Unfortunately for them, it’s a terrible, preposterous idea
Some technologies do so much feeling that they just won’t go away. The T9 — the old text input from reliable Nokia phones from the 1990s — is one of those twists. Direction 9 is a startup that wants to bring it to your TV so you can use the directional pad on your remote to enter text. They showed it at CES and… I will be extremely surprised if it ever makes much headway.
“Entering text on your phone is difficult. You have to look at your phone, two feet away, and then look at your TV, 10 feet away. You have to focus up and down and you can’t blindly type,” explains Leon Chang, founder of Direction 9.
The company has built a prototype and added it to an Android decoder. His vision for the company is to license the technology to “Roku or Netflix, or Apple or Samsung, think about such a company. Any kind of TV streaming company.”
I originally took a photo of the booth to share with the rest of the TechCrunch CES team, captioning it “LOL, looks like the T9 is back,” but I felt bad. surely, there had to be something i was missing? Unfortunately, the founder could not explain why his innovation should exist.
“The trend is to bring people back into their family room. And [our technology] it’s easy to search or import. No other solution: If you need to search for a movie or TV show or if you need to enter a password, this is the best solution. No one else could offer something faster, smarter, easier,” Chang says confidently. “We provide them with all the API and source code for the user interface and engine code.”
Except for people I am doing offer solutions that are easier. Anyone who’s tried to set up Netflix recently has realized that most screens use a “connect to your laptop and enter a code to connect to your TV” solution, a QR code, or some other way to quickly connect to your device. On Apple devices, you can use your phone’s keypad to enter passwords and login details, and on almost every modern set-top box, voice is an elegant solution to searching for the TV shows you want.
All that aside, any semi-competent engineer could implement a set-top box version of T9 in an afternoon. It is not new technology, nor is it rocket science. I’d be extremely surprised if Apple or Samsung started licensing 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 or $1 or $0.50 for every remote they send,” Chang says. In a world where you can buy a Roku Express for less than $40, I doubt it costs manufacturers more than $5 or so to produce a remote at scale. It seems unlikely that they would be willing to add 20-50% to its cost just to add a new text input as a feature.
Look, I don’t want to go crazy on the Direction 9 team, but then 80 or so tears in the pitch deck, I’ve developed a healthy degree of skepticism about the startups I come across — and this one just doesn’t hold water. Of course, I have been known to be wrong in the past, but I would be very surprised if this company could find any customers or investors.
