Steve Jobs himself

Over the years, Steve Jobs himself identified a lot of the reasons why it's hard to change the TV industry. Cable companies give set top boxes away, which makes it hard for anybody else to break in. The cable industry is "balkanized," which makes it hard to pick a single partner like Apple did with AT&T and the iPhone.

But the real clue comes, again, from the Isaacson biography. Jobs talks about having a really tough time balancing his return to Apple in 1997 with his obligations as CEO of Pixar. "I would go to work at 7 a.m. and get back at 9 at night and the kids would be in bed. And I couldn't speak, I literally couldn't, I was so exhausted....All I could do was watch a half hour of TV and vegetate."

Google just released the second version of its Internet-meets-TV software, Google TV. This is despite the fact that first version was such a flop that hardware partner Logitech had more Google TV returns than sales in the first quarter of 2011. (Not surprisingly, Logitech is not going to be on board for round two.)


The tech industry is filled with engineers and geeks. They naturally want to optimize the TV experience, to make it as efficient and elegant as possible, requiring the fewest number of steps to complete a particular task while offering the greatest number of amazing new features.

But normal people don't think about TV that way. TV is passive. The last thing we want to do is work at it.

And right now, we're not working that hard. It's not that tough to keep track of a few favorite shows -- Breaking Bad is on Monday, NFL games happen on Sunday, SportsCenter is every night at 11, and CNN is on channel 56 if something big is happening in the Middle East or Washington. You turn the set on, turn to the right channel, and that's it. Done.

Microsoft is also getting into the act again, after countless failed attempts stretching back almost two decades. (Remember WebTV?) This time, it's teamed up with TV providers like Comcast and Verizon FiOS to deliver shows to the Xbox 360 game console. The big benefit: users will be able to search for shows by giving voice commands to Kinect, the nifty Xbox add-on that recognizes voice and gestures.


# Apple, Google and Microsoft are entering the television market and releasing new products
# Some believe high-tech TVs won't sell and will only add confusion to a simple pleasure
# Many are content with the easy functionality of watching TV and do not want changes