Ashlee Vance and Claire Cain Miller are reporting that Google is asking hardware companies to delay announcing Google TV products until it can refine the software, which has received iffy reviews. Sounds liked a good idea to me.
Tag Archives | Internet TV
Google TV Gets an Update
Google is rolling out the first major update to its ambitious, interesting, flawed Google TV platform. Among the improvements: the ability to search in Netflix, the power to move the Dual View picture-in-picture window around so it doesn’t block things, and an Android app that serves as a Google TV remote control.
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TV Station in a Box
Last Gadget Standing Nominee: Jade Live Broadcaster
Price: $219
As the world turns to video it’s easy to be left behind, especially if you’re on a limited budget. MCN Technologies’ Jade Live Broadcaster levels the video playing field by offering a network camera for live video broadcasting over the Internet. It’s an HD camera with H264/AAC compression and an 802.11b/g wireless interface. The live content is distributed as a set of streams with different resolutions simultaneously (1280-by-720, 640-by-480, 320-by-240 and 160-by-120) with bit rates ranging from 2Mbps to 80Kbps, so viewers with smartphones connected to mobile broadband can view low bit rate streams while ones with HD players connected to high speed networks at home can watch high-quality video. Who knows, maybe we’ll test it out and start our own Last Gadget Broadcast station.
The Live Broadcaster is due to go on sale on January 16th, 2011.
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Cutting the Cable-TV Cord? Maybe Some Day
Cord cutting–getting rid of cable or satellite TV–is the buzzword du jour in the TV and electronics industries. Pundits have proclaimed TV dead, or at least dying00going the way of the recording industry, which went from pricey CDs to cheaper downloads and now to mostly-free streaming.
That was the juiciest topic last Friday at New York University during the Future of Television Conference, a gathering of TV brass such as the CEO’s of Showtime and Univision, senior executives from MTV Networks, Discovery, and Yahoo, and founders of Internet video startups. The subject also permeated Pepcom’s Wine, Dine & Demo tech show the night before, where about a half-dozen Internet-to-TV products were being shown.
The conclusion, at least to this reporter, is that cord cutting is about as real now as growing new organs in vats. Consumers will do it–but they won’t do it in droves just yet.
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Netflix Makes Streaming Cheaper–and DVDs More Expensive
At last week’s Web 2.0 Summit, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said that the company would soon let subscribers opt for a plan that included only Watch Instantly video streaming, without the ability to get DVDs by mail. He spoke the truth: Netflix is introducing a $7.99 plan that provides exactly that. (It’s been testing it for a while–I saw it as an option weeks ago.)
Any current Netflix subscriber can switch to the new plan right now, saving at least a dollar over the former pricing plans. Isn’t that going to hurt the company’s bottom line? Well, it has a strategy for making up the difference: Starting today, it’s also raising the price of all the plans that do include DVDs by at least $1. The new prices range from $9.99 for a one-DVD plan (formerly $8.99) to $55.99 for an eight-DVD one (formerly $47.99).
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Google TV: The Critics Are Being…Critical
The Wall Street Journal‘s Walt Mossberg and The New York Times‘ David Pogue are often among the first tech writers to review major new products. In the case of Google TV, however, they took a bit more time. Both wrote about the platform for their columns this week (here’s Walt’s story and here’s David’s), a few weeks after the first reviews. (such as mine) appeared. Neither of them is impressed–they have overlapping-but-not-identical lists of usability gripes, and come to the conclusion, as I did, that it’s just not ready for prime time.
At this point, I think it’s fair to say that Google TV, as represented by the first products that incorporate it–Logitech’s Revue and Sony’s TV and Blu-Ray player–is a critical dud. (I got a advertising e-mail from Logitech that optimistically referred to happy critics writing positive reviews, but it linked only to Oliver Starr’s review at TechCrunch, which is the most favorable one I’ve seen.)
I’m curious how well the Logitech and Sony products will sell this Christmas, especially since they compete with much cheaper options, such as the Roku players which start at $59.99. Also unknown: Is Google going to stick with Google TV for the long haul, or will it turn out to be a Wave-like fling? I hope that the company sticks with the idea and improves it–for one thing, I think the people who buy Google TV devices this year are getting an alpha product and deserve to get a more polished update. For another, I still think the idea has plenty of potential–a Google TV with fewer bugs and kludgy design decisions and a more harmonious relationship with Hollywood could be a winner.
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Hands On: The Xfinity iPad App
Comcast launched the Xfinity TV app to much fanfare this week, and though we knew it was coming, we didn’t know all the nitty gritty details until we got our own hands on. After a test run on the iPad, here’s my take on the good, the bad, and the future of the Xfinity app.
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AT&T Labs Mashes Up Voice, TV, Gestures, and Twitter
“Watching TV is supposed to be fun, right?” asked AT&T’s Michael Johnston. In a press event at the AT&T Labs in New York City, Johnston and other researchers showed off iRemote, Talkalytics, and dozens of other projects now under way for using AT&T’s long-time Watson speech recognition together with search, gestures, and Twitter analysis.
With all the hundreds of TV channels available today, it can be harder than ever to figure out what to watch, Johnston observed. But through a new iRemote app currently in development, you can speak voice commands into a smartphone to get an immediate list of “all reality shows on Thursday night”–and other categories of TV programs small enough to easily digest — on your TV screen.
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TiVo’s New Pricing: Both Cheaper and Pricier–and Definitely More Confusing
TiVo, the original personal TV box, is facing new competition from Apple TV, Roku, the Boxee Box, Logitech’s Google-based Revue, and other Johhnie-come-lately gizmos. Most of them cost less than TiVo, and none of them require a monthly fee. And the company is responding with a holiday offer–good through December 31st–that brings the price of a TiVo box from $299.99 down to $99.99, the same amount you’d pay for an Apple TV or Roku’s midrange version. It’s calling this an “instant savings” of $200. And there’s even an option to pay nothing up-front at all.
Except…it’s nowhere as simple as that. Actually, figuring out how much TiVo costs, and which version to buy, just got more confusing.
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Boxee Box Ships
D-Link is shipping the Boxee Box. The network Web sites will presumably block it, but it has Vudu, is going to get Netflix and Hulu Plus, and has a ton of other features.