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Television Businesses Programming The Almighty Buck Apple

Apple's 'Planet of the Apps' Reality Show Is 'Bland, Tepid, Barely Competent Knock-off of 'Shark Tank' (variety.com) 78

Posted by msmash from the wrong-foot-first dept.
On Tuesday, Apple made its debut into the world of original television programming with "Planet of the Apps," a reality show that brings app developers in a competition to try to get mentoring and assistance from hosts Jessica Alba, will.i.am, Gwyneth Paltrow and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk. Contestants describe their proposals as they ride an escalator down onto a stage where the judges sit, and then fire questions at the app developer. The problem? Critics aren't pleased. An anonymous reader shares a Variety report: Apple's first offering, "Planet of the Apps," feels like something that was developed at a cocktail party, and not given much more rigorous thought or attention after the pitcher of mojitos was drained. It's not terrible, but essentially, it's a bland, tepid, barely competent knock-off of " Shark Tank." Apple made its name on game-changing innovations, but this show is decidedly not one of them. The program's one slick innovation is the escalator pitch. You read that right; I didn't mistype "elevator pitch." The show begins with an overly brief set-up segment, which doesn't spend much time explaining the rules of the show, and which also assumes that a viewer will know who host Zane Lowe is, though a reasonably large chunk of the audience won't. Soon enough, app developers step into a pitch room with a very long escalator in the middle of it. As the four judges listen (often with looks of glacial boredom on their faces), the aspiring creators have one minute of escalator time to tout the product they want funding for. After the app makers get to the bottom of the conveyance, the judges (or "advisors") vote yea or nay. As long as one judge has given the developers a green light, they can continue making their pitch.
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Apple's 'Planet of the Apps' Reality Show Is 'Bland, Tepid, Barely Competent Knock-off of 'Shark Tank' More

Apple's 'Planet of the Apps' Reality Show Is 'Bland, Tepid, Barely Competent Knock-off of 'Shark Tank'

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  • Meanwhile... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Meanwhile, butthurt Slashdot users will continue to whine about Mark Cuban because he's far more successful than they ever will be. Slashdot users pretty much hate anyone who's successful enough to escape the banal world of IT by actually doing something worthwhile that people want.

    • Slashdot users pretty much hate anyone who's successful enough to escape the banal world of IT by actually doing something worthwhile that people want.

      This!

      • Re:Meanwhile... (Score:4, Informative)

        by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2017 @12:37PM (#54569519) Homepage Journal
        People didn't want what Cuban produced. It was a failure. He just got lucky selling it to stupid Yahoo for $5.7 billion which then shuttered it. He was in the right place at the right time in the middle of a bubble.

        • People didn't want what Cuban produced.

          I was referring to Slashdot in general.

          • I think Slashdot users are intelligent enough to hate people who were successful because they got lucky, while people who actually make a contribution to the world get ignored. I have more respect for someone in IT making $50,000 in Silicon Valley protecting our country, than some loudmouth who got lucky selling out during a dotcom bubble.

            • I have more respect for someone in IT making $50,000 in Silicon Valley protecting our country [...]

              Thank you.

        • THIS^ ^100 (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          My avocation is economic history - yeah, there's a reason it's an avocation.

          There are folks in the USA's past that were real innovative geniuses. Vanderbilt (steamships,Railroads, finance), Henry Kaiser (he's also the guy who created our screwed up employer supplied health insurance), Howard Hughes (aviation), Andrew Carnegie (steel), JP Morgan (corporate structures and monetary policy), Henry Ford (D'uh!) and a few others.

          Yes, most of them were mean assholes. BUT - These guys made their own luck. And some

        • People didn't want what Cuban produced. It was a failure.

          I hear his cigars are pretty popular.

        • People didn't want what Cuban produced. It was a failure. He just got lucky selling it to stupid Yahoo for $5.7 billion which then shuttered it. He was in the right place at the right time in the middle of a bubble.

          Nobody 'gets lucky' selling 5.7B of stock. You have to take work, make decisions, and take actions that result in owning stock with that much value. Boiling it down to 'just lucky' kind of reinforces the OP's point.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      Generalizing mouch are we? I don't envy people their sucsess/wrlth/whatever, om the other hand I don't find them inntereting just because they are sucsessful/rich/etc either. A cientist at CERN omn the other hand, these people are prilleant ond move sience forward, IMHO they deserve mouch more attention the base ball players etc, but that's just me

  • Well (Score:2)

    by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
    Hardly surprising considering most of their products are also bland, tepid, barely competent knock offs. With rounded corners.
    • While I'm a strictly windows and android guy, I have to give apple some credit. Their cannot reasonably be considered to make "knock offs" given what they did with smartphones and tablets. I can't think of one of their products I'd consider "bland" objectively.

      You appear to be suffering from the Seinfeld is unfunny [tvtropes.org] disease.

  • Planet of the Apps, ha ha I get it.

    You can skip the rest of it.

  • ...you're likely not watching "reality shows". At if you are, you're not watching them on broadcast or cable TV. I think the design flaw started at the demographic.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hadlock ( 143607 )

      Turns out most people are so bored they will watch just about anything. See also: reality TV craze of the late-90s / early 2000s. Not sure if reality TV is still a thing, moved out of the house shortly after it peaked and never saw the value in paying for cable TV once I had to pay for it myself. I'm sure plenty of people watched at least one episode of this.

  • M'eh (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Jessica Alba,

    Hot actress. What does she know about apps.

    will.i.am,

    O.K.AY.

    Gwyneth Paltrow

    It's not the 90s anymore. And she doesn't have those gorgeous legs anymore.

    and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk

    OK. Nice job on what he did with the store he inherited from his dad. But the rest of what he did? Mark Cuban lite.

    Sorry Apple, you had this crazy wacky visionary guy who co-founded you and when he died, so did your mojo.

    Have you guys thought of IT services and offshoring the actual work to India? I heard it's the thing to do these days!

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2017 @01:27PM (#54570015)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Mark Cuban Lite is a pretty amusing description. I have not watched the show but it sure didn't look good from the previews... I agree it makes so little sense that so much of the panel has so little to do with apps. It seems like winning ideas would end up being really poor apps...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ghoul ( 157158 )

      Apple just set up a Bangalore center this year to do the backend IT work it used to outsource to Infosys. Apple believes it can hire people cheaper than Infosys can

    • Jessica Alba,

      other people mentioned The Honest Company, which was at one time valued at nearly $2 billion.

      will.i.am,

      Currently working for Intel (on the side) as their Director of Creative Innovation.

      Gwyneth Paltrow

      Don't know as much here, business-wise, but she also has mostly got out of acting (afaik) and moved on to business (and it's e-business), see goop.com...

      I don't know the other guy.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AuMatar ( 183847 )

        All those Director of Innovation titles were bullshit marketing. They don't actually do any work at the company, they're a spokesman.

  • TV networks like reality TV because it's low-cost filler compared to scripted drama or comedy. The problem is that it's low-cost filler, and often edited or (poorly) scripted to make up loads of fake drama. It was one of the main reasons I cut the cord and gave up cable, the amount I was shelling out each month for cable wasn't really producing a good amount of value. I found that many of the decent programming I liked was also available on places like Amazon, where I could pay just for the series I liked a
    • I cut the cord because of reality TV also. When Animal Planet decides that ghost hunting dogs are worthwhile putting on TV, I decided TV was no longer worthwhile. FFS, a camera in an African plain streaming animals eating each other is still "Reality TV" but without the bullshit of ghost hunting.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by enjar ( 249223 )
        That 30 minute show will also contain about seven minutes of actual content. Intro (cut with cliffhanger). Commercial break. Re-run intro after break. Content. Have sum-up of content before commercial break. Commercial break. Recap of content before break. Some more content. Teaser for after commercial. Commercial break. Recap content of previous two commercial breaks. Induce tension. Reveal whatever. Credits run over reveal.

        Thirty minutes of life you never get back gone away into the universe's bit bucket.

  • Go look up critic reviews for any movie/show/anything on Metacritic. Anything at all. Even top-rated critics-darling indie films that get standing ovations at Cannes. I guarantee there will be at least one critic who panned it, using similar superlatives. Quoting one critic doesn't say anything about consensus about a show.

  • Not The Wire. Less blood than NCIS. Lame.

  • how does that conversation go? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07, 2017 @12:55PM (#54569665)

    ...get mentoring and assistance from hosts Jessica Alba, will.i.am, Gwyneth Paltrow...

    So, Jessica, which container class do you think would work best in this situation? I was thinking about a hash map, but since I need ordered traversal, perhaps a red-black tree would work better. I'd fall back to O(log(n)) on the accesses, but get fast traversal. Or, do you think I should consider parallel structures with a pointer to the same data in two container types, to allow both fast access and fast ordered traversal, at the expense of more time and complexity to keep them in sync?

    So, Gwyneth, I'm getting a compilation error on this line, and I'm not seeing the root cause yet. Any advice for me?

    Presumably, since they are offering mentoring, you can ask them programming questions?

    • Re:how does that conversation go? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BlueLightning ( 442320 ) on Wednesday June 07, 2017 @01:45PM (#54570203) Homepage Journal

      You jest of course, but the sad thing is none of that stuff really matters in whether an app is successful or not - history has shown time and again that developers can write absolutely terrible code resulting in an app that's slow, crashes frequently and is painful usability wise, but despite all that if it does something useful or entertaining then users will still pay money for it. The basic idea is what counts.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ghoul ( 157158 )

      VCs provide mentoring on how to raise money and hire people not on coding

    • Sounds like they take a mock-up and story board and call it a production app.

  • LUDDITE critics (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "Contestants describe their proposals as they ride an escalator down onto a stage where the judges sit, and then fire questions at the app developer. The problem? LUDDITE Critics aren't pleased. An anonymous reader shares a Variety report"
    *Fixed!

    PS. Where you are App guy? We need you!

  • If you have stock in Apple I highly recommend selling your stock...because that company has just jump the shark, HA!

  • You'd think the mentors would be top app developers. How are these people even able to help in any way? You're going to wind up with a typical "know-nothing" bean counter of a manager. Your app will then crash and burn.

    • No. You would think that. On the other hand, I would not think that.

      • How could somebody unfamiliar with something be a mentor for it?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by KGIII ( 973947 )

          My assumption would be creative and marketing mentoring.

          I'd definitely *not* think that the mentors would be top developers. In fact, I'm pretty sure they'd never do that. It'd make a horrible show, I suspect. I don't actually watch much television, so maybe that's part of the problem as to why I'd not think any such thing. However, I suspect top developers would make the show even less likable to the average reality show watcher. I'd absolutely not think that's the direction they went - and would be kinda

  • Apple is producing a Planet of the Apes TV Show? I loved that ... oh sorry. Disregard.

  • Only after reading a 3rd time I finally noticed that it's not a reality show based on the movie "Planet of the Apes" :-)

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