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No Set-Top TV Device Market Domination For Google
itwbennett writes "According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, returns of the Logitech Revue (Google's set-top box) exceeded sales in the first quarter. Explaining why sales were so poor, Logitech Chairman Guerrino De Luca went way out on a limb, saying: 'There was a significant gap between our price and the value perceived by the consumer.' So significant that 'Logitech must take a $34 million charge in the first quarter, which more than comprises the company's Q1 net loss of $30 million,' writes blogger Chris Nerney. 'In other words, Google TV is pushing Logitech into the red!'"
I haven't used it so can't say how much streaming options it has but being new and late to the game they should put it at 200 or even 150. to try to fight popcorn hour and boxee box that have been out for a while
$78 Roku box with a ton of channels, and new ones being added all the time; or Logitech Revue With Google TV for $199.00 and a more controlled selection. Easy choice...
The more significant concern should be how complicated the device is. The Logitech Revue has the hallmarks of being rushed to market by a furiously masterbating manager in the corner of an office somewhere, refusing to listen to anything anyone is saying.
Just look at the Revue website and find anywhere mentioning how simple or easy the device is to use, no just a very daunting picture of a gargantuan remote that is some nerd's wet dream.
A lot of effort has been put into the product launch, the Logitech website is larger than any other product they ship and it also extends onto the support side. It is nice to see that they have a series of support videos until you actually view one. Oh dear. I'm wincing at these poor actors having to drive through an overly technical and obtuse script which spends far too much time discussing "HDMI capable AV systems" and optional components which only serve to make it look more complicated than it needs to be.
According to the Logitech web site, the thing needs both an Ethernet connection to the outside world, and "Cable or Satellite set top box with HDMI out". What does it need a video input for? Over the air digital TV plus streaming over the Internet for anything else should suffice. None of the other video-over-the-Internet boxes seem to need that.
DOES NOT COMPUTE.
Gee, a PC like device that costs about as much as a basic function PC, but doesn't have the power for running on-line gaming and can't even watch Hulu or most network programs. And the consumer somehow preceived it wasn't worth the price? Imagine that! Who wouldn't want to buy this and hook it up to their TV rather than use the cash for a real multi-media PC?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
British, nothing to see here move along!
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
It seem likely a few saps bought them the previous quarter and finally got around to returning them.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
the key concept is for the quarter. It seem likely a few saps bought them the previous quarter and finally got around to returning them.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The problem is that all Google products are nothing but rushed out pre-beta quality software.
Even today, Android is sluggish. Honeycomb is pretty much unstable garbage with nothing to show. GoogleTV is a dead product and Google+ is a Facebook wannabe with a worst privacy policy.
In other words, Google produces nothing but pre-beta software which are nothing more than clones of other products. Nothing original, only copycats.
There are lots of devices that do the same thing going for significantly less than a hundred.
Also, it's puzzling that Google cooperated with the content blocking schemes. They should have just set the browser ID to Internet Explorer and told the networks to go fuck themselves.
That's iRonic.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Google are not the little guy. They are like Microsoft in that they have a couple of highly profitable revenue streams which they use to try to expand their product range.
But they simply haven't a clue on producing a product that people want or will want (after all, technology companies are supposed to think ahead).
Their successes are fairly obvious things, online email, search engine, online office suite and mobile phone OS. Nothing ground breaking are they? they are all things Microsoft has done or is doing.
If I want a net-TV box I want everything I can get now on TV with some extras for less money. There needs to be a large advantage to it.
Exactly. Not to mention that the choice of iPhone to get is very simple. Black or White, 16/32GB (or 32/64GB this time hopefully).
There is such a thing as too much choice. It is why games consoles are popular as you buy a console, buy a game and it is guaranteed to work with no hassle.
That's iRonic.
Really? Where? I'll buy one!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
With Google's acquisition of sageTV, it was speculated that SageTV would either become or become part of a revised platform for GoogleTV. What will happen to this fine company? Their DVR software was fantastic, and their "media extender" hardware was very useful. Many companies that get assimilated by Google become integral parts of a greater whole. But what will happen here? I seriously doubt that Google will shelve the set-top box concept. They may transform GoogleTV into something different, but I doubt they'll abandon it.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
So a bunch of people bought them in the quarter preceding the first quarter? That seems unlikely :-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Now granted the one I got to play with was a pre-public release a developer at my friends company was given that he setup in the company's theator room... but the remote was ugly and looked like a label maker mated with an Xbox 360 remote. I don't think it had any more functionality than the logictech, but I believe its price tag was $100 *more* than the logictech unit
they still have $120.00 keyboards and $90.00 rats they can sell.
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If instead a keyboard they use a tablet
...then they won't even need a set-top box, as they could just do everything on the tablet and connect it to the TV with the tablet's mini-HDMI output.
No one has come up with hardware better than last year's iPhone? You might want to check your facts on that one. It took me all of five seconds to google a phone with superior hardware specs.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
Gee, a PC like device that costs about as much as a basic function PC
But "a basic function PC" comes in a much bigger case and lacks any sort of SDTV-compatible output without an obscure VGA-to-TV scan converter.
Who wouldn't want to buy this and hook it up to their TV rather than use the cash for a real multi-media PC?
People who don't want a big, ugly, noisy tower in the living room. People who don't know how to build a small-form-factor PC from parts. People who have an SDTV and don't know that scan converters exist. People who have the mental set that PCs are for the desk and TVs are for the living room and never the twain shall meet. In other words, the majority. I've been told that statistically nobody sets up an HTPC.
I don't know about your setup but if I connected my tablet to my TV, I'd have a hard time using my tablet as a remote while sitting on my couch.
Not to mention the whole multi-tasking issue. How many tablets have the horsepower to display HD streaming content to the TV while browsing the web? Or, if one of my kids is playing angry birds on the tablet, I have to interupt everytime I want to change the channel.
I think I read elsewhere the CEO is "stepping down". AKA being fired.
Seriously, didn't this product look like a total failure the moment it was announced. I am sure we had a story on the announcement, and I am sure most of stated: WTF??? This was the most obvious DOA product since the JooJoo.
It is bad enough to launch an obvious stinker but it sounds like they also put so much money behind it as to put the company in jeopardy. Seriously how out of touch and clueless was the CEO.
CEO get 7 figure salaries for what again??
The iphone 4 has the worst reception of any phone on the market.
Apple TV is garbage. Roku is decent. Logitech priced themselves out of it. nothing to do with Google TV.
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So if I got a GTV at $99 now, it will be able to be upgraded to Honeycomb when it comes out? It was a nonstarter at 250 for something with unknown value, but I’d consider it at 99. Can I play media that is on my network via the GoogleTV, too?
You know what I want out of GoogleTV?
I want the media center capabilities of a Boxee or XBMC. I want the android market and internet prowess and ability to browse with a full-on browser a la the current GoogleTV.
And I want it in a box with a Cablecard where I can hook up an external or NAS drive and use it for a DVR. Or at least an OTA tuner. Android DVR app anyone?
*That* I would pay $250 for. A living room Youtube player? No.
This. I have an original Droid, which beat the graphics specs of the 3GS. Then the 4 comes out with their retina display crap, and we're still seeing Android phones with the same screen specs of the first Droid X! Are manufacturers just that blind or are there limitations on the Android software that don't support higher resolutions? Seems like one of the selling points of Ice Cream Sandwich was the HD resolution...maybe that's the fix? Just seems like 2 years after the Droid debut we should have much better hardware. Motorola, HTC, Samsung...you want to have a compelling selling point over the iPhone? Give me an HD screen, great battery life, and fast and quality camera hardware. Not a 6.5" screen on a phone with 2 year old resolution and a 50 megapixel piece of crap camera that's slow.
A 1994 PC can handle this "retina display" nonsense. That doesn't mean that you actually would want to use it for anything. Being able to output at a certain resolution and being able to actually do anything with it are entirely orthogonal to each other.
I'd much rather have the "underlying horsepower" so content has to be "adapted" less or not at all.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Your entire screed is Fanboy nonsense. .....
The Revue may have bombed but the rest of the onslaught continues.
Who's the "fanboy" here?
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
I've bought a few of these. Many family members have them. Here's the basic pro/cons:
Pros:
Cons:
TL;DR:
It's great for non-techies. Once the platform is cracked, or Google Market is added to it, it will be the _next_ XBMC platform ( or better ).The hardware is high powered, cool running, and soundless. Plus it has full HDMI security keys in it, so it can function as a HDMI repeater which very few open XBMC like devices can do.
Buy two for the grandparents when it comes down in price, and plug in either the HD webcam ( expensive) or any crappy USB web-cam ( cheap ). And you'll be a hero.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
All you have to "do with it" is make the same stuff look a lot better, and that's what the iPhone 4 does. Back in 1985 when the 300 DPI Laserwriter was introduced were you bitterly attacking people for spending $7000 on a printer because, after all, it's all just letters and your $500 9-pin Epson did letters just fine?
Go into the PC section of your local Walmart, and there'll probably be an Xbox 360-sized Acer Aspire. Why these aren't advertised more I have no clue.
SDTV? This is 2011. What rock have you been hiding under?
The same rock that people who buy replacement TVs at pawn shops and thrift stores hide under. People replace TVs when they break, and they buy "content boxes" (cable boxes, DVD players, game consoles, etc.) that are compatible with their current TV.
The problem with the Logitech Revue is that you could buy a low profile PC for about the same price.
The problem with a low-profile PC is that their manufacturers haven't been promoting them to the public. Average people hear "desktop computer" and think of a typical full-size ATX case (8" by 20" by 20"), not the Xbox 360-sized case of a Gateway SX or the practically GameCube-sized case of a Dell Zino.
Sounds like a classic Apple fanboy arguing against a 10 year old view of the competition.
People still use a PC operating system that will be 10 years old at the end of this year.
Actually according to Nielson, the lion's share of people that do "Internet streaming" of content do it from a PC.
What does Nielsen say about the median monitor size used with PC streaming video?
Non-sequencer since Logitek is German.
Logitek seems to be American, however this is about Logitech, which is Swiss (from the French speaking part).
Fandroids hate facts.
You must be an Apple fanboy. You missed the point and misunderstood the key technical issue entirely.
Your attempt to make somehow turn this into a case of "being cheap" and the Apple product being some sort of luxury good is also misplaced.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Ideally, there is NOTHING tying me to a single hardware vendor or platform.
When the next thing comes along, I can take advantage of it rather than being trapped by someone else's limited vision.
Open standards and free markets are handy that way.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The Wii still doesn't support hi-def video, so it's not great for media.
Your view of garbage is quite skewed, my friend. It works fine for me...
My bluray player does everything that Roku does, which is sad. (except for fox news, ufc, and cnet which I never cared about)
There's one major upside to Apple TV: I have every movie I own streamable to every tv in my house.
No, they aren't purchased through iTunes (a positive...), and they are in HD quality converted to Apple TV format and placed into iTunes on a centralized app server in the house.
translation: not everyone wants what you do, so it's garbage for you.
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I agree here, the ARM processor has excelled nicely in this arena.
Well, this arena along with cell phones.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
If it's anything like android phones, every google tv would need an app written specifically for it...
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
So I shouldn't just hook up one tabletj's HDMI out to the television. Rather I should hook one up for every member of the family leading to a veritable hydra of devices attached to 50 foot cables all over the living room. If that's the sort of thing that the /typical/ /. commenter is wont to do, I don't think that I'm in the pool of typical /. commenters.
Moreover, you didn't address the multi-tasking concern. How many tablets have the horsepower to spit out streamed HD video /and/ browse the web at the same time?
Troll? I have always seen Logitech to have by far the best devices around. Headsets, keyboards, mice, whatever they make is the best quality in the industry.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
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So you had to convert all of your videos into Apple TV format and use iTunes on a centralized app server to give Apple TV the major upside?
Why not just hook the 'centralized app server' directly to the TV and throw some XMBC/etc on it instead? Coulda saved you a lot of time re-encoding everything and importing into iTunes...
On top of that, even though the movies weren't purchased in iTunes but you STILL have to run iTunes to use them with your Apple TV.
Translation: not everyone likes to jump thru hoops just to run iTunes anyway.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.