worship the glitch

The future of TV is about access and entertainment, not a remote control upgrade. The people focusing on Siri’s integration with any possible Apple television have a serious lack of imagination. 

Should any such product be developed, it would likely have a blazing fast 802.11n Wifi extender built in. While most access points are optimized for distance and throughput, the TV would be designed to serve extremely low latency networking to the room with the television in it. 

Combine the speedy, hyperlocal area network with AirPlay, and you’ve got something far more compelling than Siri, which is utterly uninteresting, and even counterintuitive, as a TV add-on.

You have a television that will instantly play anything your iPod, iPhone or iPad sends to it, without having to switch inputs or even turn it on. Directly controlling your television in any fashion is utterly ridiculous. It’s just a leftover from the original, pre-remote control design. A modern television should be a dumb display and nothing more. It is for watching, not controlling, and certainly not for talking to. On mobile, the touch interface has been about removing layers of abstraction. Siri is an extension of this. On TV, Siri would just get in the way.  

Apple won’t get in the TV game just to replace the remote control. They’ll do it to complete what they’ve already begun with the current Apple TV. They’ll make it easy for developers who’ve already extended their apps from iPhone to iPad to extend them to Apple TV as well, as we’ve already seen with games like Real Racing II.

The television has a future only as an extension of a mobile device. An Apple television will be able to do anything an iPad can do. All other televisions will continue to do what televisions have always done, which is very little. Nobody with an iDevice will even consider buying a TV without AirPlay built in. Manufacturers will beg Apple to let them build AirPlay into their sets. And Apple might just let them. 

The future of television is here.