[opendtv] Re: Here’s Comcast’s Version of Apple TV
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 24 Jun 2013 20:15:53 +0000
Craig Birkmaier wrote:
> An app only requires a click on an icon.
Not a true comparison. An "app" first requires an app store, then it requires a
click of an icon thereafter. A URL first requires a keyboard, then it requires
a click of an icon thereafter. I suggest to you the URL approach is at least as
easy.
As I've suggested before, those who become instantly incompetent and brain-dead
when "TV" is involved can have the salesman at Best Buy pre-type their favorite
URLs and make up a nice little "favorites" folder for TV channels. And then
they can feel really foolish for having had to get help for something so
trivial.
> They are designed to work with the current family room mentality of
> a simple remote control.
And a remote mouse is just about the simplest "remote control" anyone has yet
been able to devise, although it's infinitely more flexible than the old style
TV remotes. I find it astonishing that pundits and trade scribes haven't been
able to figure this out yet.
>> And the right way to do this is to make the device appear to be any
>> generic PC, to the web server.
>
> How do you do this?
I've done it. The Sony Vaio STB device I looked at some years ago did it too.
Why is this so difficult? You're not "spoofing" anything. You're merely saying,
for an Internet TV device of the size of a tablet or something with a much
larger screen, the PC video stream is perfectly fine. You don't need special
accommodations for a tiny screen, nor do you need special accommodations for a
UI. Especially true now that OSs are available that support both a touch and a
keyboard interface. Therefore, the servers don’t need to be set up in a special
and easy to identify way. The device can use standard PC-style browsers.
The fact that Steve Jobs made his devices easy to identify, so the congloms
could happily block content or otherwise not meet his special needs, is exactly
why I thought he took the wrong approach. If Android followed suit, that's
their problem. I would expect the Surface Pro tablet should have no problems at
all with conglom Internet content.
> Not lame at all. There are good reasons why we are seeing evolution in
> desktop OS designs - just look at Windows 8.
Evolution is fine as long as the UI isn't great for tablets and crappy for
everything else. Have you been reading the complaints about Win8? Seems like
you haven't. Win8, in its default mode, is better suited for handheld devices
than it is for a PC or connected TV type of device. You can set it up
differently even in its original form, but I'll bet you that Win8.1 will better
accommodate devices with larger and more distant screens than a tablet or
smartphone. There's simply no good excuse why a connected TV and a PC should
have drastically different UIs, i.e. different enough that servers need to make
special accommodations for the connected TV product.
Bert
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