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GoogleTV, AppleTV and the Battle For The Living Room
An anonymous reader pointed us to an article talking about Google TV and AppleTV challenging the major networks and taking their place in your living room. It'll be a tough battle, amusingly waged on cable company wires in many major markets.
they won't get far off the ground. when it takes money out of the cable company mouths (the ISPs), they will throttle down google tv and apple tv so that you will have to use their services instead and there will be nothing we can do about it because enforcing net neutrality is big government intervention - just go ask the tea party people - they are adamant against net neutrality
And when the cable company says you can't use our lines for that... the guantlet for net neutrality will be thrown also.
(or when the cable company says, "look we have tv over the internet now too" like they did with phone service)
Is it just me or it's all hype and nothing to show for. Just because it has "google" and "apple" in it doesn't mean squat. They aren't relevant at all when it comes to TV.
did you forget to take your meds?
My wife still gets the remote.
www.qsopht.com ~q
This is good news for both Google and Apple. Bad news for the networks. But lets face it, when YouTube with its piano playing cats, hyperactive teenagers and snippets of prime time TV manages to outperform the major networks, the major networks have only themselves to blame!
Cats? I use Youtube for instructional videos and things like that. Reading about something, anything, and don't understand it? Somewhere there's a video that shows you how to do it. Want to know what is the real deal that Wall Street cut with the Congressmen? Go to Youtube.
Because network TV just rehashes the same shit.
PBS turned into the Antiques, Beatles, Wayne Dyer, Suzy Orman, Ken Burns network.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Hmmm. So do I want a locked-down, shiny piece of Jobsified crap, or do I want a television that watches me? [insert pre-emptive "In Soviet Russia..." here]
Oh, who am I kidding, I want them both.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
From the demo, Google TV requires some sort of keyboard/mouse interface. From the FAQ, it doesn't appear that it will be a standard Bluetooth one. Other the other end, Apple has a simplified remote but will allow for control through one of the iOS devices. I think where the battle will be won is how consumers will like the UI.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I pretty much basically watch public television (PBS) and Netflix. I don't have cable or satellite service.
The media is prime for a shake up. But I'm not sure anyone can deliver us from hundreds of channels of crap. I mean, if Hollywood is already out of ideas, now banking on remakes, neither Apple or Google can help much, but only serve us classic reruns with a better user experience. :/
Let's face it, most of us are scoffers. But moments before zero hour, it does not pay to take chances.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out... My household has been a bit of an experiment as I switched to Mythtv about 5 or 6 years ago... First with satellite receivers hooked to capture cards and most recently cable TV tuners hooked to firewire... MythTV with all of its warts is actually relatively good... I've found though, that I can get higher quality and more current programming from the Bitorrent Channel than I can from any of the cable channels so an account on a few private trackers with a client that can do RSS feeds and a seedbox has pretty much supplanted our need for the cable connection... In fact, I'd sooner download a show than let my Mythbackend record it from cable... I still pay the cable bill, though.. The bitorrent channel doesn't get Antiques Roadshows and other shows that my wife watches... Plus, I sort of justify it to myself that I'm still paying for the content; I just choose to get a 3rd party (the scene) to de-commercialize it for me...
Wife Acceptance Factor is pretty high.. In fact, she hates LiveTV now... My son has grown up not really knowing what a commercial is.. When we visited the inlaws this summer, he was watching TV with his grandfather... A commercial came on and he was looking for the skip button.. Our livingroom at home sports a moderately sized LCD with an Acer Revo bolted to the back on the VESA mount. No cables are visible and the remote is a wireless keyboard. No stereo cabinet...
If I could get all of the shows I watch in reasonable quality (720p) automatically sent to a local storage device where I can play them back any time, and as many times as I want, I'd happily pay $70-$80/month (plus price of internet connectivity) for the privilege... I'm dubious that this is going to happen however. It'll probably be substantially more expensive, limit the number of times I can view a show, and if my hardware ever fails, I will have to repurchase all of my content.
If only they'd focus on giving consumers what they want; they'd make a ton more money.
"An anonymous reader pointed us to an article..."
An article on a unknown blogspot, telling us what we already know, that Apple and Google are battling for the living room and that Youtube is popular. Shouldn't this be in Idle?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Apple will seriously have to convince people that their service is worth it considering how locked down, even for apple, the appleTV is. No web streaming (aside from youtube) means no hulu, no network websites, no thedailyshow.com. As a cable replacement it just might be viable on a per-show basis once more networks sign up, but as of now it's a $99 box that apple's selling to let them sell you stuff you most likely can get legitimately on the web for free.
If it wasn't so damned restricted I might give it a look, but it would take some heavy convincing. And this is coming from a Mac user of almost 2 decades now.
Which leads to the question .. so what role do the networks play in the grand scheme of things ... NBC / ABC / CBS / FOX are not all developing their own content, they buy that content from a show producer. If Apple develops enough mindshare and living rooms, you don't need NBC to order the episodes of a new show, Apple can buy it directly from the show's producers.
This could be a great play to cut out all the middlemen, not just the cable company or the satellite monthly fee, but the entire tv network system as well ... it's possibly the biggest change in the business of TV in 50 years, and frankly none of the TV networks seem to notice yet.
I also only pay for cable internet access but not TV. I think it'd only be like, $20 a month more to get basic cable TV, but I'm not $20 worth of interested in television and won't pay for it.
The fly in Apple's pie is that they can't get all the content brought together in a cohesive manner which allows the phobe to just watch what they want. Apple's walled garden is to blame. Apple would have to sign with everyone, and that's just not possible. As it stands it has two. ABC includes Disney, but two isn't enough to make a success.
Google on the other hand can partner with anyone without forcing them behind a walled garden. Google is about open access to all web video. Apple is about closed walled garden content that they can sell. In the long run Google wins. Google's TV and Apple TV are correlate directly to the Android's open nature vs. Apple's iOS which is closed and will never be opened.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
The assholes at Comcast are using their digital switch* as an excuse to force cable boxes on their customers. Sure, they could just send unencrypted QAM like all digital TVs are designed to receive, but why do that when the FCC and FTC are too spineless to stop them from encrypting everything and charging $5 per TV for boxes?
*Note: Comcast's switch to digital is not the same as the broadcast TV switch and is not mandated by the government, even though Comcast representatives will consistently and blatantly lie by telling you that it is.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz