Does new technology make our lives better or worse?  People who grew up with older technologies are critical of the new ones.  It is true that a lot of people are addicted to their phones and Facebook to the detriment of actually interacting with actual, living people next to them in the same room.  But look at all the great stuff you can do on your phone!

The budding streaming television industry is a case in point.  While the attractions of on-demand à la carte TV with no commercials are very alluring, the implementation of the interfaces is a hot mess, and the content providers are as likely to mess up their 'apps' as they are to improve them.  The point of this technology is to watch TV.  Yet so many aspects of the apps we watch them on get in the way of the watching.

For example, Hulu recently changed its app from the familiar rows of rectangular graphics for browsing shows to a text-based list.  The old version of the app had handy banners marking new shows in series you were watching.  The large-type text-based list takes up a lot more space, meaning fewer shows are listed on a screen at a time, and a half-cocked attempt to create a personalized list of shows you might (or might not) like makes you wait while it loads, creepily greeting you by name as you sit fuming, waiting for it to propagate its list.

I would prefer my 'watch list' (shows I have marked for watching) to be the default screen in Hulu.  They do mark new episodes in small text on that screen, and also series for which you are 'all caught up'.  The watch list screen isn't bad, but it isn't and good as the old version of the app, which I have read was changed to accommodate the company's new live TV service.  Although I don't see how smart design prevents live TV.  The Hulu app on the iPad seems a much better design, and I often access it to find or preview shows before loading them on my TV.  It's faster.  I am not convinced shows I add to my list on the iPad are translating to the TV app (they're not), so I have to do that again on the streaming TV device.

The CBS app has been fairly consistent since I began using it, but it continues to have a serious, major flaw.  It stinks at remembering which episodes have been watched.  I'll finish an episode, then look at the list of shows in a season and the one I just watched has the progress bar at 50% or not even showing.  I have to remember which episodes I have watched to figure out if there are new ones.  My memory for trivia of this kind isn't stellar, and I  find myself wasting a lot of time figuring out which episodes, if any, are new ones.

The PBS app has its own way of telling you which episode you have viewed.  It isn't bad, but it's so different from all the others that it can be confusing unless you only watch programs on PBS.  I remember when Microsoft decided to move the computing world from DOS to Windows.  They came out with a strict set of standards they wanted programmers to adhere to, so every program would have an 'About' box, all menus would look and work the same, dialog boxes would appear and work similarly from program to program.

As an independent programmer I saw this as a way for the Goliath Microsoft to quash all the little David developers' creativity.  It was only later that I realized it was a brilliant move to force a common interface that would mean if a person learned how to use one program there would be virtually no learning curve when learning another one.  The scheme set a standard for user expectations, and any program that met the standard was instantly familiar.  Microsoft even had a certification program for developers who complied with Goliath's standards (which Microsoft had no problem breaking themselves, but that is a different story!).

I took a similar approach when we 'cut the cable' at my house.  I bought a remote control that looks similar to the one cable TV had provided, even though I knew most of the buttons wouldn't do anything when we switched to streaming apps.  I'm a guy , so i don't mind all the little remotes that look different and have different buttons, but my wife is not a fan of learning curves.  Thus our new remote.  She took to it instantly, and while it doesn't have some of the functionality that the AppleTV remote has, she prefers the big, cable-looking one.  It's a good scheme.  Familiar means you can get to the purpose of the exercise (watching TV) without a lot of distracting trouble dealing with the interface.

The commercial-free versions of services like CBS and Hulu are fantastic.  It's worth waiting until the day after the original broadcast to see shows without commercials in the streaming apps.  I never understood why it is so important to some people to see shows the moment they come out.

Netflix continues to have the best designed app, but when you scroll to a particular show in the current TV version it starts playing a trailer rather loudly instead of just showing a graphic as the old version did.  Netflix has announced that they think this enhances the TV watching experience.  I say it is extremely distracting and annoying.  The only way to not suffer the sound blast is to use the mute button on your remote.

Things like this drive me crazy, because when I developed software customers often suggested features that I wouldn't use myself.  But, paying attention to the old adage that your product improves if you listen to your customers, I would implement the suggestions and add a section in 'Settings' to turn the feature on or off.  They could have it if they wanted it, and I could not have it if I didn't.  From a programming standpoint adding a setting like that is extremely easy.  From a design point of view it is a very simple way to make more customers happy.  OK, make the loud Netflix trailer a default, but add a setting to turn it off.  Easy peasy.  Everyone can be happy.

Now Disney and everyone else, it seems, is getting on the streaming bandwagon by introducing its own app.  That takes some show off of aggregate services like Netflix, but allows more à la carte choices of what you want to pay for.  Unfortunately that's going to mean that streaming TV is going to cost as much as cable TV if everyone isn't careful.  I suppose that is inevitable -- remember how cheap cable TV was when it was first introduced?  But as a new technology streaming apps need to be just as usable as cable while remaining less expensive.

When you turn off the TV using cable (or broadcast TV) you can turn it on again and it remembers what channel you were watching.  Streaming devices don't do that, and finding, for instance, the live CNN feed in Sling TV is at least five or six clicks, once you are in the app itself and if you happen to know what and where to click.  That kind of thing would also be a pretty simple programming fix, but between the hardware and software makers it is not currently a thing.  This is the sort of thing that needs to be implemented if streaming is to come into its own as cable did, and broadcast TV did before that.

Just because technology can make our lives better doesn't mean it will.  At this stage streaming TV is a mixed bag.  It is maddening, because the kinds of things that should be fixed are easy fixes.  If the designers of the apps and hardware chose to be thoughtful, streaming TV could be stellar.  Instead it's still a bit of a mess.

But it's still young.  I'm staying tuned.

v13i32