Will Google TV or Apple TV Win the Competition?
How quickly can something become a cliche? Every Tom, Dick and tech company is coming out with a television platform of one sort of another. It seems all at once people started to realize that television as we’ve known it is an antiquated concept.
Cable companies had their run. They certainly enjoyed the (rather substantial) profits coming from selling tiers of these channels upon those channels just so you can watch the single program you love so much and then requiring that cables be snaked through your walls with the luxury of multiple set-top boxes (usually at a per screen cost) and and and… and none of it makes sense to us anymore.
Some things haven’t changed. We still love our television programs. We don’t even mind paying for them and heck ya we will pay to have a digital recording device that lets us watch them later when we have more time and can fast-forward through all of those silly commercials we don’t care to see. This idea of watching programs when it works better for us (instead of at 7PM central standard time each and every Tuesday) isn’t a new one. It also doesn’t take a very tech-savvy mind to piece a few ideas together and start wondering why on earth we needed to record the program at all when we could just stream it when we are ready to watch. I mean really, we all know it is in a vault somewhere ready to be ‘rerunned’ to death.
Now add to this the fact that we want to watch our favorite shows on our iPads, our smartphones, our televisions and who knows what else. And really, we’d prefer not to be subscription-ed to death. I want to pay one service a single fee (even if it’s the same price or higher than all of the individual fees spread out amongst several services). I want it to be easy to use and ideally would have a profile that follows me everywhere on every device so I can start watching something in one place and continue later somewhere else. Is that really too much to ask?
The two biggest competitors for our attention in this arena are likely to be Apple and Google, both already offering these services to a certain extent and both offering a wide array of impressive-sounding upgrade in 2012. So who will come out on top? My money is on Apple (and no, it’s not because I’m an ‘Apple Fanboy’).
Think about this logically. The TV services from Apple and Google work in very similar ways. If you go the set-top box route, the hardware is about the same cost. Apple does have AirPlay while Google doesn’t, but even setting that aside it all comes down to interface. Apple offers a consistent and reliable user interface that is unparalleled. It can be navigated and used by virtually anybody aged, 3, 33 or 83. But let’s even take it a step further.
Apple knows how to make money. They know how to make their considerable network of developers money. And overwhelmingly it’s been shown that users of Apple products are spending more on apps and other purchases than those with Android. So what makes Google think that suddenly people will want to spend money on Android? It may be a stereotype (that happens for a reason sometimes) but I think a large number of the die-hard Android users are the skilled tech-types who have already hacked their PS3 and have it doing everything that AppleTV or GoogleTV can do. Not to mention the well documented brand loyalty that Apple enjoys. AppleTV is a logical extension service to every single person out there with an iPhone and/or iPad.
I believe that just like Google+ and other mediocre Google services that came before it, GoogleTV will become ‘the other white meat’ of this genre.