Apple Doesn't Get Channel Surfing

A fundamental problem when you break down walls is figuring out how to organize and live in the space you've created.

A 500-square-foot studio apartment feels bigger than a 500-square-foot one-bedroom apartment, until you realize that the space can never be perfected; the architecture gives you no clues as to where the bed, the dresser, or the TV should go. So you have to create your own rooms, your own set of organizations. They may not be traditional—put the couch in the dining area! Who cares!—but there still has to be a sense of order, or else you'll never know where to find anything.

Apple is attempting, as other companies have done before, to destroy the now-mostly-artificial walls separating video content, but its method, I think, misunderstands some basic elements of how people watch video.

If you want to watch "Billy on the Street," Billy Eichner's low-budget show in which he shrieks at New Yorkers, you don't really care that some of that content is on YouTube, some is on Funny or Die, some is on IFC, and some is on TruTV. That separation is all artificial, all the result of business decisions that you shouldn't need to know about. (What even is TruTV?) What you want is to watch the show. The show is the relevant brand, the relevant bit of data; knowing which channel it airs on is as unimportant as knowing which toothpaste brand is owned by Unilever and which is owned by Proctor & Gamble.

Television now refers to any and all video content, and that content can't easily be categorized by channel and placed into separate rooms. It's chaos! And nobody has yet really come up with a way to guide viewers through it in a sensible way.

The job of the streaming box maker, whether that's Apple, Google, Roku or Microsoft, is to break down those artificial channel walls, because they are confusing and do us no real service. One solution is universal search: search for a show, movie, actor, and get results any room, whether that's HBO or Hulu. Apple's is a bit more detailed, allowing you to perform more complex searches. Apple suggested one: "Show me that Modern Family episode with Edward Norton."

This is a useful feature, to be sure shouldn't be the only (or main) one. It ignores that watching TV is essentially a passive action. What we have done for years is allow video to be presented to us; channel surfing basically allows shows to pitch us, quickly, and allow us to say yes and stay, or keep flipping. This hasn't changed with the advent of on-demand video streaming; "on-demand" content hasn't reduced the amount of time we spend channel-surfing, it's just recast this as "browsing."

Netflix's chief product officer, Neil Hunt, explained this last year. From GigaOm:

Channel surfing: not at all dead.

Apple's fundamental misunderstanding is in assuming that the greater variety and confusion of video content makes us more likely to know what we want. Of course, it makes it less likely. The key to dealing with that problem is to do the work for us, figure out recommendations and make them independent of channels. To use Apple's search requires a foreknowledge of the space; you have to know you like Modern Family, know that Edward Norton is a guest star, and know that you like that episode. How often is that particular scenario going to come up, compared with "eh, I'd like to watch something funny, maybe something like that show I watched last month"?

Universal search is a shortcut, and it's new, and it's often assumed in tech that being both new and a shortcut would necessarily make for a better experience. This isn't always the case. To defend channel surfing sounds like the complaints of those who prefer paper books to Kindle because of "the feel," but it isn't, really: for a passive action like watching video, an active solution like search is more a hindrance than a help.