Request for Startups: Television 3.0

TV is broken. The opportunity seems enormous, and someone will make a lot of money they fix it.

Do your own research. It might be a graveyard of startups. But on the surface, in the AI era, a small team can win this fast.

The premise is: TV is a piece of furniture that does almost nothing, most of the time. And nearly everyone owns one. The market is all over: different brands, different sets — but the hardware is converging on it being a mini PC with some software stack and app store. The boxes are all becoming equally capable.

A small team with AI coding agents can ship a groundbreaking TV experience fast. More importantly, that team can flip TV from a slightly negative thing — people slumped on a couch — into something positive.

We went from cable, a random set of channels you flipped through hoping to find something, to on-demand, where we flip through apps hoping to find something. Same bad experience under new wrapper.

On Apple TV, the on-demand app experience hasn’t changed in years. The competition is small: a handful of big-corpo apps that shipped bad and stayed bad because they can afford to. They get worse over time. Lately I can barely do anything inside the Prime app on Apple TV. It freezes. It crashes.

The whole experience is sad. I cannot recall it being good. Search is hard. Discoverability is hard. Resuming what you watched last night is hard. Dictation, the highest-bandwidth way to talk to a machine, works terribly on TV. It is ten times worse than what is possible today.

There are many ways to tackle this.

Perhaps start with the content feed. On Apple TV I get multiple matches for the same movie because Prime and Netflix both carry it. I kid you not — the same film appears in the same list, multiple times. And often that movie is free on one app and several dollars on another. It is a terrible experience to pay for something you could watch, three clicks away, for free.

It is perhaps less broken if you buy a single TV stick — Prime, Amazon, Roku — and live inside that one ecosystem. But the moment you want one specific show, you install another app, and you are back in the same mess. If Apple and Amazon ship subpar apps, I doubt Paramount does better. (Roku, in my experience, is actually decent.) As consumers, we are stuck between apps competing for our time, all serving overlapping libraries. I do not care who owns the copyright. I just do not want to spend my evening searching.

There is also no attempt to bring independent creators to TV. For good, organic, educational content, I go to YouTube. Wouldn’t the TV experience be better if I could search across everything, regardless of who made it? There are more pixels on a big screen. Yes, you view them from a distance — but you could use the size to your advantage.

So what could TV actually be good for?

Right now, TV carries a bad connotation. Even writing this request for startups makes me feel dirty, because the default belief is “TV is bad, laptop is good.” But I would exercise in front of the TV if anyone offered me classes. Right now I get zero offers for yoga, or for strength training I could do on the floor. That is strange. Yoga could be an overlay on top of a movie, or its own class, sold separately. After a day of talking to AIs, I would use some yoga.

Or I want to watch something relaxing — something with no tech and no special effects in it. What animal show can I watch tonight? A beaver, maybe, for stress? How do I find more shows about beavers? How does my TV direct me there? How does my TV find me the best beaver documentary? Or yoga, or strength training I can do on the floor?

For trainings it could keep the checklist and somehow motivate me. Same for classes: same. And just add streaks like Audible does for listening books etc.

If you are a hardware founder, this is an even bigger opportunity. Tackle it vertically. Find a cheap TV maker and give them amazing software. Or raise the money and sell your own TVs. Ship with controllers that actually work. Make all controllers the same, gear them for gaming out of the box, and design the system so that a family of three, four, or five can operate the TV together: each through their own controller. So by default you could sell $500 TV, but add $79 for each controller etc.

The remotes we have today never met the expectations of the on-demand world. Typing on a smartphone touchscreen with two thumbs is ten times better than trying to type the title of a show you watched last night into a TV remote with my fat thumb on a little Apple trackpad. Start with a niche: retro gaming and perhaps build a following, and grow from there.

One last thing: pricing. The networks keep peddling subscription plans, and the plans keep getting more expensive. It might make more sense, for the consumer, to go on-demand at some point. If I could pay one or two dollars for a movie, that could be better for me than another monthly subscription. Is there a way to offer this?