jameswharris

Redesigning the Television–Will Apple Revolutionize the TV Next?

Before Steve Jobs died he told his biographer that he wanted to create a television set that was completely easy to use. Can you imagine a TV that’s as revolutionary as the iPhone or iPad? Well, I think it would be fun to guess its features.

World TV

Right now there are different technical broadcast systems all over the world so I would think the first area of simplification would come from jettison outdated technical standards. Why not design one TV that will work with all 7,000,000,000 citizens of the Earth. I can’t imagine Jobs would want to design a TV that had to work with set-top boxes from other companies selling content. Nor could I imagine he’d want to design something that used over-the-air channel reception. Because the Internet is universal across the world, why not just design the future TV to be an Internet TV?

Picture a TV with one power plug and built-in wireless networking. Now that would be a simple and elegant design. It would essentially be a computer with a 24”-62” screen using 1080p, that could work anywhere in the world with a different power cord.

The TV antenna will go the way of the buggy whip, and so will set-top boxes and DVD-Blu-ray players.

Physical Design

Now we need to imagine the design of the device itself. Currently I have 5 remotes and a keyboard with trackpad to use with my 52” TV entertainment system I built myself. If our new future TV used something like Siri, we could get rid of all remotes and keyboards. The only external control that Siri couldn’t handle is a game controller, and with a Kineck type sensor even that might be eliminated.

Having to connect a receiver and surround sound speakers to HD TVs is a pain. Our perfect TV should have a sound bar built-in with great surround sound. And it should play music fantastically too. No more Hi-Fi component, speakers and wires cluttering up the living room.

My new LG computer monitor has no physical buttons on it, but light sensors, even for the on/off switch. I think our perfect TV wouldn’t have mechanical buttons either. It should be voice activated only, but if it did require a manual power switch it should be light activated.

This TV will be more futuristic than anything on the Jetsons.

Content

Now I can’t imagine Jobs thinking he could design this TV and just throw iOS 5 on it. The TV opening screen and menu system is the hardest feature to imagine. This is why Apple is the success it is, and why other companies copy its design. Our prefect TV needs to show:

Internet broadcasts – live TV
Recorded shows from the past
Movies
Personal videos
Photographs
Internet
Games
Music
Telephone
Teleconferencing
Online courses
Presentations
Business and education software

For Internet TV to work we need TV networks to switch to streaming their content, but there’s needs to be a paradigm change first. How many shows need to be live? Think about that. The news, sports, reality shows, special live concerts and performances. We actually don’t need live TV all that much. Most of what’s on TV is recorded. Because of DVRs and services like Hulu, how many people even watch new TV shows that premiere each week live? Cable/satellite services provide hundreds of channels because of their technical limitations, not because we need hundreds of live TV channels.

Content from networks like TCM, National Geography, Discover, History, etc. can be served just as well from a web page, they don’t need to be live.

Recorded TV shows and movies can come from services like Netflix, iTunes and Amazon Prime.

When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s we had 3 television channels. There were no DVDs or DVRs to catch a show later. You either watched the show when it aired, or maybe had another chance the following summer during rerun season, and that was it. Each fall we were presented with a new line-up of shows and they would generally run a whole season – shows were seldom canceled mid-season. Once you learned the lineup on shows in September you pretty much knew what was going to be on television until next summer. Special shows were indeed special and rare. That was simplicity then.

Back then watching TV was as easy as basic arithmetic. Today with cable, satellite, iPads, smartphones and internet television channels, along with DVDs, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Blockbuster, Redbox and DVRs deciding what to watch on television is more like advanced calculus. We now live in a TV age of painful complexity.

Watching TV fifty years ago meant three channels of choice. Today we’re getting closer and closer to being able to watch anything that’s ever been on television at any moment. The choices aren’t infinite, but when someone asks “What’s on TV?” it might be safe to say, “There’s a million things on TV tonight.” And that’s painful to deal with.

Our perfect TV needs to have an operating system that allows the viewer to find what they want to watch as quickly as possible. It needs to be as simple to use as an iPad for a two-year-old. When the set is turned on it needs an opening screen – the top menu, and the basic functions can be simplified to these:

TV
Library
Telephone
Games
Music
Computer

This makes six tiles – is Microsoft on to something? TV would be live TV, Library would be recorded shows, either TV, movies, personal videos, photographs, or other content. Telephone could be two way video or conferencing. Games and music are obvious. Computer would be anything from online courses, business presentations, science simulations, word processing, blogging, etc. I think we’ll be surprised what we’ll want to do from the family TV in the den.

Think what a game changer such a television would be. It would be the Holy Grail of integration between TVs and Computers, but also phones, stereos and game units. Is it any wonder that Steve Jobs wanted to tackle such an exciting project? Sadly, think how many companies it will put out of business. We won’t need Blu-ray players or discs, or Google TV or Roku, or music CDs, or movies and TV shows on DVD.

How To Get From the Complexity We Have Now To A New Simplicity?

If you have cable with hundreds of channels how do you even know what to watch? And what great shows are you missing?

Live

The first thing we need to do is separate live content from recorded content. We need to bring back the demand and understanding of live TV and we need to reduce the number of channels offered. Because our system works with the world, live TV could be from anywhere on the planet. We want our TV user to select any channel they want, but we need to simplify the TV menu system. I like how Roku does things. It offers hundreds of channels but you only add in the ones you regularly use to you main menu. I’ve done the same thing with my over-the-air TV, reducing about two dozen local channels down to five. It makes life easier.

When the user says “Live TV” to our new set they should see a small listing of favorite live channels. They could be numbered on the screen so the user could say “Number 4” or just “PBS.” Or they could say “Add channel” and then go into a menu of all possible live channels to add. They might say, “Japan” and see live TV channels from Japan. Or they could say “American football” or “British reality shows.”

This system would allow for simplicity from an unlimited offering.

Also, the Live function could connect to web cams around the world. TV doesn’t have to be produced.

Library

The selection of recorded shows could run to the millions. Any movie, any TV show, any documentary, any home video, etc. We’d need a system to help people find good content. The basic search engine could find things if user already knew the name of the show, or certain related details, but for discovering new shows they would need help.

What we need is the wisdom of crowds – hit lists of all kinds to let people find what other people are watching and rating.

The default Library screen could have pull down menus on the left and a list of shows on the right. The pull down menus will let you pick for Year, Genre (and Subgenre), Audience, Now/Then, Rating, and maybe others. The default might be Current to see the most popular shows people are watching right now. But under Time you can change it to a listing by year or decade. Under genre you’ll see a detail list of genres and from Audience you can pick age group.

This way you could put in 1950s, Science Fiction, 60-65, Now – and you’d see a list of 1950s science fiction shows and movies that people 60-65 are currently watching the most. You can also switch to Then and see what the people back in the 1950s watched the most.

So if you want your daughter to learn about astronomy you could request the most popular documentaries on astronomy that are viewed by 10-20 year old girls that are rated 8-10 stars.

We’d need supplemental features that used the techniques of Amazon customer reviews, Netflix, Wikipedia, Rotten Tomatoes, MetaCritic etc. to help people find shows.

The system could have an encyclopedia of TV shows and you could find any TV series that’s ever been made and start watching them from the first episode to the last. Such a TV system will kill off DVDs.

Finally, our Library feature could also integrate with your local libraries, to their special collections, or to libraries around the world. There’s more to our culture than old movies and TV shows.

Telephone

Wouldn’t it be cool for one family on Christmas to see and talk with other family members who can’t make it home that year? The possibilities are endless. Science fiction has been predicting for the wall screen telecommunication device for decades. It’s time to get around to making one.

Games

It’s pretty obvious games need to be integrated into this system. Essentially our TV will be a computer, whether it runs Mac OS X or Windows 8 or Linux, it will be competing with console gaming. It could signal the end to console games. But won’t Angry Birds be cool on a 62” screen at 1080p? Or future versions of World of Warcraft?

Music

Apple wants you to buy music from iTunes – that’s such ancient 20th century thinking. I’m surprised that Steve Jobs didn’t recognize the simple beauty of streaming music libraries like Rhapsody, Rdio, MOG, Spotify, Zune and others. Why mess with owning music and having to worry about backing it up and protecting it for the rest of your life. Streaming music rental libraries is just too damn easy to use.

Like the “Live” TV function, the “Music” screen should allow users to add subscription services to the default screen. Probably only one, but they should get to pick which one. I’m sure the future TV from Apple will show iTunes, but unless iTunes starts its own streaming music service, this will keep the Apple model of future TV tied to the past. Right now I subscribe to Rhapsody and Rdio, and use the free version of Spotify.

Computer

Lot’s of people want to predict the death of the desktop computer but you just don’t want to do everything you can do on a computer from a 4” screen, or even a 10” screen. Online education is going to be big. Doing business presentations is already huge and getting bigger. Everyone will learn to create content, whether you’re an artist, teacher, musician or mathematician. Imagine letting kids paint on a 62” canvas? Or studying math from a library of the best teaching programs from around the world. For many families the desktop might go away, or it might become the family TV. Or the bedroom TV. Pretty soon a TV will be a computer and a computer a TV.

Summary

It’s like Dylan said, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Many young people have already abandoned the family TV to get all their content from smartphones and tablets. The shift to Internet TV has been going on for years, so it doesn’t take much imagination to predict a perfect TV. I wished Jobs would have lived into his 90s to see everything he could have revolutionized. Actually it would be fun to see if he ran out of things to reinvent.

At some point things have got to settle down. If you contemplate this TV I’ve imagined here, it integrated a lot of technologies into one simple device. I’d expect one screen in every room. And then everyone would have a 4” smartphone and a 10” tablet and maybe a 12-16” laptop if they needed one. After the war of gadgets we’ve been seen in the last decade will we see a gadget peace for a time? Reading Engadget makes that hard to believe. But the Flip video camera was killed off because of video cameras in smartphones. What will the iPhone 4s do to the digital still and video camera market? What’s happening to portable DVD players and handheld game units? Does anyone buy handheld GPSs anymore?

Just when Microsoft was getting into touch, Apple comes out with a voice interface. Schools are giving up teaching cursive handwriting. When will typing disappear? Always remember, the evolution of machines is away from moving parts. Now that consumers have access to 3 terabyte hard drives do they really need them when everything is moving to the cloud? How much does the iMac look like the future of computers and TV? Evolution appears to be moving toward intelligent flat screens. The smartphone suggests that everyone will have a personal 4” screen they take everywhere. Some people will also need 10” screens (tablets). At what point does voice controlled touch screens invalidate the need for 12-16” laptop computers? And when does the 24” computer monitor in the bedroom merge with the TV? And can one OS handle all screen sizes? Will it still be Microsoft v. Apple v. Linux?

My recommendation if you are buying a new TV now is to pick one with the most Internet features built in. But expect Apple to come out with something in 2012. Will it be as revolutionary as the iPhone? I don’t know. Too much depends on TV networks, cable channel systems and content providers. But I can’t help believe that cable TV will go the way of the floppy disc. Expect CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs to disappear quickly too. Cable TV and Satellite companies will put up a big fight for years, but the Internet will allow content produces to do an end run around them.

How quickly will all this happen? Well, how quickly are ebooks taking over printed books?

JWH – 10/30/11

What if Our World is Their Heaven?

Let’s imagine another place, another realm of existence, where beings live in harmony and togetherness. They have no clothes, no houses, no cities, no jobs, no cars, no weather and no bodies. They live a simple existence of being. And they’ve been living that way for trillions of years. They don’t die, they don’t suffer, they don’t crave, but after an eternal time one of these beings asks, “I wonder what it would be like if our existence was different?”

So these beings started thinking about that until one of them said to the others, “Aren’t we different now?”

“What do you mean?” the others asked.

“We never imagined being different before.”

And the others understood.

After many eons these beings created many different subtle aspects to their existence and they learned to crave variety, but even after billions of years their lives were still homogenous and bland. Then one of the beings asked, “What if there is a place where things are very different? What if we could go there?”

And they thought about that for a very long time. And they named this different place Heaven. And they dreamed of Heaven not knowing what it would be like. Finally a higher being that watched over these lesser beings decided to do something, so it created Earth and sent the beings there but let them forgot who they were.

And those beings pursued a never ending evolution becoming different. Eventually some of them tired of change and dreamed of finding a place of unity and harmony.

So the beings split into two species. One wanted to go forward seeking even more new experiences, and the others ached to find a new place to live. They called this new place Heaven, not remembering that this world had once been their Heaven.

JWH 10/26/11

Is Science Fiction a Modern Substitute for Religion?

Most people will think I’m nuts for suggesting that science fiction is a modern substitute for religion, but look at this comparison chart.

Religion	Science Fiction
God	Super advanced alien, AI
Greek gods, Hindu gods	Superheroes, aliens
God knows what you are thinking	Mind reading
God can be everywhere	Teleportation
God’s touch	Telekinesis
All knowing	Super AI
God creates world	L5 space colony
God destroys world	Death Star, space opera spaceships, atomic war, etc.
God creates land, sea, animals	Terraforming
Prayer	ESP
Heaven	Other planets, cyber worlds
Hell	Other planets
Devine realms	Multiverse, other dimensions
Immortal Soul	Life extension, immortality
Flying	Airplanes, rockets, anti-gravity, jetpacks, superheroes
Angels	Aliens
Devils	Aliens
God creates man	Man creates robots, AI, artificial life
Noah’s ark	Generation ship, space colonies
Virgin birth	Cloning, genetic engineering
Healing powers	ESP, Super science medicine
Prophets	Precognition
Wine to water	Atomic alchemy
Walking on water	Levitation, anti-gravity
Resurrecting the dead, rebirth	Brain downloading, cloning, Homo sapiens 2.0

Hubris knows know bounds. If you study the history of religions and myths you will see people have always wanted God-like powers. Science fiction appears to say: If God won’t give us these powers we’ll get them ourselves, or from aliens.

How long have people wanted to be more than what they are? How long have people wanted reality to be different?

On the other hand, how often do people find acceptance in what is?

JWH – 10/24/11

In Other Worlds by Margaret Atwood – Is Science Fiction Fantasy?

Is it time that we became atheists to the final frontier?

Tom Murphy at Do the Math has written “Why Not Space?” His math is very convincing, because of the fantastic distances involved, the likelihood of space travel beyond the Moon is tiny. We haven’t been beyond low Earth orbit since 1972 and there appears to be little public support or political will to do so again.

But it’s more than that. I’ve just read In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination by Margaret Atwood where she psychoanalyzes literature for the origins of science fiction. The roots of literature are in the earliest of myths, but then so are the roots of science fiction. The core of the book is about what is science fiction. Atwood doesn’t like calling her science fiction like novels science fiction because she thinks they are realistic speculation about possible futures. She feels science fiction is about far out stuff that can’t happen. Now hard core science fiction fans like me want to believe that science fiction is realistic speculation about possible futures, but I have to admit few other people think that way. The public lumps any weird-ass story into the science fiction genre category and so it’s gotten the reputation for unbelievable stories.

Margaret Atwood says what she written is like what Jules Verne wrote, stuff that could happen, and that it was H. G. Wells who wrote stuff that couldn’t happen, citing The War of the Worlds as her prime example – and that’s what she calls science fiction. Of course, there are those of us who believe Wells was speculating about something that could have happened, but his conjectures have been disproven by later science.

What Tom Murphy is saying, and there are many like him in recent years, is that human exploration of space might not happen, that it’s not practical, or even wise. And wouldn’t that make Margaret Atwood right? That science fiction is about stuff that can’t happen. Which means science fiction is fantasy.

Normally, I would argue against that, because I still think we have a chance with space exploration. Of course, I will admit that 99.999% of science fiction about space travel is patently bogus speculation and thus fantasy. But I still hold out the possibility that humans will go into space, maybe even to the stars. It just won’t be like what science fiction has predicted so far.

However, reading In Other Worlds made me think differently – not about space travel, but science fiction. I’ve read other books linking science fiction to its origins in myths before, but this book is making me think about it in new ways. Atwood links myths, religions, literature, comic books, science fiction and fantasy all into one human tendency to make up far out shit. As a species one of our defining characteristics is we dream up fantastic concepts to think about, and its when you start studying this tendency as a whole, from the earliest times that we have records of human thought to the latest, that we see it’s all of one cloth.

I’m becoming an atheist to my own religion – science fiction.

Science fiction fans believe their stories are better than myths and fantasies because of the science and technology, and they believe their fantastic stories represented something new and different – and possible! After reading In Other Worlds, I think we’re all smoking the same opium. Science fiction, fantasy and comic books fuel the same need in modern minds that myths and religions feed to primitive minds.

What we need is a label that encompasses the whole kit and caboodle, that defines and explains our craving for the fantastic. Until someone comes up with a definitive term, I’m going to call it all fantasy. Evidently humans need air, water, food, friendship and fantasy to survive.

Now what’s fascinating about In Other Worlds, and why I encourage you to read it, is Atwood’s writing about her love of science fiction, especially the chapter on Ursula K. LeGuin. Atwood loves both science fiction as she defines it and speculative fiction. Her hunger for reading and fantasy as a child, adolescent and adult knows no bounds. And as an academic, writer and savvy reader she traces our love of the fantastic back as far as history and anthropology can take us.

JWH – 10/23/11

Why Aren’t The Great Courses by The Teaching Company Online?

If you aren’t familiar with The Great Courses by the Teaching Company you should be. That is if you enjoy learning. The Great Courses are a series of college like courses done by well known professors for educational entertainment. I’ve bought several over the years and have checked out others from my library. Originally they came on audio cassettes, and since evolved to DVDs, digital audio downloads, and now video downloads. But what I’m asking is why aren’t they available for streaming? The Teaching Company needs to create a Netflix like service for their educational videos so I can watch them on my TV, computer, iPad or even iPhone.

I don’t like owning stuff like DVDs anymore. Netflix streaming has ruined me for that. Nor do I like owning MP3s, Rhapsody and Rdio have ruined me for owning music. I like to pay a monthly fee and just call stuff up when I’m in the mood. If the Teaching Company offered their library for $7.99 a month I’d subscribe.

Online education is taking the world of higher education by storm. Educational videos from the TED Talks, Khan Academy and iTunes U are also gaining popularity. There’s a market for fun learning, or edutainment, especially when it’s convenient. The Teaching Company videos have always been rather staid in production format, reminding me of educational TV from the 1960s, but they are slowly learning to jazz things up with multimedia to support the lectures. What The Teaching Company needs to do is get away from it’s old fashion 20th century marketing concepts.

The Teaching Company would do well to model its distribution on Hulu Plus and Netflix. The $7.99 all you can eat video services are the way to go. That’s $95.88 a year, about equal to one of their 36 part courses. Now I’m sure The Teaching Company fears giving everything away for the price of one course, but how many people buy more than one course a year? And would they attract more customers if they offered their courses in a much more convenient and easier to pay fashion?

Sooner or later someone is going to bring edutainment to the Netflix streaming model. Right now there are several companies trying to copy Netflix, such as Amazon Prime Video, but they tend to offer the same kind of content – movies and old TV shows. The same thing is happening with music. There’s are a half dozen or more streaming music services all with almost the same 12-15 million songs. I would think the entrepreneurial action would be delivering new kinds of content, and I’m thinking online education would be popular for a niche market.

The Power of Online Learning

Look at this sample lesson from Educator.com for Cascading Style Sheets. It’s quite slick, and it illustrates the value of studying at the computer or TV screen. You can pause the lecture at any point. You can have your own text editor in another window to practice the lesson as you watch. You can have a third window open to take notes. Educator.com charges $35 paid by the month, or $240 paid by the year, to access all its courses, which mainly focuses on tutoring kids for high school or some basic college courses. That’s a good value if you’re going to school and want extra help, but a little high for edutainment.

Free Online Education

These sites are offering free courses in a variety of formats. You can go to YouTube and search on any subject and find videos to help you learn too. The Teaching Company has a lot of competition from free sources. But their video and audio courses are well produced. I don’t mind paying for them, but I have to say there’s lots of good free content out there. Look at this MIT video on linear algebra. It looks like being back in school with a professor at the blackboard.

Another free approach is from the Khan Academy. And that’s the cool thing about having a variety of courses – if you are having trouble with a topic, just find another teacher with a different approach.

Look at this link to Educator.com’s lesson on linear algebra to see even another approach. It uses a multiwindow technique, with the professor in one window, the exercises on a whiteboard in another, and the course outline in a third.

I wished The Teaching Company had some sample lectures I could link or show. But here’s a lecture at YouTube on How to Read World Literature. It is has a rather long intro, but even that explains the value of the lecture. Often this is what The Great Courses are like, a professor who is passionate about his subject just talking to a class. The Great Courses are a bit more slick, filming the lecture without distractions with better sound, but it’s the content that counts.

I think The Teaching Company has done a poor job of advertising itself. I’ve asked a number of professors I know if they’ve seen one of The Great Courses videos and many have not. Over the years I’ve met a few other Great Courses fans, but I feel The Great Courses are an acquired taste. Most bookworms read fiction, but if you love non-fiction they may appeal to you. Even then, you can read a book by Bart D. Ehrman or James Gleick and ingest facts far faster than you can by watching lectures. However, there is something different about having a specialist just talk to you, and maybe show some sample photos or film clips. Listening to people lecture sometimes helps with learning.

One reason why I like The Great Courses is they enhance my personal map of reality. For instance I watched From Monet to Van Gogh: A History of Impressionism and learned so much, that when I went to Washington DC looking forward to seeing the Air & Space Museum, I actually ended up more thrilled at the National Gallery. And since then I’ve read books about the history of Impressionism and the artists, bought impressionism art books, and took in every visiting exhibit of impressionistic paintings that have come to town since.

I’ve read three books by Bart D. Ehrman on early Christian history, and now want to get his lecture series from The Great Courses. What happens is you take up a topic and start studying it just for fun. There are no stressful tests, no homework, no writing papers. It’s just learning because it’s fascinating.

That’s why I believe I would enjoy The Great Courses if they were available like TV shows. Instead of watching an old episode of Star Trek on Netflix, I could watch a lecture on British literature, or one about cosmology. Watching the YouTube clip above about world literature makes me want to read outside of my normal territory of the US, Canada and Great Britain.

JWH – 10/22/11