Unfortunately for them, it’s a terrible and illogical idea
Some techniques make There is a great feeling that they will not go away. The T9 – the old text input from our trusty Nokia phones from the 1990s – is one of those throwbacks. Trend 9 is a startup that’s keen to bring it to your TV, so you can use the directional pad on your remote to enter text. They showed it off at CES, and I’d be very surprised if it makes much progress.
“Entering text on your phone is difficult. You have to look at your phone, two feet away, and then look at the TV, 10 feet away. You have to focus up and down, and you can’t type blindly,” explains Leon Chang, founder of Direction 9.
The company built a prototype and added it to an Android set-top box. His vision for the company is to license the technology to “Roku or Netflix or Apple or Samsung, think of a company like that. Any type of TV streaming company.
I originally took a photo of the booth to share with the rest of the TechCrunch CES team, with the caption “LOL, looks like the T9 is coming back,” but I felt bad; Surely, there must have been something I was missing? Unfortunately, the founder was unable to make a real argument for the raison d’être of his innovation.
“The trend is to bring people back to their family rooms. And [our technology] Easy to search or enter. There’s no other solution: If you have to search for a movie or TV show, or if you have to enter a password, this is the perfect solution. “No one else can offer anything faster, smarter, or easier,” Zhang says confidently. “We provide them with all the APIs, UI source code and machine code.”
Except people Do Provide solutions that are easier. Anyone who’s tried to set up Netflix recently will know that most screens use a “sign in on your laptop and enter a code to sign in on your TV” type solution, or a QR code or other method to quickly sign in on your device. On Apple devices, you can use the keyboard on your phone to enter passwords and logins, and on almost every modern set-top box, voice is an elegant solution for searching for the TV shows you want.
On top of all that, any incompetent engineer could implement a T9 version of a set-top box in an afternoon. It’s not new technology, nor is it rocket science. I would be very surprised if Apple or Samsung came around to license this technology – especially at the price the company hopes to charge.
“Our business model depends on who the company is, but we plan to charge $3, $1, or $0.50 for each remote control they ship,” Chang says. In a world where you can buy a Roku Express for under $40, I doubt it costs manufacturers more than $5 or so to mass produce a remote. It seems unlikely that they would be willing to add 20-50% to the cost just to add new text input as a feature.
Look, I don’t want to be a jerk to Direction 9, but then 80 or so stadium surface demolition operationsI’ve developed a great deal of skepticism regarding startups I encounter – and this one simply doesn’t hold up. Of course, I’ve been known to be wrong before, but I would be very surprised if this company could find clients or investors.