Demo of Google TV (Skip to 32:00) [video]
promeas.com
promeas.com
All of these services ask me to think about what I want to watch. But there's this thing that we all do, and I absolutely think there isn't a single person that doesn't do this, and it's called "channel surfing". You just flip and flip and flip to see if there's something more interesting than you're currently watching, or you've just finished watching a program and you want to explore your options.
Stumbleupon provides exactly this, but much more. Stumbleupon is purpose-built specifically for boredom, and over time tailors itself to you. Next, next, next, ohh that's cool, next, next, next. That's exactly what I want from a TV experience. Additionally, I'd be able to save and share with friends.
An example of how this feature would differentiate itself from current methods is, I like a lot of TED videos, but there's also a lot I find incredibly boring. With current interfaces, I have to click a TED category and then sift through all of their offerings. And how the heck would I even know if I'll like something until I play it? Blegh! The Stumbleupon feature would know what type of content I like, and would be able to pull out TED videos that it thinks I would find interesting, and all I would have had to do was click "Next", and it would eventually be presented to me.
That's all I got to say. Add a dang Stumbleupon feature, and an internet-tv box will be MONEY.
Edit: Just noticed they showed Leanback in the demo.
1) When in Top Gear and watching the action, I'll buy a ferrari. This is a demo of screen-in-screen, yet bringing up the search bar hid the freaking screen, you could no longer watch the action. The screen-in-screen only worked when the search results came up, but the whole point of screen-in-screen is to not miss a second.
2) Transitions... where are they? Every screen was a surprise, it just obliterated the prior screen entirely and suddenly. If you were watching the action and accidentally touched a button you could miss your team scoring a goal... transitions help with this, as does opacity. It also gives it a deeper more tactile feel and a sense of quality.
3) Web browser on a TV. That's it? The font rendering looks terrible on the TV, none of it appeared to be readable which I hope is just the video of the presentation.
4) Where are the apps? Any apps would do? But more specifically things like:
4a) twitter for TV. Imagine watching a game and having tweets of a hashtag search appear live around a chosen space on the screen (overlay) or to reduce the screen (screen-in-screen, but the main screen at 80%) and a list of tweets on the right. Immediate awareness of all your mates watching the game elsewhere... an extended social experience based on shared viewing.
4b) home dashboard. Imagine the TV having 2 stand-by states, one being a home dashboard in which the screen goes into a low-power screen saver type state (utilising a low-power palette for the device and dimly lit) and on this dashboard information from which appliances are on and using power, where your family members are (via Latitude), what you have in the fridge and cupboards and some suggested recipes, the weather for the next 6 hours, local transport information, your unread email counts, google voice, shit... throw in Skype and use a high def web cam built into the TV so that full room video conferencing has arrived for home use.
And what did they present? Chrome browser within a TV at a touch of a button and the most primitive screen-in-screen I think I've ever seen.
I'm just, argh! Google, FFS! Hire me and let me run riot in doing the right thing here, this is an idea whose time has come and right now you deserve to be beaten to the post because the offering is under-whelming and doesn't yet offer anything that having an XBox, PS3, Apple TV or even just a bog standard media centre cannot offer.
Heh, enough of the rant. I'm just passionate about the potential here and was ready to be blown away. I hope the finished product leaps on from this and blows me away.
But without details, we just don't know. I'd rather see segmentation and cross-over of apps by device. A twitter TV app as I've described is silly on the phone, and a real time navigation app doesn't make the greatest sense on the TV (unless someone wants to do a fly-by of a potential holiday destination using street view).
Love the browser demo; you can’t read a single word shown on-screen. Massive UI fail in trusting normal websites to be TV-friendly! This is why AppleTV has had its own YouTube browser for years now. Heck, the Google TV demonstrator has to manually start fullscreen mode on YouTube. She mentions LeanBack as an alternative UI, and describes it as "intuitive." Have you tried it? I have. I couldn’t figure it out. It is exactly the opposite of intuitive.
Edit: Irrelevant comment: The demo starts with Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, a terrible movie based off a great book? Interesting Google chose an antithesis of (Jobs-founded) Pixar for their demo.
true, it had little to do with the book, but i don't fault it for that.
The key elements they've got right as I see it is that it's based on HDMI passthrough, so you're not switching between HDMI (or other) inputs and back again which is a major stumbling block for my family, particularly as we control the cable with a remote that can change the TV volume but nothing else. With Google the picture slideshows, last.fm etc. just appear on top of the standard video signal and they appear to have IR blasters to pass through all kinds of controls to other devices, which is hacky but necessary unless you want to buy the entire ecosystem from your cable provider.
They're also building it into TVs and Blu-Ray players, which means one less control (and box) to worry about. Integration with iPhones/Android is something that geeks already do to various degrees (e.g. setting recordings while out and about, flicking through or searching your video library on your phone) but it's good to have it built in from the start, particularly with voice activation for finding that rarely used channel.
On the other hand searching the web while watching a program is something I do right now with my iPhone or netbook, so I don't really see the benefit of that, but then it kind of comes for free so why not?
Count me not impressed. Similar (and more featureful) stuff has been around in other OSS projects like MythTV and XBMC for years at this point.
Are there many non-techie users of XBMC/MythTV?
And anyway, ideas are worthless if execution is poor. if google creates an integrated seemless product then it doesn't really matter if XBMC has been doing it for 10 years or not. Its like saying that the (original) iPhone would be useless because other phones had had browsers/email/whatever for years. Apple executed better, thats all that mattered
It seems like a lot of folks are convinced there is a lot of great TV out there on the Internet and it's just a matter of finding it. That doesn't really seem to be true to me. Most quality content is rather short. Mr Deity and the like aren't really "curl up on the couch" TV. I don't want to surf, I want to be passively entertained. That means in half-hour chunks with high production values. You know, like the Networks tend to create.
For that you seem to have three real options:
1. Hulu 2. Netflix 3. Torrents
I'm not really into the hassle and dubious legal status of #3... but past that what's the point? Until there are folks truly producing great content, discoverability really isn't the issue is it? Yet isn't that what Google is trying to solve here? I just don't really get it.
Hulu: nope
Netflix: nope
Torrents: works
The other part is that she is no Steve Jobs. Marketing, and more specifically _believing_ in your product, makes all the difference.