Let’s just suppose for a moment that you’re an Apple
devotee.
There are millions of them out there, swayed by the design
sensibilities, and maybe an anti-Microsoft bias.
You may be one of these people, or you may not be. But, just
for kicks,
let’s pretend
there’s a bit of a love affair going on between you and
Cupertino.
How then do you satiate your craving for Apple news?
Presumably with
a steady diet of blog posts, the produce of rumor mills, maybe even a
subscription to a magazine or two. Yes?
What About Video?
Okay, well, that’s
good and
fine, but what about the video angle? How do you get your fix of
Mactastic product reviews, speculative talk, and general cultist junk
in moving-picture form? Podcasts? YouTube clips?
What if you were to be given the option to watch an IPTV
channel,
active 24/7, that purported to provide nothing but Apple-centric
foodstuffs?
You might be eager to sign on to such an experiment, no?
(Remember, we’re still pretending to harbor fanatical zeal
for Steve
Jobs & Co.) Lucky you, then, because someone’s gone and launched that
very item.
Before we divulge the details, let’s do this right
and coat this story with a bit of butta, shall we?
A Brief History Of Apple
Some ten years ago, the company now known as Apple, Inc was
but a
struggling corporation.
Still in a relatively bad place (financially
speaking) after having trudged through the late eighties and first half
of the nineties in a lazy, disoriented stupor (even looking for a short
moment into the dark, fearsome abyss of bankruptcy), it was just
getting its bearings again, and saw hope in the return of its founding
CEO extraordinaire, Steve Jobs.
It was also a point at which the
aesthetically gifted Jonathan Ive was named Senior Vice President of
Industrial Design, paving the way for designs like the iMac, the iBook,
and the now ubiquitous iPod to be put into production. The rest, as
they say, is history.
The Cult Has Grown Exponentially
Now, the cult of Mac is as strong and as far-reaching as ever.
There
still exists the devoted core, of course, gravitating ever so willingly
to Cupertino and all its various inventions.
Only, the outer circle of
more casually committed folk has grown exponentially with time, a
global trend the result of Apple’s logical abandonment of
restrictive,
Mac OS-only development for a lucrative and more expansive life on the
Windows front. (At least as far as iPod-iTunes progression is
concerned, anyhow.)
So here we have a great big Apple fan club, with numbers
reaching
well into the tens of millions. (An impressive following for a
profit-seeking business, for sure.)
How to satisfy them all? How to
provide technological fodder for the converted and the devout when the
company’s conferences aren’t in play?
Sure, there
are the blogs and
rumor sites and month-to-month glossies to quench the need for that
continuous buzz.
But how about something a bit more visual, something
that’s built to feed and please at all hours of the day, a la
CNN? A
geek-friendly 24-hour all-things-Apple television channel, perhaps?
Yes, perhaps.
The Digital Lifestyle
Enter TDL, or The Digital Lifestyle.
Founded by a Mr Ryan Ritchey, The Digital Lifestyle is the first of its
kind. It’s kind being an Apple-specific news, rumor, and
lifestyle IPTV
outlet that operates all hours of the day. And night.
The idea is to aggregate many bits of professional and amateur
content for broadcast over the Web in one unending visual
stream.
Be it
an episodic podcast, a user review of a hardware or software product, a
breaking story, a discussion on an official or impending release. TDL
looks to put it all together into one ongoing flow.
But Does It Work?
So, you’re likely wondering now just how well the
concept translates
into realistic practice. And my honest opinion is, well, not too good.
Not terrible. But suffice it to say that
you’ve gotta be a
pretty staunch Apple fanatic to see it as something worth
“tuning in”
to with any regularity.
Of course, like most broadcast television channels, TDL does
repeat
particular blocks of content. It has to.
Yes, there is technically
quite a bit of Apple-related content in video form floating about the
Internet, and if it were a perfect world, TDL would be able to mate its
service with all those nifty clips and things and fill up a good
portion of the day with fresh material.
But it’s not a
perfect world,
and its partners in crime are few indeed. So it’s no
surprise, then,
that TDL’s broadcast cycle is a fairly diminutive one.
It gets mighty redundant mighty fast.
The technical quality of the stream isn’t anything
to speak of,
either. It’s terrible, really. Compared to the source
material, it’s
quite sub par, and that’s putting it lightly.
Conclusions
All in all, the project is an honorable one –
ideally. For the
fanboy (and fangirl) crowd, it’d be a bookmark likely
frequented on a
daily basis – if not hourly.
Unfortunately, the execution of
it is
poor. Poorer than poor. It’s abysmal. And for that,
it’s getting no
vote of confidence from moi.
What do you think of The Digital Lifestyle? Thumbs up?
Thumbs down? Let us know in the comments below.
Paul Glazowski is a contributing author discussing the social networking world, his work can be found on Profy.com
