I miss the cable box. Not the cost or that user interface that always looked exactly a decade too old. I miss the way the cable box let me browse everything I wanted to watch. I didn’t have to turn on the TV, wait for the smart TV system to load, navigate to the app I think has the show I want to watch, then go search for the show because the algorithm never suggests a show I want to watch, or insists on starting with the end credits from an episode three seasons ago. Our TVs have allegedly gotten a lot smarter, but watching TV on them is a lot harder.
The industries making the TVs and the smart TV systems and the streaming services we are forced to use know this. They’re trying to either build or buy their way into owning the cable box of the future. It’s one big reason Rupert Murdoch’s Fox just paid a stunning $22 billion for Roku, which is effectively the new cable box. Roku devices are found in just over half of all U.S. households with broadband. Amazon is just behind Roku in market share, and Apple and Google also have cable box-like things central to parts of their business.
Theoretically, having three of the biggest and richest tech companies on the planet plus a TV juggernaut like Roku all competing should mean we have something that replaces and improves on the cable box in every way. We can all agree that hasn’t happened. Instead of a cable box that makes watching the shows and films you want to watch easy, we have corporate-owned portals that funnel you into apps, many of which also want to be your main corporate-owned portal. It’s the iPad, but bigger, cheaper, and slightly more difficult for a child to break. And it’s by design.
Take Roku. It is a titan in smart TVs because it made it cheap and easy for users to get Netflix on old TVs, and then turned around and sold all those users and their viewing data to advertisers who advertise on the Roku and its free streaming network. Its business isn’t making TV watching easier, it’s being a cable-box middleman with all the annoyances and none of the good stuff.
The other companies aren’t better on this front, they’re all finding ways to say “what if cable…but more irritating.” For example, Amazon and Apple both have had the bright idea of “channels” where you can subscribe to less popular streamers directly through them. This is just premium cable channels, but confusing because it assumes you remember where you subscribed to that channel. I do not know where I signed up to watch a vampire sing through his relationship problems. I only know I seem to watch AMC+ through a different app every Sunday.
The cable box of the future is just as bad at Live TV. Hulu has spent a decade reinventing and failing at replacing what the cable box did so admirably, and Google and Amazon have both made their attempts too. They only work with very specific approved services and there’s a myriad of rules that only the nerdiest TV watcher will bother to learn that govern which service will work with their guides and which will need to be used in—you guessed it—another app.
But the worst is how each of these cable box replacements handles tracking shows and films you are watching. It’s the “Continued Watching” experience, and while they’ve all tilted at this particular windmill that should be an absolute no-brainer, they’ve all failed. Even Apple! There’s technically an Apple TV app on the Apple TV where you can track shows, but it only works for shows on apps that Apple has made an agreement with, and those app makers have to actually maintain their little apps. Which means you can’t track anything on Netflix, and when you try to keep up with the Taylor Sheridan Cinematic Ranch House you’ll find that at some point the Paramount+ app and the Apple TV app got out of sync and you have no idea how many episodes deep into Yellowstone you actually are.
This, like all the ads Amazon and Roku rocket into your face, is by design—but not Apple’s! Apple and every other smart TV maker wants to be the home page of your TV experience and wants to provide a really savvy “Continue Watching” feature that tracks all the stuff you watch and tells you when new stuff is available. When chatting with me, a streaming exec once likened it to the Holy Grail.
But despite all that money and the terrific eggheads at its command, Apple hasn’t been able to actually do that. Nor has Google, which has committed enormous resources to making some variant of Google TV central to the home for over a decade. None of these major companies have succeeded at making that feature because the other streaming services don’t want a central hub, they want to be the only hub you use. It’s why Netflix won’t make its own streaming box. Netflix would really prefer you just open its app as soon as you open the TV and then hang out there forever.
As long as all these companies are in competition with each other for our eyeballs they will continue down this road of purposely bad design and deeply flawed TV experiences. Some of the smaller ones will bow out, fully embracing their lives as premium cable channels. Others will probably get worse—I have no idea what the future holds for NBC Universal or Paramount or Warner Bros, but it will probably involve another app that doesn’t play well with others.
And as long as they all refuse to play well with one another, the rest of us are stuck fondly remembering a past where a cable installer three residents ago decided where the TV would wind up on the wall. Where we’d screw that coax into our loaned cable box and cringe at that user interface, but where we could always find what we wanted to watch by muscle memory alone. I don’t like being in a world where I look back and wistfully say “Remember how good the cable box was,” but until the set top makers stop treating TV like fiefdoms to be guarded, I guess I must reluctantly be one of those people looking back to the past and saying “I miss my cable box.” I’m as upset about it as you are.
Alex Cranz writes about the intersection of technology and pop culture.
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