your DVR recordings or the shows available to you on iTunes or Netflix. Apparently, that would require a level of integration the industry hasn’t yet reached.
But that complaint may be a little unfair. I’m a cord-cutter, having given up on cable TV about three years ago, so I’m not really in Dijit’s target market. I don’t have 500 channels of cable programming to sift through, which means that until Dijit fully integrates with Netflix, iTunes, YouTube, and Amazon, where I get all of my TV content, it’s just a glorified, touch-driven remote control.
Which brings us all the way back to Apple. Right now, according to Toeman, cord cutters are still a small group. “The two real numbers the cable industry is worried about are cord-trimming and cord-never-getting,” he says, meaning people who cut their Gold package of premium channels back to Bronze, and 20-somethings who grew up on the Internet and don’t see much need to sign up for cable in the first place. My own guess is that as soon as Apple comes out with a truly end-to-end TV product—an actual television with Wi-Fi access to a video store in the cloud, offering on-demand access to most of the same shows and movies you’re currently buying for $180 a month—all bets will be off. Other manufacturers will rush to copy Apple, the cord-trimming will turn into a real riot of cord-cutting, and younger audiences will be lost to cable providers forever. Naturally, Apple’s television will work seamlessly with its mobile devices, facilitating even more of the kind of second-screen IMDB and Wikipedia surfing that we’re already growing addicted to.
Our viewing habits, in other words, are likely to keep changing radically, to the ruin of many incumbents in the broadcast and entertainment industries. Toeman thinks Dijit is ideally positioned to ride out the storm. “We think that in the connected home of the future, you are going to get content from lots of sources,” he says. “Apple will create this best-of-breed fusion, and everything else will be fragmented. A second-screen app like ours is perfectly suited to rise up and be incredibly sticky.”
