TV may suck, but it doesn’t suck so badly that most people want to spend $4 to $500 to fix a menu problem. It’s also not used in the same mode as when the “owning the living room” idea was born. Nicholas Lovell characterized Xbox One as an example of a brilliantly executed plan based on faulty strategy. Meanwhile, Leigh Alexander called it “a desperate prayer to stop time” and go back to an era when we all consumed entertainment at the altar of television.
What both are picking up on is the rise in personal technology like the laptop, smartphone and tablet and the decline of the living room as a battleground. Rather than the battle being about owning rooms, it’s about personal screens and personal connections. Alexander writes how she didn’t watch the Xbox Reveal event on a television, but on a computer while talking on a phone and using a netbook. Lovell writes about how personal technology largely circumvents the need for worrying about television at all.
They make the case that today’s problem is not about cramming tentpole features into big boxes to bring everyone back to television, but rather how to acknowledge that television has become the second screen. More lightweight Apple TV that shows your HBO Go iPad stream, less 2001-style entertainment monolith. More consoles that are nimble and unobtrusive, and provide app-style game experiences with app-style liberal game making conditions. Less heavy handed overbearing grand plans that leave everyone behind.
The failure to adapt to this new reality makes Xbox One looks like the console for last year’s man. Live TV is a mode of watching that many people don’t do any more because they have long-tail services like Netflix and Hulu. Rather than watch scheduled programming like a sucker, they sit in and watch the entirety of Arrested Development as a batch. Rather than stare all eyes-a-goggle at the big screen, they have other devices open and switch back and forth. The living room of people all sitting around their Kinect dancing for joy and swiping over to read Internet Explorer is not a real place, and never will be.