I'd like to offer what I believe is the humongous missed thinking on every product like this and any service that aims to mix internet and TV. Maybe it's been done and I've somehow missed it. But I'd like to call it the Stumbleupon feature.
All of these services ask me to think about what I want to watch. But there's this thing that we all do, and I absolutely think there isn't a single person that doesn't do this, and it's called "channel surfing". You just flip and flip and flip to see if there's something more interesting than you're currently watching, or you've just finished watching a program and you want to explore your options.
Stumbleupon provides exactly this, but much more. Stumbleupon is purpose-built specifically for boredom, and over time tailors itself to you. Next, next, next, ohh that's cool, next, next, next. That's exactly what I want from a TV experience. Additionally, I'd be able to save and share with friends.
An example of how this feature would differentiate itself from current methods is, I like a lot of TED videos, but there's also a lot I find incredibly boring. With current interfaces, I have to click a TED category and then sift through all of their offerings. And how the heck would I even know if I'll like something until I play it? Blegh! The Stumbleupon feature would know what type of content I like, and would be able to pull out TED videos that it thinks I would find interesting, and all I would have had to do was click "Next", and it would eventually be presented to me.
That's all I got to say. Add a dang Stumbleupon feature, and an internet-tv box will be MONEY.
True, what they have is pretty darn close. As long as it offered me TV and Movie level content and gave me a custom-tailored feed based on what I like.
YouTube is starting to offer movies and probably TV shows to follow. The stream is personalized based on your activity and the activity of your friends.
Oh, one other thought. Add Korean dramas and you will OWN the entire female asian market. They're easy to find on several sites, but completely non-existent on internet/tv solutions. Additionally, it's next to impossible to explain to our Asian mothers how to load up a webpage, select a tv show with a drop-down or in a list, and then click through the episodes. It's information overload to them and they simply don't do it. But if they had this on a simplified internet/tv interface ala XBMC or Boxee, it just might do the trick.
"Soon, you won't want to buy a TV without a browser." Hello, WebTV of 1995…
Love the browser demo; you can’t read a single word shown on-screen. Massive UI fail in trusting normal websites to be TV-friendly! This is why AppleTV has had its own YouTube browser for years now. Heck, the Google TV demonstrator has to manually start fullscreen mode on YouTube. She mentions LeanBack as an alternative UI, and describes it as "intuitive." Have you tried it? I have. I couldn’t figure it out. It is exactly the opposite of intuitive.
Edit: Irrelevant comment: The demo starts with Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, a terrible movie based off a great book? Interesting Google chose an antithesis of (Jobs-founded) Pixar for their demo.
Seems to be getting a tough reception here. Seemed pretty good to me, basically delivering various things that I geeked up myself with an Acer Revo running Ubuntu and XBMC, but with vastly easier setup, a better interface, and better integration with US cable TV and DVRs.
The key elements they've got right as I see it is that it's based on HDMI passthrough, so you're not switching between HDMI (or other) inputs and back again which is a major stumbling block for my family, particularly as we control the cable with a remote that can change the TV volume but nothing else. With Google the picture slideshows, last.fm etc. just appear on top of the standard video signal and they appear to have IR blasters to pass through all kinds of controls to other devices, which is hacky but necessary unless you want to buy the entire ecosystem from your cable provider.
They're also building it into TVs and Blu-Ray players, which means one less control (and box) to worry about. Integration with iPhones/Android is something that geeks already do to various degrees (e.g. setting recordings while out and about, flicking through or searching your video library on your phone) but it's good to have it built in from the start, particularly with voice activation for finding that rarely used channel.
On the other hand searching the web while watching a program is something I do right now with my iPhone or netbook, so I don't really see the benefit of that, but then it kind of comes for free so why not?
every time ive thought about setting up mythtv, i never did because i knew it would take me hours, it would cost money and time to find the right tuner cards, and there would be no particular guarantee that i could actually get it to all work in the end.
Are there many non-techie users of XBMC/MythTV?
And anyway, ideas are worthless if execution is poor. if google creates an integrated seemless product then it doesn't really matter if XBMC has been doing it for 10 years or not. Its like saying that the (original) iPhone would be useless because other phones had had browsers/email/whatever for years. Apple executed better, thats all that mattered
I've used MythTV on and off for years but what will impress me is interoperability. I want to be able to hook this into my current set-top-box and for it to work seamlessly. They seem to have that with Dish Network.
I don't really see the use case for this. Doesn't everyone inclined to want these features have a laptop/tablet/SmartPhone within arms reach when they sit on the couch and watch TV? I can't imagine watching a video with friends and using the TV to search for something while making the video 1/8th size in the corner. Assuming I did want to browse Flickr on my TV I would want a TV friendly UI -- not the Flickr website. It makes sense to have a set top with tight integration with other devices for control, TV-centric apps make sense if you can figure out a non-clunky control method. Another demo I saw included setting up an IR blaster to a cable box with video inputs. No one wants to do that. That's exactly why Windows MCE was a failure. At this early stage Google TV doesn't seem to have moved far enough away from being an Android based HTPC. Some people undoubtably want that but I'm not sure it's a mainstream thing.
I really hope that they improve this, it failed in so many ways.
1) When in Top Gear and watching the action, I'll buy a ferrari. This is a demo of screen-in-screen, yet bringing up the search bar hid the freaking screen, you could no longer watch the action. The screen-in-screen only worked when the search results came up, but the whole point of screen-in-screen is to not miss a second.
2) Transitions... where are they? Every screen was a surprise, it just obliterated the prior screen entirely and suddenly. If you were watching the action and accidentally touched a button you could miss your team scoring a goal... transitions help with this, as does opacity. It also gives it a deeper more tactile feel and a sense of quality.
3) Web browser on a TV. That's it? The font rendering looks terrible on the TV, none of it appeared to be readable which I hope is just the video of the presentation.
4) Where are the apps? Any apps would do? But more specifically things like:
4a) twitter for TV. Imagine watching a game and having tweets of a hashtag search appear live around a chosen space on the screen (overlay) or to reduce the screen (screen-in-screen, but the main screen at 80%) and a list of tweets on the right. Immediate awareness of all your mates watching the game elsewhere... an extended social experience based on shared viewing.
4b) home dashboard. Imagine the TV having 2 stand-by states, one being a home dashboard in which the screen goes into a low-power screen saver type state (utilising a low-power palette for the device and dimly lit) and on this dashboard information from which appliances are on and using power, where your family members are (via Latitude), what you have in the fridge and cupboards and some suggested recipes, the weather for the next 6 hours, local transport information, your unread email counts, google voice, shit... throw in Skype and use a high def web cam built into the TV so that full room video conferencing has arrived for home use.
And what did they present? Chrome browser within a TV at a touch of a button and the most primitive screen-in-screen I think I've ever seen.
I'm just, argh! Google, FFS! Hire me and let me run riot in doing the right thing here, this is an idea whose time has come and right now you deserve to be beaten to the post because the offering is under-whelming and doesn't yet offer anything that having an XBox, PS3, Apple TV or even just a bog standard media centre cannot offer.
Heh, enough of the rant. I'm just passionate about the potential here and was ready to be blown away. I hope the finished product leaps on from this and blows me away.
I suspect they're thinking that apps are just apps and that games for the phone are good for the telly.
But without details, we just don't know. I'd rather see segmentation and cross-over of apps by device. A twitter TV app as I've described is silly on the phone, and a real time navigation app doesn't make the greatest sense on the TV (unless someone wants to do a fly-by of a potential holiday destination using street view).
The current version doesn't feel too impressive though I'm sure the pie is big enough that improvement will happen quickly with big investments being made rapidly. The vision is inspiring. The implementation needs work.
A year ago my wife and I cut the cord. We gave up cable and switched to a media PC with Hulu and Streaming Netflix as our primary sources. It's been a great change for us (particularly with Hulu+), but I do think Google TV is pretty hopelessly misguided.
It seems like a lot of folks are convinced there is a lot of great TV out there on the Internet and it's just a matter of finding it. That doesn't really seem to be true to me. Most quality content is rather short. Mr Deity and the like aren't really "curl up on the couch" TV. I don't want to surf, I want to be passively entertained. That means in half-hour chunks with high production values. You know, like the Networks tend to create.
For that you seem to have three real options:
1. Hulu
2. Netflix
3. Torrents
I'm not really into the hassle and dubious legal status of #3... but past that what's the point? Until there are folks truly producing great content, discoverability really isn't the issue is it? Yet isn't that what Google is trying to solve here? I just don't really get it.
Because the US spends so much money on production value that we can't compete and just dub stuff. While these dubs are really high quality, I personally find awful to watch them since a lot of jokes or puns get lost in translation :(
All of these services ask me to think about what I want to watch. But there's this thing that we all do, and I absolutely think there isn't a single person that doesn't do this, and it's called "channel surfing". You just flip and flip and flip to see if there's something more interesting than you're currently watching, or you've just finished watching a program and you want to explore your options.
Stumbleupon provides exactly this, but much more. Stumbleupon is purpose-built specifically for boredom, and over time tailors itself to you. Next, next, next, ohh that's cool, next, next, next. That's exactly what I want from a TV experience. Additionally, I'd be able to save and share with friends.
An example of how this feature would differentiate itself from current methods is, I like a lot of TED videos, but there's also a lot I find incredibly boring. With current interfaces, I have to click a TED category and then sift through all of their offerings. And how the heck would I even know if I'll like something until I play it? Blegh! The Stumbleupon feature would know what type of content I like, and would be able to pull out TED videos that it thinks I would find interesting, and all I would have had to do was click "Next", and it would eventually be presented to me.
That's all I got to say. Add a dang Stumbleupon feature, and an internet-tv box will be MONEY.