Why Apple TV Needs a Subscription Offering

I experienced a total case in point for this last night. I have an Apple TV 160G, and it's been great. I actually love the thing. "iTunes for the living room" is exactly what it is. That said, there are three or four little things I'd change or enhance... not the LEAST of which is the ability to use a bluetooth or even USB keyboard, ad hoc, while you configure your network or log in... it takes me about 5 minutes to key in my network password with the remote, which makes me cranky and is some major wear and tear on that little plastic remote... it's tedious, like the method used in the coin-op dominated arcade game-laden 80s when you got a high score and had to enter in your three initials for the scoreboard with the joystick, moving a little selector all around the alphabet grid chasing down that damned 'm' or something... even that took a full 30 seconds, and my network password has 20+ characters in it. But that's not what this post is about... I just wanted to take a moment to toss my slip in the ol' suggestion box. USB or bluetooth keyboard extensibility = easy to implement, and a dyed-in-the-wool good idea.

I was browsing through the movies available for purchase or rental last night, while waiting for my wife to make her way to the living room. I thought to myself, "cool, I want to see this," and "oh, I'd love to see that," and "hey hon, did we ever see Sleuth? It's directed by Kenneth Brannagh?" No reply... The experience of the moment taking me from "hey I'd love to see that" to "yeah, let's not drop another $14 for a digital file that I may or may not get into the habit of backing up properly." Getting into the habit of buying movies on Apple TV (though, novel), has been too big a leap so far - just can't do it yet. I haven't gotten over my love of the DVD boxes on the bookshelf - call me old-fashioned. Even renting a movie... since you only have 30 days to start it, and 24 hours to finish it once started, that's so often a deal-breaker in the impulse moment for me. I think, "aw hell, I'll just watch the Netflix DVDs that we have at home; get through 'em." (Attenborough's "Life in the Undergrowth" at the moment, spurred by quite literally flying through "Planet Earth" last month... OMG). What we viewers do (at least in ye olde Howard house), is choose the option that benefits us most and erodes our "we still have cool stuff to watch at hand" list the least. If we have two Losts, one House and one Battlestar Galactica to watch, we'd never watch both Losts in the same night. Save one so we still have it yet to watch; we like that feeling. Err on the side of watching the Netflix DVDs before anything else, because then we can send them back and get another one on its way, and still have whatever backlog of shows we have, etc.

In our living room - and I've already plunked for the Apple TV unit itself - the only way that paying additional funds through the Apple TV is going to happen in the near future is if they were to say something like... for $39 a month, you can watch 12 movies of your choice from the entire catalogue. In my opinion, they should try to compete directly with Netflix. Making the move to having "Same day release DVD's" is a big move toward competing with brick and mortar video stores (do they still have those?), but Netflix is still getting our $14.99 a month or whatever it is, for three movies at home at a time. Until Apple can compete with this model, they've only gotten my purchase price of the box, and won't get any more ad hoc cash out of me. They could also interface with facebook app Flixter, where I've already taken the time to say "I want to see" this or that... why not throw those on a list for me of rental possibles?

What are my other suggestions for Apple TV fixes? When you are browsing through the movie rentals, I should be able to essentially "add to my Apple TV queue." So when you are browsing through the catalog, if you see something that you will want to see someday, why not click a button that flags it. Why not offer that level of management on the Apple site itself? A queue much like the Netflix cue. The requirement to go hunting through the entire list again and again to try and find "Barton Fink" (turns out it's in 'comedy'... who knew??) is a real drag. The moment I say "wow coo, they have "Barton Fink," I should be able to flag it and then look in my rental cue for those movies that I've flagged any time I want.

Another thing is when watching movies or videos that you have in your iTunes that you have synced to the Apple TV, there is this long list of your movies, and when you watch them, or any time you want, you should be able to either flag them as watched, (again, while you go down the list, and you are on a movie name, you could just move to the left once (entering my proposed "watched flag" column), and press enter to put a little red check next to it or something more Appley if that doesn't suit. I've already had a bunch of times where I'm like, "which ones of these have I seen?" (this happens with multiple episodes of a TV show or Podcast mostly.) IT's not good enough if they implement the iTunes method of deactivating a little blue circle when you play even 1 second of the file... that doesn't work. I want to have a personally assigned check mark that tells myself "disregard this file for now" visually. Am I the only one?

YouTube videos leave something to be desired as well. In the current version of Apple TV software, you can access your YouTube Favorites if you log in on the device, but you can't access the swift organization of your individual playlists that you've created on YouTube. Ultimately, this would be very helpful. Although I must say it's nice to be able to do some of your organization on your computer, and then go to Apple TV and have that work done - but the REASON I like this is because I can use my computer screen, keyboard and mouse to work quickly. (See my first suggestion above.) This only points to the lack of solid hardware UI. I almost always admire Apple's minimalist hardware UI (save for the decades of lame mice), but trying to pilot this "media management and viewing system" with a six button remote it tiresome at best.

And finally Podcasts... Apple TV is called Apple TV and not Apple Radio for a reason right? Why is there no choice in the podcast list that breaks out "Video Podcasts?" I'd love to browse on Apple TV for the free video content that all these amazing podcasters (even HD!) are creating. Does Apple want me to buy their videos so badly that they've left this out on purpose? I would think the major thing they'd want to do right now is get as many Apple TV's in people's living rooms as possible - then they can start to rollout whatever software enhancements they want to a much larger installed user base.

Oh, and why can't you power the thing off... it gets so damn hot, and stays hot all the time. I need to google that. Is mine broken, or are they all radiators?