No, it's not. Most YouTube users have a different primary music app.
Google is trying to artificially force a marriage of YouTube and YouTube Music because they have utterly failed to do it in the product experience and user base themselves.
If I'm watching a random YouTube video and then want to switch to music, I expect my music app to come up, not YouTube Music.
That being said, f*k Roku and their voice remote. They've been pushing that crap hard. Showing prompts on screen for upwards of 30 seconds to push the Mic button. I don't want my remote to have a microphone or be able to listen to me.
I replaced my Roku remote last month because the one I had started having connectivity issues and missing clicks all of the sudden. The first thing I did with the new remote was pop it open and rip the microphone off the PCB with a pair of pliers.
I really don't want an Android TV or Fire TV, and I'm not really keen on Apple TV either but Roku is making it really difficult to stick with them.
This is kind of thread drift, but I really agree with this. I wish products would stop trying to get me to use some particular feature. First, they cram it onto every screen in the application. Then, they make it easy to accidentally invoke when you didn't want to. Then, they spam you with notifications saying "PLEASE DON'T YOU WANT THIS FEATURE?" Then, they silently enable it and make it opt-out. Product Managers, please just stop this madness. I don't want your feature. I don't care that your bonus is tied to its use. I already bought your product, so you already have my money. But if you keep trying to cram your feature down my throat, I'm not going to buy your company's next product. Give it a rest!
Google itself is the worst offender in this. Turn off the Meet advertisement in Gmail for Android, and they literally pop open a giant comment box saying, "In 1000 words or less, please type in an excuse for why you disabled the giant Google Meet advertisement we plastered all over your Gmail accounts?"
Does this happen to you after the first launch of the app after an update? I find it terribly annoying as well. I would rather see a "New Feature Tips" or something similar as an icon notification that I can choose to review or not. The forced balloons stealing focus absolutely needs to die in a fire.
What is naturally intuitive to me is to go to an app and anywhere in that app have a voice search specific for that app, as Google is requesting of Roku.
If you're using a fullscreen app on macOS and activate spotlight, do you expect it to only search that app, or do you expect it to behave like Spotlight always behaves and search the entire system?
Put another way, this depends entirely on how the OS and UI is set up.
To make another analogy: Maybe Roku should ask Google to make the Chrome address/search bar only show Roku.com results if you’re already on their site.
Regardless of what you think is a better user experience, Roku has made a design decision and are sticking to it and aren't giving Google special treatment, so Google is threatening to take their ball and leave if they don't get what they want.
I only expect it to be localized within the app I'm in when I'm in the search box for that app, in which case I'm not using voice search, I'm using voice recognition to fill in the contents of the search bar.
Outside the context of voice recognition for an input, to me clicking the voice button on my apple TV is opening Siri, just like "Ok Google" or "Hey Alexa"
Monopolists can often have batter products as well as charging monopolistic pricing.
I guess the question is, who is the developer in this case? The Youtube App is running on the Roku Platform accessing the Google Platform. Both Roku and Google are acting in both roles.
The Roku Voice Search is weird, it's surfaced via a button alongside local media controls which are contextual but Roku appears to want their Search to be analogous to Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant as a platform level tool. The volume, and mute keys are the only other buttons that behave at a platform level. The Roku Home button is contextual.
As a user of a STB, if I search (voice or otherwise) I expect it to be contextualized. If I'm in an App then the search should be localized, if I'm at the home screen then I expect it to be global.
Which begs the question: who, is _the_ developer? I think the argument can be convincingly made that both Roku and Google are “the” developer. It seems to be the fundamental disagreement underlying every modern accusation of antitrust.
Trying to think of analogies for this “dual developer” framework from the analog world and it’s difficult to come up with one that isn’t in a heavily regulated industry. Airplane & engine manufacturers maybe? Certainly no one would say Rolls Royce is the “manufacturer” of a plane but I would expect they still exercise some degree of control over what plane manufacturers can change and do to the engine. If planes with Rolls Royce engines started falling out of the sky it would be bad for business regardless of whether it was Boeing or Airbus’s doing. But the same can also be said for Boeing and Airbus. Probably more so.
Regardless, I worry the most recent claims of antitrust violation aren’t about consumer protection (as antitrust was intended) so much as they’re about consumer control.
Your airplane engine analogy doesn't really work; Roku doesn't want to modify the YouTube app; this is purely Roku's own global search feature. Yes, it will aggregate results from the YT app, but Roku doesn't want to modify that data source. Further, the Rolls->Boeing/Airbus relationship is more like a vendor->purchaser arrangement, which is nothing like the Roku->Google relationship here.
Google as an example. They push their "sensor fusion" location service EXTREMELY hard on Android. It will ask you to turn it on every time an app requests location and GPS hasn't locked. It's hard to not turn it on by accident. And once you hit yes, you never see another notification.
Well it turns out this "location service" provides some of the most valuable data Google ever receives. It's tied to their maps live traffic, "how busy is this place" features, location based advertising, wifi based mapping, accuracy of their IP->location maps.
It's creepy data core to their business and if too many people turned it off, it would seriously degrade their mass data collection.
Oh, and it's often given to law enforcement for dubiously legal "area" warrants where they simply say "give me all devices in this radius at this time". Where the radius can be hundreds of meters and the time can be hours.
More than anything else, this particular piece of strong-arming makes me completely distrust stock Android handsets. It's shocking to me how casually the boundary of location privacy was violated, and it doesn't inspire confidence in any of the other privacy boundaries.
After warranty ends I flash Lineage and run location spoofing.
It sounds like they have been pushing too hard, but discovery of voice commands is hard. Pushing them is probably useful for some set of customers.
For example, I have an ATV. While watching something you can click the voice button and say something like 'what did he just say' and it will go back 30 seconds or so, turn on captions, replay the bit you missed, then turn captions back off. As a user how would one discover this amazingly useful feature? I didn't even know it existed until I happened to hear about it on a podcast.
I love voice search on Roku. Typing things in with a d-pad and on-screen keyboard is horrendous. I think it's very fast, and I like that it shows me all the ways what I'm searching for is available.
I generally like the Roku experience better (a friend and I wrote some apps for it in the distant past), but we already had two Amazon sticks in the house, and we happened to go into an Amazon store recently to see what it was like, and the fire stick was cheap enough to be an impulse buy to replace the aging Roku in my bedroom. Not having HBO Max on Roku at the time played into that. I wonder how much that cost Roku.
Every other steaming device I’ve ever tried is riddled with ads, dark patterns, and slow slow SLOW performance.
I can understand the aversion to a $200 device just to watch some Internet TV but then I watch people making six figures pretend like a $50 Fire/Roku Stick is the best way to watch movies on their $2,000 LG OLED.
If I were buying a steaming device today I’d probably be evaluating the Apple TV against the Nvidia Shield.
Price being one thing but with how Apple recently demonstrated they can just take away all your movies with no recourse, I will pass
This is an answer to the question I was about to ask. Except for a MacBook Air that I used to run Linux on (but is now gathering dust) and a Mac Mini that I currently run Linux on, I own no Apple devices. I hear great things about the Apple TV, but don't really care to buy into that overall ecosystem to the degree that I assume is necessary to get full use out of the ATV. It's bad enough that Google has its fingerprints on so much of what I have, and I'm actively trying to reduce that, not replace it with another corporate overlord.
2. iTunes is part of Movies Anywhere just like all its competitors. Being “required” to purchase/rent movies through iTunes isn’t really ecosystem lock-in.
3. “Taking away your movies with no recourse” is not unique to Apple’s iTunes Movies service. This is a standard movie industry practice that can affect you regardless of provider. Using an iTunes competitor does not remove this flaw.
Apple offers a way to back up purchases. They never promised perpetual re-download ability. From their support site: “The only way to back up your purchased media is to download your purchases to your computer.”
I would guess that no other content store can promise anything better than that. Apple didn’t make the rules here, WB/Disney/Universal/Sony did.
Movies Anywhere doesn't exist outside of the US fwiw.
Personally I flat out don't trust Apple on content censorship, as I think the Apple TV UI is not very good.
I know I lose access on X, but how about on the other stores?
Also, how the heck does Movies Anywhere actually work? Say I buy a movie on iTunes, but then via Movies Anywhere watch it using the Fandango app on my TV.
Who pays for the bandwidth for that stream? Does Fandango just eat it, or behind the scenes does each company keep track of how much of their bandwidth was used for movies bought at each other company, and they periodically settle up for any imbalances?
I sold my Apple TV 4K and bought a Fire TV 4K and pocketed the difference. The Fire TV does have slightly more stupid ads on the home screen for shit like McDonald's but the Apple TV would gladly advertise me shit to buy on iTunes. Slightly more relevant ads maybe but still ads. Otherwise it does everything I did with the Apple TV plus works better with my Echos plus has Firefox for watching random vids on the web. Also the Fire TV doesn't suffer from the maddening Netflix bug that made the interface slow to a crawl if browsing for 5 minutes.
The new Apple TV just announced has a much better looking remote
The new remote looks alright. Knowing Apple it's probably still too thin and easily slipped through couch cushions.
I think that must be how you configure it? The too banner does not show that for me - it grabs the shows I e been watching from infuse tv and. Puts them there
You can also side load unofficial youtube apps, which are much better than the actual youtube app on the chromecast.
The LG OLED tv os was missing some services, like HBO, but it stutters less.
The only thing missing from all of these devices is a backlit remote. I don't know why they're against the concept.
I can understand "overpriced", but on the other hand, the apparently-not-out-of-date chromecast stutters? WTF.
Also, I know many will disagree, but...no headphone jack. I don't like bluetooth earphones.
There are directional buttons, trackpad swipes, and a classic iPod-like fast forward and rewind touch gesture. Mute button and TV power buttons now included.
In some not too distant Black Mirror future, that would cause the remote to no longer function.
And after all this research, voice control is still primitive and limited, and its capabilities are impossible for a user to discover. If I want to search my E-mail for a message from a colleague about Project Abc, can I do this through voice control, or do I need to type into a search box? I could try voice control, and when it fails because it doesn't know what I want it to do (or it punts me to a generic web search), now I just wasted my time and feel silly for talking to a computer that doesn't understand me.
One that understands "Google, set a timer for 5 minutes" as well as "Siri, remind me to call X tomorrow" and "Alexa, start Y on the TV in the living room"
Users voted with their wallet and bought a Roku, then explicitly defined their preference in the settings.
Google then says fuck you, no.
Exactly. If I setup my music profile to be Spotify, and I have a Spotify premium account, I expect my device to play music on Spotify. Why should it play on Youtube?
I for one don't use YT Music, but to use YT. Then again I don't use Pandora or Spotify as well, but do listen to music on YouTube (non-music). In my case, I'd expect the search to be executed in the context of YT, but that's what the defaults are there for. I'd choose YT (non-music) as default, if that's possible, or YT Music if i'd care.
Yes, somehow it does make sense that it selects the app which is set as a default, even if I would expect it to perform the query in the opened app.
Can it act upon "Open Song/Performer in Pandora/Spotify"? What's so hard about it? It all doesn't make sense to me.
I'd expect it not to query in YT Music but in the app which is currently open, which is simple YouTube. No, it feels like Google shouldn't have the right to expect YT Music to get launched if it is not set as the default app.
Umm what? Why is it google's responsibility to ensure their youtube music video is linked to spotify's audio song listing?