Pocket Link’s Paul Lamkin, quoting Samsung AV product manager Chris Moseley on a possible Apple TV:

We’ve not seen what they’ve done but what we can say is that they don’t have 10,000 people in R&D in the vision category. They don’t have the best scaling engine in the world and they don’t have world renowned picture quality that has been awarded more than anyone else. TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. How smart they are… great, but let’s face it that’s a secondary consideration. The ultimate is about picture quality and there is no way that anyone, new or old, can come along this year or next year and beat us on picture quality.

“PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll have noticed earlier today that I went off on one about shiny discs versus naughty downloads of TV shows and films. My rant was prompted by two things:

• Studios continuing to whinge about the eleven billion dollars per second they’re apparently losing through the evils of piracy, oblivious to the fact they are in part to blame for said piracy;
• A number of official pre-recorded shiny discs I’ve recently bought that made me want to hit things.

In the latter case, it’s commonplace to plonk your shiny disc in your shiny disc player and watch, getting increasingly angry, as the following happens:

1. Unskippable company logos, to remind you who’s wasting your time;
2. Unskippable piracy warning, to remind you who’s patronising you;
3. Unskippable adverts and trailers, to remind you about things you either already own, didn’t want to buy, or perhaps didn’t want to buy a while ago, when you first bought the shiny disc;
4. Unskippable advert about some other format that you don’t care about or already own, to remind you to add ‘the people who compiled this disc’ to your list;
5. Unskippable animated menu, to remind you that the studio’s art department are just as dickish as its marketing and legal teams.

Phew! That all takes a while. But at least now you can play your show—well, at least if the stupid unskippable animated menu doesn’t continue stupidly animating between pages, like some kind of stupid videogame where you get to control precisely nothing.

But wait! Then this happens:

1. Unskippable warning that the commentary on this disc might contain opinions that differ from those of the studio, to remind you that sometimes it would be better to put disclaimers on the box, or in a little menu option called ‘disclaimers’, like they do on websites;
2. Another unskippable piracy warning, to remind you that, yes, these guys really hate you;
3. Unskippable stupid logo for the stupid sound encoding the stupid disc makes, to remind you to hate related parties and not just the studio itself;
4. More unskippable logos, to remind you that you’ve just wasted minutes of your life, for no good reason.

I’ve recently bought discs that do exactly this, and it drives me nuts. In one case, I have an ‘acquired’ digital copy of some episodes of one of the TV shows, and here’s what happens when I select a file:

• It plays, immediately, and with no fuss.

“Aha,” you might argue, “studios are getting this! Just buy digital downloads, you idiot! They don’t have all this crap welded to them.” And that is true. Fire up an episode of, say, Castle on the Apple TV and it goes right to the content itself, without all the associated crap. But here’s the thing: studios still clearly want you buying shiny discs and not digital files, presumably because shiny discs provide more profit, or just because they hate you. I say this on the basis that:

• Digital content (in terms of access) is haphazard and inconsistent across territories, often being hugely delayed outside of the home territory and sometimes not showing up elsewhere at all;
• Digital content is often removed from services after a short time (such as movies that suddenly vanish from the Apple TV);
• Digital content is typically priced at least as high as a shiny disc, and older content is rarely discounted, leading to the absurd comparison of “shall I buy this TV show on iTunes for £40 or just grab the DVD for a fiver?”;
• Digital content is sometimes locked down with DRM, making it hard or impossible to transfer between devices you own.

By comparison, illegal content is:

• Available worldwide, shortly after broadcast;
• Typically available for a lot longer than official digital content;
• Free;
• Easy to transfer between devices.

The continued bitching of the film and TV industries and its support for draconian copyright measures is really pissing me off. The industries still refuse, for various reasons, to provide anywhere near the same level of user experience in bought media—be it digital or physical—that people can get with illegally downloaded content. There will, of course, always be people who refuse to pay for anything—but they are a lost cause; however, most people are happy to pay for convenience and immediacy. The thing is, they don’t want to wait. It’s no longer the 1980s, where you don’t really know right away what’s going on elsewhere in the world. When a new episode of House airs in the USA or Doctor Who on the BBC, everyone who’s a fan knows about this. If your studio isn’t then making this content legally available, affordably, and on a worldwide basis, shortly after broadcast, you’ve only yourselves to blame when people hit torrent websites and download it for free.

As I said on Twitter:

Companies do a lot better commercially when it appears they don’t hate their customers with a frenzied passion.

When some chunks of the music industry realised this, ditched DRM, embraced digital and mostly stopped being dicks, things started to improve. The same could be true for the movie and TV industries too, but they have to want to stop being dicks first.

There are plenty of rumours flying around about an Apple television. My hope is that Apple won’t enter the TV space directly—I think doing so is unnecessary and risky, and I can’t see much value that Apple could bring. Instead, I’d like to see the existing Apple TV move from being a hobby to a unit every iOS device owner must own, simply because it’s so fab.

Right now, it’s not there, but it has potential. On its own, it’s a reasonable piece of kit for movie rentals. If your Apple TV’s wired into an amp, it’s a great means of getting music from your iOS devices to your home music system. Using AirPlay, it’s also possible to stream a bunch of content, including files incompatible with iTunes, should you invest in AirVideo or streamtome. (And by ‘invest’, I mean ‘spend a couple of bucks’—it’s not like apps are expensive.) Should Apple power-up the Apple TV and reduce lag, it’s also going to become a great gaming device.

The main sticking point for me with the Apple TV remains television programming. In the UK, TV series are far too expensive (anything up to double what you’d pay for a DVD box-set) and many popular series are absent. The US gets things better, merely being lumbered with overpriced content. One of the very few Apple rumours I’m happy to believe is that TV companies are reluctant to cave to Apple’s demands, in making their shows cheaper or more readily available, because, well, um… THE MUSIC INDUSTRY!

Apple totally destroyed the music industry, didn’t it? Steve Jobs totally wrecked things for those guys, and made Apple far too powerful in that space. Particularly terrible things Apple has done include:

• encouraging more people to buy digital music, rather than just downloading it from the naughtyweb;
• convincing labels to drop DRM, leading to people being able to do what they want with digital music purchases, thereby leading to more sales;
• effectively monetising pirated music, through iTunes Match.

You can see why TV companies won’t cede any measure of ‘control’ to Apple. They might encourage more people to buy digital content, rather than downloading for free! Maybe Apple could somehow figure out how to monetise downloaded content with the video equivalent of iTunes Match, thereby making studios more money! And, um… …  …

No, it turns out I don’t get it either. Maybe those guys just really like shiny discs?

(Note: I know the real sticking point that gets TV companies’ knickers in a twist is Apple’s cut, but NEWSFLASH: a large chunk of something is a bigger figure than all of nothing.)

Good grief, The Guardian. Last week, you reported:

Doctor Who has faced many fearsome foes in the past, but none of them have been a Bolton-born TV presenter who yells “Our survey says”.

This was on the back of the show’s plummeting audience share, which saw it beaten by All Star Family Fortunes, to which The Guardian suggested:

The current series of Doctor Who – the second overseen by showrunner Steven Moffat – has faced criticism that it is too scary and too complicated for younger fans.

To be fair, The Guardian isn’t alone. Lots of publications are saying Doctor Who is screwed, largely because Moffat has the audacity to create plots that make you think a bit, that hold up brilliantly to rewatching (so you can figure out what you missed), and that have an intelligence and horror that was largely lacking in the (still pretty good) Russell T Davies era.

Only it’s not quite that simple. Tom Spilsbury reports that ratings are far more complicated than they used to be, and Who performs extremely well on the BBC Three repeat, recordings and iPlayer. The linked post shows that the current series is up on the first three series, and down only slightly on the 2008 run. Spilsbury says the following on this (WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR SERIES FOUR):

This can partially be put down to the final half of the series which concluded with Journey’s End, the return of Rose, the return of Davros, the fake regeneration, etc. Journey’s End was the top rated show of the week, and amassed almost 15 million viewers across all outlets, so this really gave a boost to the series average.

So what does The Guardian run with this week? Doctor Who’s mixed fortunes continue, which at least notes that the statistical reversal of All Star Family Fortunes ‘winning’ the ratings war again will be “shortlived”. So, not really mixed fortunes at all then, unless you consider it to be ‘mixed fortunes’ when your favourite football team goes to half-time a goal down, but then ends up winning two-one.

Fucking hell. That nicely sums up my reaction to AllThingsD’s article stating that Apple’s canned TV rentals. Being British, a mystical place called ‘overseas’ that whoever does Apple’s media deals isn’t entirely sure actually exists and therefore largely ignores, I had to use a sneaky US account to access TV rentals on the Apple TV. And here’s what happened:

• 48 episodes of Lie to Me rented ($47.52)
• 48 episodes of Castle rented ($47.52)
• A bunch of miscellaneous rentals of Grey’s Anatomy and random other shows (about $100)

Without Apple TV rentals, we (Mrs G and I) would have probably never discovered and watched Lie to Me. Grey’s Anatomy… we were acquiring that by ‘other means’ before the 99-cent rentals rendered that pointless. And Castle? Well, we love Castle, but not enough to spend loads of cash on it. We’d have waited for the inevitable DVD firesale in the UK or US and picked it up for bugger all—and certainly than for less of the price of the iTunes rentals.

Apple’s laughable spin is that “customers have shown they overwhelmingly prefer buying TV shows”, but that’s bullshit. While reaction to my complaints about Apple binning TV rentals on Twitter shows this is certainly the case for some people, it isn’t for others; more likely, the studios holding back their content was to blame, leaving the rental selection in a pitiful state, especially towards the end. And at the same time the likes of Warner Bros. were arguing 99-cent rentals devalued their content, they were of course allowing Netflix users to download as much as they liked for eight bucks per month. Classy.

So, where does this leave anyone who loves TV? Well, you now have the following choices:

• Pay for hugely expensive cable or satellite, which gives you tons of crap and a few shows you actually care about.
• Pay over the odds for shows on iTunes: £2.49 ($4) per HD episode, in the UK.
• Grab waste-of-resources Blu-rays or DVDs when they show up or, if you’re savvy, hang on for the sales, and then try to figure out how to fit your ever-growing collection in your home.
• Visit the naughty web and say “screw you” to the studios.

Me, I’ll probably head for the third of those options now, but I’m sorely tempted by the fourth. The thing is, I actually want to pay for good shows and support those who make them, but the studios aren’t making it easy. I’m not paying twice as much for a series of House on iTunes as it costs on DVD, but I’m also not exactly thrilled by the prospect of buying more discs-in-card-boxes that waste resources and take up space. I also don’t really care to download content that I then ‘own’ and that takes up hard drive space when I only watch the vast majority of shows once. (Note to US readers yelling “But what about iCloud?”, Brits will only get app and book sync initially—we’re left out of the media-streaming excitement.)

So, yeah, thanks, Apple and thanks, greedy studios. Maybe one day the studios will wake up and realise that 99p or so would be a sensible price-point for a TV show, but I won’t hold my breath. (Even many games companies don’t seem to understand that popular products sell way more copies when they’re cheap, otherwise Pac-Man would always be 69p, rather than rather more ambitiously priced.) Also, take this surrender by Apple as a possible shot across the bows regarding digital movie rentals. As I said a couple of weeks back, they’re now being removed from iTunes with alarming speed, to drive up purchases that are often costlier than grabbing a DVD. It wouldn’t shock me if Apple quietly decides to trash that aspect of the iTunes Store, while being strong-armed by the studios, under the excuse that people want to ‘own’ their movies.