Unfortunately for them, this is a terrible, ridiculous idea
some technologies enable The meanings are so great that they won’t go away. The T9 – our trusty old text input on Nokia phones from the 1990s – is one of them. Direction 9 is a new startup eager to bring it to your TV, so you can enter text using the directional keys on your remote. They showed it off at CES, and… I’d be very surprised if it made much progress.
“Typing on a phone is difficult. You have to look at the phone two feet away, and then watch TV 10 feet away. You have to focus up and down, and you can’t blind type,” explains Direction 9 founder Leon Chang.
The company has built a prototype and added it to Android set-top boxes. His vision for the company is to license the technology to “Roku or Netflix, Apple or Samsung, think about that. Any kind of TV streaming company.”
I initially took a photo of the booth to share with the rest of the TechCrunch CES team with the caption “Haha looks like the T9 is making a comeback,” but I felt bad; surely I must have missed something? Unfortunately, founders can’t use real-life examples to explain why their innovation should exist.
“The trend is for people to return to their family rooms. And [our technology] Easy to search or type. There is no other solution: if you have to search for movies or TV shows, or have to enter a password, this is the best solution. No one else offers anything faster, smarter, or easier. Chang said confidently. “We provide them with source code for all APIs as well as UI and machine code.”
except people Do Provide simpler solutions. Anyone who has tried to set up Netflix recently has realized that most screens use a “log in on laptop and enter code to log in on TV” type solution, QR code, or other quick way to log into the device. On Apple devices, you can use your phone’s keyboard to enter passwords and logins, and on almost any modern set-top box, voice is an elegant solution for searching for the TV show you want.
Best of all, any engineer with a smattering of knowledge can implement a T9 version for a set-top box in an afternoon. This is not new technology, nor is it rocket science. I would be very surprised if Apple or Samsung proactively asked 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 every remote they ship,” Chang said. In a world where a Roku Express costs less than $40, I doubt it would cost a manufacturer more than about $5 to mass-produce the remote. It seems unlikely that they would be willing to increase the cost by 20-50% just to add new text input as a feature.
Look, I don’t want to be a jerk to the Direction 9 team, but after tearing apart about 80 funding presentations, I develop a level of skepticism about the startups I encounter—and this one simply doesn’t hold up. Of course, I knew I was wrong beforehand, but I would be very surprised if this company could find customers or investors.
