

Sony beat the Apple TV without Google TV - ajaimk
http://www.ajaimk.com/2010/09/04/sony-beat-the-apple-tv-without-google-tv/

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mikeryan
There's a ton of connected TV's which do this. Samsung/LG/Sony - they all are
playing in this space.

The big downside is that right now most of the TV chipsets (outside of the
latest models) are severely underpowered, and no one wants to upgrade a TV,
when they can upgrade a box for about 10-20% the price.

If you want a TV with all the cool interactive bells and whistles wait for the
TV's which can run full flash 10.1 - not so much for the flash, but so you
know you have something that will be able to handle much of what's being
thrown at it.

~~~
Raphael
I don't see a compelling reason for a smart display when there is so much
competition for cheap boxes that drive displays.

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heresy
If you need any of

* MKV support

* 1080p support

* Subtitles (.sub/.idx/.srt)

* Remote control

XBMC on a Gen 1 Apple TV with a Crystal HD card is pretty simple to get going,
and has decent performance.

I've tried:

* Gen 1 XBox running XBMC (no 1080p on a Celeron)

* XBox 360 with WMC (flakey codec support, requires separate Windows PC, no subtitle support, remote control via Media Control is bad). Microsoft fluffed this one so bad. All the codec packs for it require you hacking your standalone host system to bits to get playback working.

* DLNA on my Sony Bravia to PlayOn. PlayOn sucks, to put it kindly. Still requires a seperate standalone PC.

In 2008, XBMC streaming over SMB directly from a NAS was the answer.

It still is, if you don't want to muck around for hours fiddling trying to get
stuff going by following the cargo cultish forums that exist for video
playback (blind leading the blind).

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I've got XMBC on an Acer nettop which as well as being an actual full
computer, cost the same as an Apple TV with the same size hard drive. It also
has a powerful video card that means you don't need to add a video accelerator
card, just add a remote (either a cheap USB-IR model, or use your bluetooth
playstation remote, or your Android or iPhone, iPad or netbook).

Unlike Apple, who expect you to have their stuff out on show, it came with a
mount that attaches to the back of your TV which hides it's cheap'n'cheerful
plastic exterior while minimizing cables.

I believe xmbc also does DNLA too if you wanted to plug it into one TV via
HDMI and stream to another.

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wccrawford
My Samsung TV has most (if not all) of that, and already has Hulu Plus.

And Hulu Plus was a huge disappointment. For those that don't know, ONLY
'plus' content can be streamed to a device directly. You can't watch the vast
majority of Hulu's catalog directly on your TV/PS3/whatever. It cost me $10 to
learn that.

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jrockway
Also, doesn't Hulu Plus have ads? I will pay $10 for a bunch of ads when hell
freezes over.

(This is why I don't read magazines.)

~~~
papa
Yes. I could stomach the ads during the TV programs but the commercial breaks
during Hulu-streamed movies really sucked. There's definitely something to be
said for the commercial-free programming available via Netflix streaming.

The Hulu Plus content was also disappointing (compared to what's offered on
the free Hulu site).

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petercooper
Apple has missed a trick it should have learned from the iPhone in the value
of allowing controlled third party apps on to a platform. Apple TV +
downloadable/purchasable iOS apps aimed solely for TV use would be awesome. Or
maybe they're hoping to pull the same idea off using the iPad->Airplay->Apple
TV integration coming later in the year?

~~~
refulgentis
You hit the nail on the head – if I was a betting man, I'd put as much money
as I had on a 'surprise feature' of 4.2 being that you can use the Apple TV as
a screen for outputting from an iOS device.

Why do I think this? <http://twitter.com/lllucas> \- Apple employee,
apparently worked on Airplay (note the "happy airplay day!" tweet) Joe Hewitt
(of Facebook) tweets "If only iOS apps could use AirPlay to stream their own
stuff to AppleTV." and then lllucas replies "what makes you think they can't?
:-)"

Why might I be wrong? It doesn't necessarily make sense that an app could
output arbitrary video data (namely, what we're all thinking of, 3D games) to
an Apple TV unless there was something seriously cool going on behind the
scenes, like using a H.264 encoder in hardware to compress the stream.

If that's happening, then I would think certain devices (such as the iPod
touch 2G/3G, iPhone 3G) would be incompatible because there's no reason for
them to have an H.264 encoder on their chipset since they don't have video
cameras. This would be an odd thing for Apple/app devs to try to support,
because now you have to worry about OS revisions + device capabilities, and
Apple's been fairly good about coming down on the side of keeping things
progressing in software even if the hardware is too slow for it in reality
(see the iOS 4.0 on iPhone 3G debacle)

I think it's certain given those tweets that you'll be able to at least stream
arbitrary H.264 content from your app to the Apple TV, but to be encoding
whatever is on the screen in real time and also be putting load on the
graphics processor...I'm not sure that would work.

~~~
petercooper
I think they already announced that, actually (?):
<http://www.apple.com/ipad/software-update/>

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refulgentis
It's definitely in Apple apps, and I imagine that 3rd party apps will get it
for "free" using the standard media player classes. The issue is if apps could
send arbitrary video data, because then your $99 Apple TV turns into a game
console if you have an iPod touch.

~~~
petercooper
Good point - that would be like the VGA adapter. It'd be like having a DS
where the top screen could be 30 inches or more.. :-)

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ugh
The funny thing about buying a TV roughly every two decades (currently a
twelve year old Sony Trinitron is doing its duty) is that I just don’t know
that there are TVs which can do that.

It seems that TVs have turned into twins of the bloated laptops Sony likes to
sell. I’m not sure whether I like that. Is that software at least user
friendly?

~~~
jbuzbee
The position of the TV manufacturers reminds me a bit of the ISPs. The ISPs
don't want to be just a dumb-pipe so they add on "features" that few want. And
the TV manufacturers are the same way. They no longer want to be just a dumb
monitor, so they're embedding these features that would be better implemented
in an external box that's replaceable.

As far as user-friendly, my experience is that the interfaces look flashy on
the surface, but once you dig deeper, you'll find poor integration, bugs and
rarely a new release. All the better reason to rely on an upgradeable,
external box for these types of features.

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gaiusparx
It is obvious that Apple's direction is streaming. Streaming from the cloud is
easily done. Streaming from users content is via AirPlay. Apple probably
looked at DLNA. It looks unlikely that AirPlay will support 'non-Apple' format
such as divx, mkv, flac. And I hope Apple will change its mind. It is not a
Flash vs non-Flash issue.

Will Apple TV turns into an app & games platform? I see alot of pluses.
Something not in the interactive TV as we know today. I think this is coming,
based on what Google is doing. Google probably has some inside info that Apple
is developing such, thus Google is developing its own Google TV to compete.
But I think Apple's implementation will be something different. Maybe: using
your iPad/iPhone as controller, select the game you want to display on your TV
and push it via AirPlay, the game will then load and play on Apple TV. Then
you use your iPad/iPhone as controller to play the game.

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tdmackey
This sounds like he is the kind of guy who in less than a year will be writing
about how he wished he owned one and will be first in line for the next
revision later blogging about how awesome it is.

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bbuffone
My Sony TV is just a TV, and that is the way I like it, no apps, no internet;
just channel buttons. Currently I am watching "Starwars II: Attack of the
clones" in high def and commenting on this post at the same time.

Two screens are a far better experience than trying to both large video and
interactive apps in one device. This is one of the reasons that interactive TV
has never taken off. It just isn't feasible for general consumption.

~~~
ajaimk
I'm personally not a big fan of the interactive TV idea myself. What I am all
for is a TV that connects to different sources of media. I have music from
Pandora and movies on netflix.

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mveldthuis
"AirPlay (which is kind of cool but inherently flawed in the fact that when I
switch it to the TV from say my iPad, I’d like to use the iPad for some other
task.)"

By the time this comes to the iPad, it'll be iOS 4.2 which probably means
they've designed this as a background task, which would allow you to do other
stuff on your iPad.

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jasonlbaptiste
There's a company called PlayOn. They use DLNA to stream things like Netflix,
Hulu, and your files to DLNA capable devices. DLNA is actually built into
8,000+ devices such as XBOX,PS3, and some of these snazzy new TVs. PlayON is
installed on one computer and then streams the rest. Is anyone here well
versed in DLNA?

~~~
jbuzbee
I've used a lot of DLNA devices and servers over the last few years. Most are
"meh". They work, but most seem to have a user-interface reminiscent of
Windows 3.1 especially when dealing with video. They typically have no photo
or video metadata knowledge so you're limited to browsing through directories
of files and selecting what your want by filename. Have your non-techie
significant other try that. No movie-poster art, IMDB synopsis, etc. When you
have a library of hundreds and hundreds of ripped DVDs, good luck.

And format support is spotty as well. There's often a mismatch between what
the server will serve up and what the device will play back.

I have a Sony TV with most of what was shown here and I rarely, rarely use any
of the Internet features. There's DLNA support built-in, but of the 800 or so
videos I have being served up on my network, it refuses to even recognize any
more than a dozen or so. Everything else is either ignored or causes an error.
And the user-interface is completely divorced and separate from my set-top
box. if I want to use the Internet features, I have to find the TV remote vs.
the cable-box remote and then deal with a different user interface. The lack
of transparent integration is a deal-breaker for many people. Switching back
and forth between Internet video sources and "normal" sources has to be as
seamless as changing channels. Google and Echostar are working together, so
they may pull it off, at least for Echostar set-top boxes. Otherwise, without
tight-integration, these efforts are going to be a flop.

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DannoHung
Does it seem to anyone else that he has missed a few other service
integrations that Apple mentioned?

Now, I'll give you that the Sony TV probably is capable of more, but I thought
the Apple device was going to do YouTube and Flickr at least.

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Towle_
Apple TV is an experiment. They're trying to find a market fit, so to speak.
If you're comparing anything Apple is doing to an existing product, you're
looking at it the wrong way.

~~~
basicxman
Agreed, and at the $99 dollar price point, you can tell they're trying to make
it work. Unfortunately, I don't know anybody technical or non-technical that
would enjoy it.

~~~
naelshawwa
the market is already there, every iPad, iPhone, and iTouch owner will get
one. God its cheaper than an iPod nano.

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naelshawwa
These are my thoughts on this topic:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1660396>

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baby
but the guy has an iPhone 4 instead of an android phone...

