Playlist Potential

Playlists, please.

If the tvOS team talked with the iTunes and Apple Music teams more often, I think they'd see a missed opportunity for a commonly used and shared format: playlists. The Watchlist sometimes fetches all the latest new episodes, but I may still need to scroll horizontally for a while to cherry pick the first thing I want. Normally, my watching pattern is consistent enough to go on auto pilot mode. I wish I could pre-select and save certain groupings of media channels available through the Apple TV. One imagining could be a "Home DJ" app.

Or something of the like

I would be able to create a playlist, specifically selecting shows to populate with random episodes, sequentially, or only for new and unwatched content. Music breaks can be inserted, with duration set by number of songs or a specific period of time. Scrolling up while the TV is active on any current item would bring up the playlist and the ability to jump ahead to future items. 

When a playlist ends, the Apple TV returns to screensaver, letting me return to my life and decide what my activity will be. The number of clicks and necessary jumps between apps to watch a "normal" amount of content has too much friction. All the pieces are there for tvOS to be better. Playlists seems like a low hanging fix with oversized returns.  

A Digital Talking Stick

Media consumption could be so much more enjoyable than it is now. We're a household of laziness, and repeating patterns. The Apple TV remains the default media faucet for us, beating out the Roku, PS4, and Xbox One as having the least amount of friction. Dinner prep begins while putting something on in the background. If it were easier I'd probably just play music through the HomePod. Instead, CNN, Stephen Colbert's monologue, or an episode of the French Chef with Julia Child may stream out. 

While consuming the stream, I'll often run into a small item on my phone I want to share temporarily on the Apple TV: a new song, a video of the recipe we're making, an Overwatch League game. What I want to do is set a temporary exception to the current stream: play this media from my phone until it ends, then return to the original stream. Instead, I have to adjust my settings and turn AirPlay on for my phone, flipping all streaming content to come from my phone. Only when I'm done and I go back and disable AirPlay does the native content return to the Apple TV: even then it usually requires an additional 'menu' button press to get the original stream content to play once more. 

I wish the 'play' button could be used to temporarily stream to a device, then release. The 'AirPlay' button requires too many steps. 

Instead of providing a separate button to flick AirPlay routing on and off, why not provide long tap or 3D Touch options available when clicking the 'play' button on any given media? Bringing up a context sensitive drop down would allow you to project playback of only the content linked to the 'play' button to whichever device is selected. All of the component pieces to do this are there in Apple's hands already. They're so close to having something that would be so much less intrusive and annoying when it comes to consuming media on my terms. Especially in households with multiple people, give us a better way to share with each other and temporarily control the digital talking stick. 
 

My Apple TV Should Know Better

Every weekday morning follows a pattern. Get up, make coffee, grab the newspapers, and throw on a late-night episode from the night before. I turn on the TV, press 'menu' to wake up the Apple TV, and wait for it to load an outdated watchlist. Clicking on the 'TV' app brings a new view that loads with a few more new episodes of followed shows visible from the night before: still no Seth Meyers though. 

A long hold and jump to the Hulu app leads me to a loading screen while Hulu fetches my new content. Somehow their 'Lineup' panel and 'Keep Watching' still haven't caught on that I watch Late Night with Seth Meyers first thing in the morning. So I navigate up to 'My Stuff', down to 'TV Shows', click on the appropriate square for Seth Meyers, land on an individual page view for the episode, and hope that by this time NBC has properly uploaded the ad-free version of the show. Even at eight in the morning on the west coast, I sometimes have to fall back to the DVR recording of the show from NBC Bay Area with natural commercials as well as inserted Hulu-only commercials. All this and more for a low, low price of $40 a month.

The more time I spend with the Apple TV, the more convinced I am that Apple cannot provide the seamless experience I would expect from their product offerings. Even the facets of the Apple TV that fall in line with Apple's vertical integration, such as purchasing TV shows from iTunes, don't work the way I'd expect. We're a household that buys all episodes of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee ahead of time with season passes. And yet just yesterday we realized we were two episodes (weeks!) behind. Apple's bundling of episodes had completed for our previous purchase. In no way were we warned or presented with the offer to buy the next volume of episodes. In order for new ones to populate the watchlist, we had to search for 'Samantha Bee,' hunt around in the UI for the proper volume, purchase it and watch the first one. Problem solved until the next volume of episodes releases. 

Let's not mention this delightful app that somehow never remembers the only Apple TV it has ever connected to in the phone's lifetime. 

My Apple TV is connected to wired ethernet and power, yet it behaves as though it's operating from a very low battery and doing it's hardest to save me on my data plan: please don't. Ideally Apple would establish push-notification style connections for these content providers so that as they put up new material, my Apple TV is alerted and refreshes accordingly. If that's a bridge too far, then how about setting a refresh point early in the morning to fetch all relevant content from the night before? I'm tired of dancing with the watchlist, scrolling through and selecting something only for the watchlist to refresh mid-scroll and lead me to selecting unintended content. Why do I need to launch the Hulu app and then wait for content to refresh? I have seen and know there is some precedent for background refreshes of apps, but it seems like it only happens when the Apple TV is awake. This should be done before I begin engaging with the device for the day. Is it poor planning, poor coding, or both? Whatever the reasons, it leaves me stewing, waiting for a competitor that gets in the way less of how I want to watch things. 

Hey Siri, Help Me Help Myself

Since Apple's HomePod landed at home, there has been a noticeable increase in this household's music consumption. I find myself hunting for albums I think will sound great on the HomePod; showcase songs to flick on when friends are over to wow them. I've even adjusted weekend hangout patterns to play an album or two while I'm on the couch with the boyfriend, each silently lost in our own devices and screens. For something that triggered behavior change so quickly, it frustrates me to no end that I can't remotely recommend the thing to anyone.

Almost as useful as a mac's spinning beach ball.

I've always loved the notion of movie magic, and try whenever possible to make those sorts of magical moments with people I care about. Finding just the right song to put on while cooking together is just the kind of magic that HomePod doesn't want you to make. To get an isolated music experience, you must talk at Siri and awkwardly command this electric servant to fetch and hopefully play the right song. Alternatively, you can pick the song on your iOS device and choose to AirPlay sound to the speaker, locking the two apple products and making it really hard for you to try to then search recipes on sites with crappy ad banners that want to also project sound through the HomePod. I don't like phone calls and talking through a device at humans; I find talking solely to a device even more annoying. 

This speaker has incredible sound quality, but a non-existent UI and a really limited set of UX choices really handicap it from being a must-buy. I want an app that lets anyone on the shared wifi network with the HomePod to be able to queue up music that is sourced from the HomePod and not parasitically AirPlayed from a device and blocking some of its functionality.  When setting up AirPlay, you can at least see what was last being played on the speaker. Apple should give me a HomePod app or a new way to navigate the Music app wherein all music choices are saved and queued up on the speaker itself. 

Right now the HomePod is a DJ with great gear that I need to talk to every time I want music. Make it easier (and quieter) for me to curate music to play from it and I'd be singing its praises left and right. No one wants awkward back and forth with their DJ at home.