I’m sorry I wasn’t at Apple’s music event today to cover it live. I had fun watching it via Apple’s live video stream from the lobby bar here at the Grand Hyatt in Berlin, though. (I give the experience a B- from a technical standpoint: Eighty percent of the time, the stream worked well, fifteen percent I got audio but the picture froze, five percent it misbehaved in other ways. Then again, I was on iffy hotel Wi-Fi, so the glitchiness might have been on my end rather than Apple’s.)
Sounds like Netflix Watch Instantly may get some Amazonian competition soon.
Internet TV box Roku is about to get scads of new competition–Google TV and Hulu Plus devices and the Boxee Boxfor sure, and maybe an all-new Apple TV. The Roku SD is now $59.99; the Roku HD is $69.99; and the top-of-the-line Roku HD-XR is $99.99. That reflects a $20 price cut for the SD and $30 cuts for the HD and HD-XR, all of which have built-in Wi-Fi networking. And it gets the basic box to a super-low price and the high-end one that should make sense no matter how much the new arrivals go for.
The company is also announcing an upcoming upgrade for the HD-XR model that will permit streaming of 1080p content (although most of the services it includes still top out at 720p).
The Roku boxes were already pleasing products at good prices; now they’re an even better deal. Would buy one? Well, I did get one last month, as a birthday gift. But at this point, unless time was of the essence, I’d wait a bit longer to see what the competition has in store. By December, we should have a good idea how the new gadgets stack up–and it’s possible that we’ll know a lot more about the future of Apple TV as soon as tomorrow.
Netflix Watch Instantly, which was one of the iPad’s launch apps back in April, is now on the iPhone (and iPod Touch), too. There isn’t much to say other than that it’s just about everything that makes Watch Instantly such a delight and such a deal, in handy pocketable form. Pay Netflix for a red-envelopes-in-the-mail plan starting at $8.99, and you get unlimited access to on-demand movies and TV shows. Recent releases are still absent, but the selection continues to improve and now includes some high-profile titles from 2009, such as Up.
The service works with both Wi-Fi and 3G connections. I was impressed by the quality in both forms, and the 3G option is yet another reason I’m glad I clutched onto my grandfathered unlimited AT&T data plan for now.
I do miss one feature that’s present in most other incarnations of Watch Instantly: The thumbnail previews that pop up when you skim forward in a video.
After the jump, a few images.
Quick reminder: Along with LeVar Burton, Michael Endelman, Jim Louderback, Anthony Wood, and Dave Zatz, I’m a guest judge for Roku’s developer contest. The company is going to give away $35,000 in prizes for channels created for its Internet entertainment box–categories include video, audio, photo, screensaver (which I’m judging), social media, and founder’s choice. The deadline for entries is September 6th.
Clicker, the cool site for TV watchers that’s part Google, part TV Guide, and part virtual TiVo, is launching an iPhone app today. The company’s CEO, Jim Lanzone, told me that it brings much of the features of the site to the small screen, but it’s meant as a companion–there’s a lot less TV available on the iPhone than on the PC-based Web, especially since neither Hulu Plus nor Netflix have launched yet.
As with the site, the Clicker app lets you search for TV shows and get information about where they can be watched on the Web or on the iPhone (both for free and for pay); add shows to a playlist that alerts you when new episodes are available (and which you can get access to in your browser where everything’s available); and check out what your friends are watching.
After the jump, a few screens.
The New York Times’ Matt Richtel and Brian Stelter have a nice story today on the threat posed to traditional cable TV by free and low-cost Internet TV. Despite the growing sophistication of Web service, Americans still haven’t started cutting the cable cord in droves. Richtel and Stelter point to popular content that’s not available (legally) online–such as American Idol and True Blood–as a primary explanation for cable’s continued viability.
I’ve been writing about the idea of dumping cable for a long time and am instinctively drawn to it…but I haven’t done it. In our household, we’re heavy watchers of Netflix on Demand via a Roku box. We also watch Hulu and occasionally partake of movies and TV on iTunes and Amazon on Demand. But we still consume plenty for Comcast Xfinity cable TV. (For that matter, we also buy DVDs, and I’ve been known to pull out VHS tapes.)
ZDnet’s Sam Diaz attended Adobe’s Android Flash summit and saw a new preview of the upcoming Google TV.
PlayOn, a service that uses your PC as an intermediary to route streaming services such as Hulu and Netflix to non-PC devices, is launching an iPhone version. As VentureBeat’s Devindra Hardawar reports, the most interesting thing about it is that it’s a browser-based service you access via Safari. (PlayOn submitted an app, but Apple hasn’t approved it.)
Thinking about dumping cable and doing all your TV watching on the Web? Web TV guide Clicker crunched the numbers on how much network programming is available online. It isn’t everything–American Idol and Law & Order are two notable holdouts–but an awfully high percentage of stuff is there. It would be interesting to see similar data for major cable networks.
