features in new tvs while you lag behind only to be late comers? It makes no sense.

This dude on Macrumors.com summed it up better than I and it’s from a post that is not even responding to the current update of the AppleTV:

When the time is right? Yes, instead of offering an innovative and interesting new product with all kinds of potential 3rd party support and things to look forward to, let’s offer the same old product that didn’t sell before for a somewhat lower price, take away all internal storage so it’s even less useful in some areas, ignore ALL previous customer suggestions (say 1080p?) and hope it sells anyway. Then we’ll hint that SOME DAY maybe we’ll offer something useful or interesting to consumers IF we sell a whole boat load of them, which we won’t because it’s uninteresting and out of date just like the last version that didn’t sell for squat.

Sometimes I TRULY wonder how Steve ever got where he did. He’ll show all this innovation in some areas like the iPhone but then appear to be Forrest Gump when it comes to something that’s actually pretty simple like home theater products (i.e. offer the best quality and state of the art features for a reasonable price offering all the conveniences of the best products that already exist).

For example, if Apple TV had 1080p from the start, a DECENT sized hard drive (even if that meant making SLIGHTLY bigger to fit a 3.5″ hard drive; imagine THAT!?!) contained a DVR and Blu-Ray drive with support to convert them to be stored in iTunes automatically (like they do for CDs; a license would make this possible), had a front panel display that at least had a CLOCK on it (rather than just a little led light that does squat) and maybe even display title/artist information so you can see what’s playing music-wise when the TV is turned off and don’t have to wear out your projector bulb just to see a flipping album cover endlessly…or perhaps offer a cool visualizer to watch while you listen? What’s THAT?!? ), put in place the ability to add features like Netflix support, etc. as they become available (i.e. give the thing proper hardware assisted video decoding) and supported ALL the available formats so you can watch your home movies etc. without having to convert them to M4V and left provisions in place for gaming (and included a “remote” that could be used for gaming ala the “wii”) and offered it for around $500, MAYBE just MAYBE the thing would have actually SOLD because it would have the potential to replace most of the home theater gear out there (just add receiver and TV).

THAT is what it would take to be as innovative as an iPhone. Apple TV should be a general purpose computing device with slick controls that can be upgraded to do just about anything you’d want it to do, whether it be a DVR or a cookbook display for the TV in the kitchen/dining room. If it had the proper connections (e.g. input video as well as output it) and the right hardware inside (hardware assisted encoding/decoding) with enough room to store apps/videos/movies (1.5TB 3.5″ drives and larger are DIRT CHEAP for goodness sake!), it could do for TV what the iPhone did for smart phones. But no, some of those things MIGHT cannibalize iTunes music/movie sales, so we cannot include them! Never mind that we claim we do not make much profit from selling those sorts of things. We simply CANNOT offer a user-friendly do-everything type device because we want to sell SD 480p movies with low-quality video encoding and Dolby Pro Logic 2-channel sound to people that don’t think there is anything better….

This device just doesn’t do enough… It needs services from 3rd parties, it needs games, and it *should* just be open to the app store like the iPhone is and allow developers to build their own stuff for the device. Imagine calendars, weather, and other features made for the big screen, not to mention a Richardland TV channel option to stream directly to the living room and finally democratize tv.

What is Apple waiting for?…