I agree with your well-placed sarcasm -- this is not a black and white issue.
However, I disagree that there is fundamental value in built-in TV software supplanting third-party devices. That is, unless a software company is making the software.
I have a Roku, and built-in software from Sony on a blu-ray player (on separate TVs). The Roku is so much better that it's painful to use the TV without it:
- The buffering is much worse on the Sony. When it switches between ads and the video it takes several seconds to rebuffer.
- The delay between menus is measured in seconds, while the Roku is almost instantaneous
- It's almost like Sony didn't even have one UX designer working on their project. It will do idiotic things like when Hulu opens, create a modal dialog that says "The internet content is ready" and I must click OK to proceed.
- The remote and other menus are slow and hard to decipher just like you'd expect from built-in software.
The point is that building the user experience of a video client is not trivial. I can't even blame Sony, really -- a non-software company will never do a good job at that kind of thing.
The Roku is a world of difference and until a company like that is building the built-in software, the mainstream of the market will be in third-party devices.
>The point is that building the user experience of a video client is not trivial.
No, but "Sony" have done it before and it's been fine. PS3. (I've not tried the PS4's media player.)
>I can't even blame Sony, really -- a non-software company
Sony Vegas? ACID? Sound Forge? Sony is not short of software production, "Sony Creative Software" makes a few software products most people here would have heard of. Not to mention SCE, they've made quite a bit of software and no-doubt have some UI engineers.
They bought every single one of those, from Vegas and from Sonic Foundry, Sony was not responsible for their design or creation. The UIs were AFAIK fully in place before Sony ever owned them, though I am sure some changes have been made.
> - It's almost like Sony didn't even have one UX designer working on their project. It will do idiotic things like when Hulu opens, create a modal dialog that says "The internet content is ready" and I must click OK to proceed.
This really sounds like a design failure + rushed development. It sounds like the sort of thing that you would throw in during rapid development with the idea to replace it later, only it never ends up on a TODO list, and there is no one looking at the 'big picture' to make sure that these things are caught.
The Youtube app on Samsung SmartTvs is pretty good. I'm not sure who does it, but it has quite deep integration with the Youtube Android app and site, so it could be done by Google.
For example, you can pair your TV with your phone or computer, and then use the device to navigate Youtube but the TV to display videos.
It's YouTube's html5 leanback experience. So it's Google, but they license the interface to a lot of vendors. Google can in theory push updates out this way too.
This is also what Netflix increasingly does (Hulu Plus and Pandora too).
If a smart TV or set top box has a good version of WebKit embedding in it and uses html5 rather than embedded versions of code, they can stay up to date much better. Samsung's newest TVs are designed this way, but there might be a provision check for the Samsung website as was the case in this thread, which is just bs.
The problem was the first two generations of "smart TV"software were highly proprietary embedded systems with custom apps from a service. It took 7 years, but most have moved to html5.
You do still run into hybrid solutions. Even the Roku3 and TiVo Roamio have html5 for some apps and custom old-ass shit for others.
For the fire TV, Amazon uses html5 for its own apps but android apps for other services (except YouTube, who doesn't offer its app outside of google play, so it's the html5 version Roku and some of the TVs use). In that case, I wish for companies with great html5 solutions for those with them (pandora, Netflix, Hulu Plus)
However, I disagree that there is fundamental value in built-in TV software supplanting third-party devices. That is, unless a software company is making the software.
I have a Roku, and built-in software from Sony on a blu-ray player (on separate TVs). The Roku is so much better that it's painful to use the TV without it:
- The buffering is much worse on the Sony. When it switches between ads and the video it takes several seconds to rebuffer.
- The delay between menus is measured in seconds, while the Roku is almost instantaneous
- It's almost like Sony didn't even have one UX designer working on their project. It will do idiotic things like when Hulu opens, create a modal dialog that says "The internet content is ready" and I must click OK to proceed.
- The remote and other menus are slow and hard to decipher just like you'd expect from built-in software.
The point is that building the user experience of a video client is not trivial. I can't even blame Sony, really -- a non-software company will never do a good job at that kind of thing.
The Roku is a world of difference and until a company like that is building the built-in software, the mainstream of the market will be in third-party devices.