Tag Archives | Internet TV

Roku Holds a Channel Contest (I'm a Judge!)

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 7, 2010 at 7:23 pm

Roku’s neat little Internet TV box is also a platform for third-party channels–app-like services which can offer music, photos, social networking tools, and more. The company is taking a logical step to encourage developers to create cool stuff: It’s holding a channel competition and giving away a total of $35,000 in prizes to the creators of the best channels.

Who decides which entries are the best? The first round of judging will be done by Roku owners. Then a final pass will be done by guest judges: Jim Louderback of Revision3 will look at video channels; Michael Endelman of Rolling Stone will handle music; Dave Zatz of Zatz Not Funny will take care of photos; actor, director, producer, and Twitter superstar LeVar Burton will be responsible for social media; and Roku founder Anthony Wood will choose a special award called Founder’s Choice. Oh, and I’m handling screen savers–should be fun.

The deadline for entries is September 6th, and winners will be named in October. Here are the complete rules.

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YouTube Leanback: YouTube That Looks Like TV

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 7, 2010 at 4:00 pm

The average American watches five hours of TV a day. For YouTube, it’s more like five minutes–a fact which the folks at YouTube don’t like a bit. They think is due to it being too hard to consumer their service in mass quantities. So they’re launching a new service–which the company showed as a sneak peek back at Google’s I|O conference in May–called YouTube Leanback. (Yup, this is YouTube’s second new version of the day: I saw it and the new YouTube Mobile at a press briefing this morning.)

Leanback is an expansion of the basic idea in an earlier service called YouTube XL. It runs in any browser that supports Flash–iPads need not apply–and is designed to make watching YouTube feel a bit like watching a personalized TV channel with a really slick program guide that can be controlled by keyboard. Videos display in full-screen mode, and you press the Up Arrow key to search and the Down Arrow key to reach playback controls, a feed of videos tailored to your interests (which are search results if you’ve just searched) and a browsable directory of videos in major categories.

Unlike the revamped YouTube Mobile, Leanback isn’t trying to give you all the power of standard YouTube in a new format. It’s YouTube stripped down to its bare essentials, and judging from my brief hands-on time with it so far, it’s pretty nifty. Folks who have connected a PC to an HDTV will obviously be intrigued by Leanback–and it will run on Google TV devices once they’re available–but YouTube execs at the briefing said they think people who watch the service on a laptop or desktop PC display will like it, too.

Here’s YouTube’s video demo of Leanback–if you try the service, let us know what you think.

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The Best Mobile Version of YouTube is Now YouTube, Not an App

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 7, 2010 at 1:11 pm

YouTube is launching a new version of its mobile site today for HTML5-capable smartphones such as the iPhone and Android handsets. I saw a demonstration at a press briefing this morning, and it looked like the most YouTubey mobile version of YouTube to date, with most of the major features of the full-blown version of the service, playback of videos within the browser (rather than in an external media player) [CORRECTION: I got the previous point wrong], and higher-quality video than is currently provided by the YouTube apps for iPhone and Android. Judging from the demo, it’s extremely snappy for a Web-based app–screens popped up as quickly as they would in a local application.

It also has a user interface that’s designed to be as touch-friendly as possible, without demanding the user to poke at the screen very precisely–Product Manager Andrey Doronichev even conducted part of this morning’s demo using…his nose.

The new YouTube Mobile looks cool, but it’s most interesting as a salvo in the war between local apps (a form of software championed by Apple) and Web-based ones (Google’s bread and butter). When Google writes iPhone apps–like, say, Google Voice–it’s at the mercy of Apple. When it creates browser-based services, it doesn’t need to seek anyone’s permission to distribute them to every iPhone user who cares to give them a try. And with YouTube, at least, it looks like there’s no particular advantage to writing an iPhone app–the Web-based incarnation works at least as well as a piece of native software would.

Even if the unique challenges of getting into the iPhone App Store weren’t an issue, there’s much to be said for YouTube being a Web app rather than a local one. With a Web app, YouTube can roll out new features on as aggressive a schedule as it chooses, instantly putting them in the hands of everyone who uses the service. It can’t do that with the YouTube app for Android, and the one for iPhone is completely out of its hands, since it was written by Apple. (For what it’s worth, a YouTube exec at the briefing I attended said he hopes Apple continues to update its YouTube app, and that YouTube would be happy to help.)

You gotta wonder: How long will it be until Web apps are capable of doing nearly anything a local app can? It’s not going to happen in 2010, 2011, or 2012…but it will happen.

Here’s YouTube’s blog post on the new YouTube Mobile. One surprising note: The company says that it hasn’t finished polishing up the service to work well in Safari on the iPhone 4.

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Hulu's For-Pay Service is Official. You Excited?

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 29, 2010 at 11:23 am

Speaking of browser-based entertainment services that are branching out: Hulu has finally announced its plans for a for-pay version of its extremely popular TV service. Hulu Plus will cost $9.99 a month and provide full access to entire seasons (current and past) of shows from ABC, NBC, FOX, and other TV networks. And it’ll be the first version of the service that’s available on devices that aren’t PCs, including the iPhone 4, iPhone 3G, iPod Touch, iPad, Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and TVs and Blu-Ray players from Samsung, Sony, and Vizio. (That helps explain why Hulu has done everything in its power to prevent other companies such as Boxee from letting their users watch Hulu shows.)

Hulu says that the freebie, ad-supported version of the service isn’t going away–it’ll just offer fewer episodes, and won’t be available on a cornucopia of gadgets.

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BitBop TV for BlackBerry Goes Live

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 24, 2010 at 11:17 am

Got a BlackBerry and feeling a little left out of the excitement this week? Here’s something to cheer you up: a cool service that’s only for BlackBerries right now. BitBop, a TV service that was previously available only as a closed beta, has opened up. And so far it only runs on RIM’s phones: the Bold, the Curve, and the Tour.

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Boxee Box: Later Rather Than Sooner

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 11, 2010 at 5:14 pm

The Boxee Box–D-Link’s gizmo that brings the cool Boxee Internet TV service to HDTVs that don’t happen to have a PC or Mac handy–was announced last December. It was supposed to ship in the second quarter of 2010, which will end in a little over two weeks. But now Boxee is saying that it won’t be ready until November. The company says it needs until then to get the thing working properly.

As usual, I’m in favor of waiting longer for a better product. But it’s disappointing news to those whose appetites Boxee began to whet so long ago.

A Boxee Box that was available this month would have had a nice head start on Logitech’s Google TV-based set-top box and other Google TV hardware which is due in time for the holidays. Now they’ll debut more or less simultaneously–and it’ll be fun to watch them duke it out.

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Western Digital's New WD TV Does Netflix

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 9, 2010 at 5:00 am

There are a gazillion ways to watch movies and TV shows on the Internet, and I’m not sure if any of them are more fundamentally appealing than Netflix’s Watch Instantly: It’s reasonably priced, fun to use, and bursting at the seams with stuff worth watching. Small wonder that it’s among the most widely-supported services on gadgets that let you connect an HDTV to your home network–the latest of which is Western Digital’s $150  WD HD Live Plus HD. I tried a unit loaned to me by Western Digital.

Physically, the WD TV Live Plus HD looks like earlier incarnations of WD TV and reminds me of Roku’s player: It’s about the size of a thick sandwich, and plugs into your TV via component cables or HDMI (the latter cable isn’t included). Unlike Roku, it doesn’t have built-in Wi-Fi–you’ve got to connect it to your network via Ethernet or spring for an extra-cost Wi-Fi adapter. I used the former approach, and found that the box worked with minimal setup.

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