TV: Now What? | Hacker News Reader

TV: Now What?

commonsware.com

80 pointsingve159 comments

The fragmentation is both a flaw and a feature. It means we have diversity in media vendors, at the cost of a pretty high cognitive load to just watch something… which app is it on? What’s the account login? Search the device main search, then go to each app and do its own individual search. All while dodging ads and autoplay and “what’s new” and “for you.”

It sucks for users. But it also sucks for developers, who have to maintain multiple apps for multiple platforms, even multiple generations per platform. And this affects users too, when a version of an app eventually gets dropped because the developer decides it’s too costly to maintain.

The diversity and competition is good, but there’s got to be a better way. The AppleTV platform makes some effort to bridge the gaps, but apps have to play along, and many decide to roll their own instead of using the provided APIs, complaining about the APIs not letting them do what they want to do the way they want to do it. To which I say, getting all these apps to do something in a consistent way is the point.

But whatever. I’m in no hurry to go back to huge cable bills. We told the industry to get on board with streaming if they don’t want piracy, and they did, so now here we are. Instead of digging through BitTorrent and newsgroups, we are juggling apps. ¯\_(°_o)_/¯

“Huge cable bills” - we’re already back there. Netflix is $23, Apple TV just increased to $10c Disney+ is now $14, Hulu is $20, Max is $16, Paramount is $10, Peacock is $6.

You can easily spend $100 /mn on streaming services.

Prices have been creeping up (and Netflix is the worst offender). But, if you can live without live TV and can do without that one show on such and such a service, it's still a pretty good deal relative to the cable TV bundle especially if you also had one or two premium stations/streaming services like HBO.

$7.99 in 2010 is $11.27 today. The remaining $4.22 delta is reasonable given that their business model has changed from purely licensing with zero competition to being locked out of popular content and forced to produce their own.

Oh, I understand the reasons. It's just one of services where my monthly payments are yellow to red on my radar. I keep them but it's on the bubble.

And now the actors unions and writers unions are going to get more money from streaming.

No one says you have to subscribe to ALL of the streaming platforms at once.

If cost is an issue, pick 1 or 2 services, watch the shows you’re interested in, then cancel those and pick 1 or 2. Rince and repeat.

You have choice with this approach and you don’t need every service offered.

While perhaps a nominal iteration of improvement, cable was this way too. You didn’t have to have the $100 /month service package. There was always the $30 /mo basic cable (no guide box).

The industry simply recycling its business model in new delivery methods is a valid complaint/perception.

I didn't have a guide box--had a TiVo from pretty early on--and I was still over $100/month before my HBO monthly fee.

the last base package I subscribed to was $80

The problem with cable was you couldn't have 'basic cable + FX' or 'basic + AMC' it was $30 for lame selection of mostly crap and then $80 - $100 for anything better.

But! With cable, if you didn't buy the upper tier packages, you may have missed out on some great shows/networks (e.g., HBO). And cable companies often use contracts to make downgrading expensive. With streaming services, cancelling after you've binge watch the shows you're interested in comes with no penalty.

> cancelling after you've binge watch the shows you're interested in comes with no penalty.

...for now. We'll certainly see these kinds of shenanigans before too much longer. Take ads. They're creeping in to paid subscriptions now - despite the fact that an allure of online streaming is that you can pay not to see them.

Where there's the possibility of a revenue play, it will happen eventually.

There’s a ceiling on how much pain they can put people through. Too much, and it’s back to piracy. That’s the difference now. Back in the cable days people didn’t have that option.

There's a ceiling but I'm not sure an annual subscription is that. And if a random person feels they have to pirate a random show because they don't care about anything else on a given service, that's in the noise.

I'm pretty sure the percentage of people doing the binge/subscription change dance is pretty small.

Mind boggling that someone can compare the utility to cost ratio of cable/satellite TV requiring contracts and installations to on demand libraries of near unlimited content with instant sign up and cancel abilities on every device.

Exact opposite of a “nominal iteration”.

There is on paper and in practice. Yes, streaming has a ton of content… you still watch a handful of things because there is far more noise than signal.

The noise is far easier to avoid since I have on demand access to exactly what I want to watch when and where I want to watch it. The situation is objectively much better than it was during cable/satellite TV days.

The tech industry's definition of "disruption" has been pretty clearly validated by now as "undercut established players then appropriate their business models with little innovation". Streaming is a change from syndicated programming but introduces its own issues.

But you couldn’t just choose a single channel aside from the premium channels.

You cannot pick only Star Wars from Disney+ either. Or Orange Is The New Black from Netflix.

You can buy “Orange is the New Black” and Star Wars from iTunes…

Or you can pay for one month, binge and cancel your subscription to each without a contract

You are a power user. Less savvy people can’t or won’t figure this out

Really? Only power users can search on an iPhone and click on a link and go to the TV app or is it only power users who know how to subscribe and cancel a subscription?

And only power users search Google for “Orange is the New Black” and click on “How to Watch”?

yes, switching between Netflix and Disney plus actually is difficult. usually, people just give up to use it.

People have become accustomed to using apps since 2008. I assure that most people - including my 80 year old dad - knows how to switch applications.

You are incredibly cocky and arrogant.

I would say that you are incredibly insulting to most people if you think they can’t use apps in 2023 after a decade and a half of smart phone usage

You are very inexperienced I can tell and it is obvious from your immaturity, cockiness and arrogance

Hint: it’s not hard to figure out my approximate age from my user name…

"Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it."

-George Bernard Shaw

unfortunately, my father know this, but I just give up to watch TV.

Yes, the interfaces are clunky, different and confusing. That’s why people despite the cost eventually liked cable because it is an inclusive bundle.

Well, there is evidence that you are incorrect seeing both the published growth in streaming services and the decline of the number of people who have cable…

You are technically correct however that does not work easily in practice. It is easy to forget. It’s not auto opt out.

And the commercials are coming within a decade.

Disney + just added them to the plan I already paid for the next 12 months for when it didn’t have ads and I had no idea they were a part of the deal

How much TV do you watch??? If we're lucky we can squeeze 90 minutes a day in before bed. We have netflix, get prime video free with prime, and now that we have a toddler, we have Disney+. That's about $40 but there are NO ADS. If it's not on Netflix of Prime (or Disney+) we just don't watch it. There aren't enough hours in the day to go explore random series on Hulu, Paramount, Peacock. HBO Max has been a fucking disaster of a service for several years and runs like garbage on my TV. We cancelled it days after Game of Thrones ended.

I'm in the same boat. I maybe average an hour per day. I probably subscribe to at least one more service than I would if I were really optimizing. There's very little that I feel that I really need to watch. And I can always buy a la carte or even buy a DVD. I do without live TV but that's OK. I canceled my cable TV when I realized I hadn't watched anything on my TiVo in over two months.

The fragmentation is a phase until the industry matures. Take a look at other industries, like woodworking. They have established practices which don’t change much.

The software industry has so much potential I don’t expect it to mature for another hundred years. Although some patterns are emerging, like strong typing and universal cross-platform runtimes (most notably Web).

Yes because cross platform frameworks like Electron and before that Java Spring were the bees knees

There's enormous incentive for somebody to create a tool that actually lets you "write once, run everywhere" by automatically compiling your code to the right format for every platform. This would dramatically reduce development time for companies that have to support multiple platforms which means they'd be willing to pay a substantial sum of money for it.

You already kind of have something along those lines with game development where (I believe) the most popular engines like Unreal and Unity can export to every popular gaming platform. Web development also allows that which is why everything is becoming a web site. But native apps have significant performance advantages over something like Electron that bundles a web site and a browser. Currently, there is no way that I'm aware of to generate a true native app with the correct look and feel for the platform and reasonably optimized for every platform from the same code but there should be.

There is Tauri. Afaik it’s like Electron but doesn’t bundle a browser and instead uses the existing “native” browser on the system. This means you can have 100 Tauri apps and they won’t be any more performance intensive than having 100 open browser tabs.

> The fragmentation is both a flaw and a feature

It’d be purely a feature if we banned shared ownership of distribution and production, like we did with movie studios and movie theaters for decades.

This is monumentally a bad idea. Do you really want to ban all producers from being able to distribute their own goods and depend on middlemen?

Whether you know it or not, since the 1930s things have changed, TVs are popular, there is this thing called the internet and websites.

Do you also want to ban software developers and song writers from being able to publish their own work on websites?

> Do you really want to ban all producers from being able to distribute their own goods and depend on middlemen?

Yes.

> Whether you know it or not, since the 1930s things have changed, TVs are popular, there is this thing called the internet and websites.

So?

> Do you also want to ban software developers and song writers from being able to publish their own work on websites?

Maybe. It doesn't appear to be a problem yet, but if it is then let's pursue that option.

You agree with the fact that iOS developers must go through the App Store? Would you want it to be illegal for you to distribute any content you produce and for you to have to go through a middle man?

Does that also mean if that I wanted to create my own Indy movie I couldn’t sell it on my own website?

How does it help the consumer for all content to have to go through a middle man where they get a cut?

And it matters because the law was there in the thirties when the only way to get movie content out was via the movie theaters. Now anyone can publish content

> You agree with the fact that iOS developers must go through the App Store? Would you want it to be illegal for you to distribute any content you produce and for you to have to go through a middle man?

I mean, honestly, having app stores be separate from the phone maker sounds like a great idea. The monopoly that apple has on the app store is harmful to both producers and consumers of apps.

> Would you want it to be illegal for you to distribute any content

Isn't this already effectively the case in the phobe market? Not illegal per se, but practically speaking impossible.

That’s not what you’re saying. You’re saying that a content producer should never be allowed to distribute on their own site and that you as a software developer, author, music producer, etc should not be allowed to distribute your own work.

I don't think anyone is saying that.

Just because an extreme version of an idea is way too much, doesn't mean the more moderate versions are without merit.

What is a non extreme version of not letting content producers distribute thier own content and where do you draw the line?

Line would be drawn at operating a distribution business for profit. That wouldn't prevent you from putting your own stuff on your own website.

Other ideas in this vein include things like requiring non-discrimantory licensing agreements (no "netflix" only licenses)

So now no content producer is ever allowed to sell thier own content on thier own website?

That's correct. You have it nailed down. Any regulations that can be conceptualized are exactly what you say they are. We decided to make child labor illegal so now there are no children working on family farms, no children working in their family stores, and everyone under 18 is not allowed to work at all. We mandated safety in workplaces so now every person has to wear a respirator and a hard hat even in office jobs. Your obviously completely honest arguments are completely right and there is no room at all for anything but the most extreme possible position.

I am still waiting where do you draw the line and tell someone that they can’t sell the content that they produce on thier own website?

You got an answer two comments up that you ignored.

You didn’t come up with concrete guidelines for when the content creator should not be allowed to sell content on their own site. Are we also going to block foreign content owners from selling their content to US citizens?

You haven’t thought through the consequences of giving the government more power in limiting what people can do on the web.

I have no opinion on this as it is not currently a problem and it is not relevant.

> Does that also mean if that I wanted to create my own Indy movie I couldn’t sell it on my own website?

Just like you can create your own movie and show it at your own venue, so can you sell it on your website. However studios cannot own movie theaters and should not own their own distribution platforms. Taking something and mincing it down to the smallest iteration and using that to prove that it is wrong is either obtuse or dishonest.

> How does it help the consumer for all content to have to go through a middle man where they get a cut?

Should drug companies own pharmacies? What about hospitals?

At a certain point it is not good for the consumer to let manufacturers control the distribution of their product.

So you are saying that producers should not be able to distribute their own content? Are you saying that no one should be able to produce their own video and sell it themselves?

So I can distribute my own video on my own website. So what if I get together with a group of college friends and we decide to sell our movies on a website we jointly own, should that be illegal?

If I am a news organization and do a show of re-enactments of true crime like CNN Headline News and sell it as a subscription, should that be illegal too?

And why just video producers? Should song writers also not be allowed to distribute those own content? Writers? Software developers?

Wouldn’t it be considered a violation of free speech if I wasn’t allowed to produce a video and distribute it myself?

Are you saying if I create a video on my phone I shouldn’t be allowed to sell it on my own website? I’m a producer and a distributor.

And now studios can own movie theaters…

https://www.dallasobserver.com/arts/studios-can-now-own-movi...

Ignoring your irrelevant hypotheticals for which I am not arguing, why is having distribution channels controlled by the content owners beneficial? At this point there is no way for a third party to license content from enough content owners because of cross licensing deals and their ownership of competing platforms. So there can be no place where one can watch a diverse selection like netflix used to be. Is this good for consumers? Do you think the content owners even want it?

It’s not a hypothetical. You are saying that the government should outlaw content producers from distributing their own content.

How do you define content producers and are you going to force them to allow anyone to distribute their content?

Are you going to apply the same standards to all content producers?

There was never a time that Netflix had the majority of the top content - especially movies

Sure you can watch all of the content you want just like you always did - you pay for it.

Proposing something is one thing and having the final laws and regulations ready for you to dissect are another. Is it not possible to say 'this is a good idea' without having it taken to the most extreme possible point and then required to split hairs over hypotheticals?

Are you arguing for a consumer first perspective or an ideological one? Because if you care about consumers you are not approaching dialog in any way that seems proactive to that. If it is ideological then your motive is just to win based on a belief that you are right. One of those things is productive and one is not.

I am simply saying that you come up with a proposal where the government tells content producers that they can’t distribute the content they create on their own website and where do you think is a reasonable place to draw the line on content?

Should the government also set mandatory licensing requirements for content and the amounts? Should the government force Disney to license a $100 million to produce marvel movie at the same cost as a $5 million Blumhouse movie?

Come up with a reasonable proposal where the government doesn’t allow you to distribute your own content.

It would be better for consumers if productions were available through more outlets rather than fewer, so yes.

You didn’t answer the question , are you really saying that it should be illegal for any content producer to distribute their own content on their own website?

I’m assuming you would apply those same standards to software developers, writers, song writers and any video content?

Why would you assume any of that? So it’s easier to dismiss the notion?

So which content producers are you going to tell it’s illegal to distribute their own content on their own website?

Film and tv studios. Selling is fine, but no rental or subscription streaming. Basically the same as the no-owning-movie-theaters rule. Idea’s to force streaming services to compete on service quality, not content exclusivity.

So what qualifies as a studio is any content producer a studio? And now you’re going to make a law that says content creators can’t sell subscriptions to their content? Does this also count for OnlyFans?

Why is video special? Why only say video producers can’t have subscriptions to their own content but writers can?

And the law that you are referring to is no longer a thing

Seems like the easy answer is not to remove anyone’s ownership over their own content or their rights to distribute it on their own or however they want, but rather to also force them to release on something central as well.

Would you also “force” software makers to distribute their content - including GPL software?

Also who determines the terms for which licensing agreements have to be made? Does that apply to all video producers?

I don’t agree with forcing anyone to do anything with something they have created.

It just seemed like that’s what they were asking for as a consumer.

No it wouldn't. The distribution businesses would still want to buy things exclusively from the production businesses.

It would literally make no difference whatsoever.

I wonder if anyone is saving statistics on torrent traffic. It was huge in the 00s, then dropped as streaming became a thing.

Now that the companies are back to rent-chasing (it's abhorrent that some of them still show ads even when you pay), it would be interesting to see what the numbers look like. Could be cool to compare to music, because Spotify and Pandora have been relatively not scummy.

I'd love to see the feds step in and force content providers to make their content available to anyone willing to make a compliant (sorry, DRM likely required)frontend. I should be able to buy content from, say, Paramount using Hulu and not be forced to use Paramount's app.

It’s called a web browser.

You are free to connect a PC to your TV now.

The answer is streaming sites like SFlix

I would like to see a standardized streaming protocol be developed. That way there can be a market for the client side (different apps that organize content you've subscribed to) and for the server side (like web servers are commodities). It would eliminate content providers having to roll their own streaming back ends and front end apps for so many platforms.

> I would like to see a standardized streaming protocol be developed.

Like... HLS?

> It would eliminate content providers having to roll their own streaming back ends and front end apps for so many platforms.

Oh you mean metadata. Forget it. We built a live streaming service specializing in classical works (opera, ballet...), and even within that tiny particular niche, nobody can agree what "standardized" metadata should look like.

Yeah more than HLS. It would need to handle authentication and authorization such as is the user subscribed and what content is available them that they may have purchased a la carte. It would need listing of available content for search and indexing by the client. Presumably the major forms of content are standalone (ie movies), series which are a collection of content broken up into seasons, and potentially live streams. Finally it needs a way to purchase new content.

The industry is standardized enough to agree on distribution formats (VHS, DVD, etc) and to have awards for different established categories and video rental companies used to be able to organize their collections well enough. I want studios to handle distribution, that is operating a streaming farm for their content, and get out of owning the storefront. I want a digital Blockbuster type experience with everyone's content commingled. No having to go to the Disney store, and the HBO store, and the Paramount store and oh last month this content was on Netflix and now I can't find it because it's on Amazon this month.

In the system we built, some content was live, some was VOD, some was covered by subscription, some could be purchased individually, some was free (sponsored by a patron org that needed attribution), some was available all year round and some only for a very limited period.

On top of that we supported purchases/subscriptions on every major mobile/TV platform and then some - all shared, so when you paid on AppleTV, you could watch it on the web, etc. This included working around platform-specific brain damage, e.g. on Amazon FireTV you can only offer VOD content purchases through Amazon's own catalogue. This also included interoperating with local vendors running the most oddball systems you'd ever witness.

Because of this complexity (which "only" reflected real-world streaming rights deals), we needed a hero UX designer and tight collaboration between frontend, backend, video, and design teams. Forget devops, we have VideoOps.

If you think you can draft a standard that covers each and every possible case, I will happily rate it - the measurement unit is blood sweat and tears. If it gets a 10/10, I will personally rewrite every part of our system to comply - no joking.

> It means we have diversity in media vendors, at the cost of a pretty high cognitive load to just watch something… which app is it on?

So do you have a YouTube, Spotify, and an apple music sub?

When it comes to music, I'm not sure I've once thought "which app?"

The only reason the consumer has to think about it is greed.

For something like this, I'm not sure I'll ever buy a streaming device with a JavaScript interface. Steam has one, and it's slower than the old one by far.

Who am I kidding, I'm not gonna buy it because I don't need Amazon "sidewalk"

The 2nd and 3rd generation AppleTV “apps” were just web pages running on the WebKit engine. They were really responsive and better standardized.

> huge cable bills

now we have to pay for the internet + streaming service(s)

and most "big" internet providers keep increasing their prices.

The answer is mandatory licensing. Maybe permit some limited ability to offer a very narrow window of exclusivity (weeks, not years) in exchange for getting a lower rate later (because we should treat attempts to wall off parts of shared culture as a an antisocial act, rather than a nifty business model.)

Every platform can have everything, at a predictable standardized rate card, so they can compete on their own merits:

* We have the best CDN/apps/software support * We have a better recommendation/discovery experience (which could include "positive curation" like "we could license everything, but our niche is Namibian Sitcoms From 1983, so we won't") * We'll cut corners (lesser encoding quality to save disc/bandwidth, or no bespoke speculative content creation) to deliver the cheapest possible experience.

The "content people" and "tech people" come from different universes with different skills and expectations, and having to wrangle the two into individual platform teams helps nobody.

Plex, Jellyfin, LibreELEC, Kodi... those are the best solutions for those wanting to manage their own destiny and TV experience.

You can run them on practically anything and there are Tiny PCs, stick-form-factor Raspberry Pi devices (like CM4 TV Stick), and other silent small boxes you can attach to a TV for a thin client interface or just a shared media library / TV experience.

It'd be nice if Amazon, Apple, Netflix, et all had integrations though, besides wrapping a browser window.

> Plex, Jellyfin, LibreELEC, Kodi... those are the best solutions for those wanting to manage their own destiny and TV experience.

As long as one produces their own content, right?

Correct me if I am wrong, but hasn’t it been found (In the US) that making a digital copy of a DVD you own totally okay?

Correct. Personal archival is protected under fair use. [1]

1. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23...

Personal archival isn't exempt anymore, that dropped some years ago. The only archival exemption now is for "qualifying institutions".

You have a source on that? I can't find anything - so as far as I can tell you're just spreading misinformation.

I mean just read through the link above. You'll find no exemption for personal use when it involves bypassing DRM. Which I don't think any DVD or blu-ray anymore lacks.

I'm also reasonably sure that "3. Proposed Class 6: Audiovisual Works—Space-Shifting" in the above link would cover personal archival and that was explicitly rejected.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still all for it, but it's not permitted anymore like it used to be.

Correct (as long as you don't distribute it), but not all content is available on DVDs, and many things come to DVDs much later than they are available elsewhere.

That said, there is a _less legal_ solution to those problems...

Unfortunately not. The exemption dropped some years ago.

Sure, and the "water pipe" they sell on the boardwalk is for "tobacco use only".

Let's be honest, most people use this software to serve up their library of pirated content. The number of people who are even still buying physical media is relatively tiny. That is why retailers like Best Buy are abandoning that market. The population of people who buy that physical media and then manually rip it has to be miniscule.

Quick side note on Best Buy abandoning selling physical media, the cashier at Best Buy said they'll probably just throw the rest of their stock in the trash when they stop selling them in early 2024. So if anyone is interested in some free blu-rays and doesn't mind dumpster diving...

Those all have apps for Netflix and others, as well as video on demand.

what do you think

What exactly are you implying? You think I can't rip a Blue-Ray or DVD?

No, just pirate. I can kind of understand why people started giving Netflix money for the convenience, despite that supporting an industry desperately trying to destroy the Internet. But now with a thousand and five different "services", continually squeezing users for more revenue, digital restrictions management that makes perfectly good hardware stop working, and ever more surveillance telemetry in the various apps and devices? Rent an off the shelf seedbox, or set up your own with a consumer VPN, and don't think twice. Consider it just another "service" and see if it wins out in your life. And if down the line you end up deciding it doesn't work well for you, you still get to keep access to everything you've obtained!

So instead of just paying a few bucks a month I’m going to go through the trouble of trawling the internet to find a good torrent and then set up my own Plex server (been those done that) - alternative I can just open an app and not think about it.

Judging by the various threads on this topic, the current streaming reality isn't "a few bucks" and it actually involves quite a lot of cognitive overhead (exactly when you just want to be relaxing!). Neither do you have to go "trawling" for torrents - public trackers/catalogs easily get you the contemporary zeitgeist and its back catalog. But sure, keep on enjoying the simulated liberation of the corporate sandbox. My comment was meant for those on the fence.

It's funny you mention that. Convenience is exactly why I switched to piracy earlier this year.

To watch content legally, I first have to work out who owns the rights in Australia (it can be different to the US, and often changes - e.g. last time I watched The Terminator it was on Netflix but now it's on Amazon Prime), see if I have that app (I'm not signing up to an app to watch one film, even if it were free it's not worth the bullshit), and if not pick a different film and start the whole process again. It's worse for TV shows, where season 1 could be exclusive to Netflix but seasons 2-7 are only on Stan.

To pirate content, I open the Elementum tab in Kodi, type in what I want to watch, and 20 seconds later it's directly streaming from the bittorrent network in fantastic HD quality.

Elementum is a plugin for Kodi, works great.

These days you get a much worse service if you pay[0].

Can't make that shit up.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4GZUCwVRLs

This is, unfortunately, a point very much tied to the region you live in. In my region, even if I pay the same price as the users from US, not only do I pay much more in terms of percentage of my income, but I also get just a fraction of the content available.

Imagine, I'd want to watch some Doctor Who for example, there's exactly zero streaming services offering the show in my country.

For a while now there are services out there (usually on discord) who will rent you a plex container hooked up to a ridiculous size media library (I’ve seen multiple in the 1.5 PB+ range) with basically everything from every streaming service , Bluray, or DVD in the original bit for bit download, just sans-DRM

This is probably going to catch on more and more - it’s not free, you have to pay, but! - it’s $10 a month for everything like Spotify

Popcorn Time is "just an app" too.

I've never understood this idea of good torrents being hard to find. TPB has been around for a long time.

To me the biggest frustration is that they can and will pull content with no warning or notification. So you are always gambling whether or not the thing you want to watch will appear, even if you've watched it dozens of times already. Personal digital collections do not have this problem.

Archive.org has vast amounts of video; from public domain through "that's not supposed to be here."

There's lots of other sources too.

I'm curious now, can you give an example of one of the 'that's not supposed to be here' things?

cheerfully!

Here's 3 examples of movies of Cultural Import * that are copyrighted and technically, probably shouldn't be there. But they're unavailable, or hard to find; possibly outlawed in some places.

I'm quite grateful to someone for taking the trouble to find, digitize, and upload these classics, and that archive.org can host them.

+ I'll leave it to you to figure out what the "cultural import" is in each case here. As with all Art, it's certainly debatable.

https://archive.org/download/rollerblade/rollerblade.mp4

https://archive.org/download/flesh-gordon-1974_20220429/Fles...

https://archive.org/download/barbarella_202110/Barbarella.mp...

Since all of these streaming platforms are available on the browser, it should be trivial to run this through a pc/pi even without API support, if a little cumbersome. SHould also run faster than the ad-ridden software on Firestick/Chromecast/Apple-tv.

A PC will work fine for general viewing but might be a problem for those looking for more advanced features, e.g. Dolby Vision.

Apple TV has a few things one may consider “ads”, but they’re limited to promotion of Apple’s own shows (no third parties) and can be done away with by simply ignoring the stock TV app and moving it off the top row of the home screen where it’ll never get highlighted. They haven’t bothered me personally, and my Apple TV 4K working flawlessly since buying it in 2017 is worth that tiny tradeoff.

I've been looking into Apple TV 4K boxes as an alternative to Roku --- I'm sick of their ads baked into the UI --- and I've read in a couple places online that if you put the Photos app in first position of the top bar you'll get a slideshow of whatever photos are in there instead of promos for a particular app's shows.

Is that so?

It'd definitely put me across the line into switching. With Jellyfin now supported with the native Swiftfin app it'd have everything I need.

Yeah, that’s correct. Only apps in the top row that are highlighted can display content on the home screen and the leftmost app is highlighted at boot/wake.

I don’t have any experience with Jellyfin+Swiftfin but Infuse has worked well with my Plex server.

As a sidenote, to test this I woke the the old 2015 Apple TV HD that the 4K model replaced and to my surprise it’d updated itself to the latest tvOS and still runs smoothly. Not bad for an 8 year old device, and no doubt in better shape than most competitors of a similar age.

The Jellyfin user experience would be a ton better if the client app for the iphone/ipad actually took advantage of local playback instead of relying on transcoding. Random seeks, rewinds, and especially subtitles timing are all better if the client is just accessing a file stream. This is especially true as the codecs change and the on-NAS GPUs fall behind due to the lifecycle differences.

iphone/ipad would be a ton better if you could install kodi on it.

Can you not disable transcoding on the iOS version of Jellyfin?

Run the Infuse client and point it to your Jellyfin instance.

SwiftFin seems to do the job, but this is also a good suggestion.

Are you using SwiftFin? It is much better than the standard Jellyfin iOS app, I’ve never had any problems with it.

Shoutout to the FinAmp app for music, too.

This is awesome, no, I was not. Excellent suggestion.

You can’t run Plex well on just about anything if you need to support transcoding

So hear me out, I have this crazy idea.

For all the people who can't afford OTT services like hbo and Netflix and prime and apple tv, how about we remove all the excess IP overhead and send the mp4 over broadcast RF using a band like 700mhz from local hills or if need be make towers. We can pay by watching ads or something.

I mean sure, call me crazy, imagine everyone having to watch the news and movie at the same time, neat right? Wouldn't that be cool. Hell we could probably even send about 5 or so different signals out.

Last year, I puzzled over how to watch my local sports team of choice and got mired in questions about streaming services and local blackouts and licensing. Then I bought a ten dollar antenna for my TV.

I have line of sight to the Brisbane transmitters across the river such that I think I may have an attenuator on the antenna feeds.

I actually miss broadcast TV social norms. It was crap but we all talked about it. First release movies from last year at Christmas and a non stop feed of Hollywood B reels. Daytime soaps!

I only get 1 channel at my location: https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps

Please consider accessibility while you're building this. The number of TV apps which don't use the Accessibility APIs is probably worse than on any other platform. Apple TV (as usual) is the best, but still has issues.

Granted, we're kind of Luddites, but my wife and I were going home from a social gathering, where some people were talking about the latest TV shows. My wife said to me: "I was embarrassed to admit it, but I don't know how to watch TV any more."

You made me realize that I grew up without cable and not having some or all the streaming services is basically the same. It doesn’t matter too much.

There's a Canadian company that tried to do this a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/user/YouiLabs

Not sure what's come of it since their cert at https://youi.tv is broken at the moment.

My experience with it was working at a big tv network who was trying to port all of their native tv apps over to this platform.

From what I recall:

It was a pain for designers because they had to retool their Sketch workflow to Adobe After Effects, which nobody liked. The idea was that the designer would design the view layer in AF and pass it along to the dev for integration. In retrospect, I think this was a mistake: developers should have been doing that from the beginning, as the workflow was similar to VBA or Storyboards and required intimate knowledge of how the view would be integrated into the code.

Most developers who worked with it loved it or hated it. It bridged the gap between platforms, but came at the cost of losing out on unique native platform features without writing complicated C++ bridging code on each platform.

The idea sounds solid at first, but you're really just trading one massive problem for another.

Server-driven UI is a thing that's been gaining traction in recent years.

To my knowledge, at least a few FAANG companies have adopted this for the reasons mentioned in the article (AirBnB, Lyft, Expedia)

https://github.com/csmets/Server-Driven-UI

There are a few frameworks that cater to this -- most of them are variations on an API that returns JSON describing view components and state/actions.

For instance, DivKit:

- https://github.com/divkit/divkit

- https://divkit.tech/playground

It's a decent idea IMO, though I have no personal experience with it. I guess time will tell whether it catches on at-large though.

This is hardly new in TV-land.

The second generation Apple TV's app runtime was all server-driven XML. TVMLKit is the "modern" replacement for this style of Apple TV app (mostly to make it easier to port I guess) https://developer.apple.com/documentation/tvmlkit

Archived example https://web.archive.org/web/20170813035144/http://trailers.a...

TV's "native" platforms are also similar, or just straight up HTML/CSS/JS.

I decompiled Apple TV's Android app when it first launched, and was surprised by how well made it was. Rather than rely on a WebView to parse markup and display a GUI as most other major media apps do, it integrated NodeJS for scripting, a native XML parsing library, and then drew the entire UI directly to the display as if it was a full screen video game. This allowed it to have smooth, consistent animations on hardware which choked on Chromium's bloated resource needs. It also let Apple have a cross platform UX without needing to rely on any of Android's native UI controls.

I was pretty astounded by its elegance, simplicity and power. Apple was able to build off the work they had already done for Apple TV and the end result was a compact and relatively straightforward application. I bet it's even easier to maintain than apps which use standard Android dev tools and libraries.

> Roku uses a proprietary language and UI toolkit

I thought Roku was originally based on Silverlight, but I may be misremembering. I can't find any source to validate that.

But Roku still quietly has the biggest market share in this space.

Brightscript is the name of their application language. Sounds similar enough to Silverlight to me. I bet it’s just a mix-up.

SceneGraph, the XML, UI-layout component of Roku development is similar to XAML from Silverlight; but BrightScript, the language, is much closer to a modified VB6 than anything .NET.

I know Netflix was def. Silverlight to begin with due to supporting DRM.

They use a language called BrigthScript that’s closest to Visual Basic. It was originally intended for digital signage. A few years back they “improved” it with XML crap that you have to use to describe public methods of your objects(!) and stuff. It was better before (docs and examples for old and new style exist).

Notable quirks include the XML companion files for code interface descriptions (in the newer SDK, anyway), and single = doing double-duty as assignment and comparison.

[edit] oh but my understanding is that big players get a different SDK with the ability to e.g. use C libraries, which is how they’re able to look & work so much like they do on other platforms.

With sufficient head-scratching and ingenuity it's possible to use BS to create a UI like the "big players" have. But yes, they get to do roughly what they want as I understand it - C and/or HTML/JS.

Quite annoying when, in this space, the most common requirement is "make it like Netflix".

As someone who's used BS & Silverlight, I would say they are not alike except very superficially (XML for layout - but Android also has that).

I'd have to look quite hard to find a language I like less than BrightScript, it's horrible.

The article is about what UI toolkits are used to build content apps for TVs and TV devices like FireTV/Apple TV, but I wish for a world where using those apps weren't my only options.

It'd be nice if TVs and streaming service apps were better participants in the open-protocol smart home. I'd like it to be possible to call an API on my TV from say Home Assistant to tell my TV to turn on, switch to Netflix, and play the next episode of a show - though honestly I'd settle for just control over linear TV channels and to be able to say 'switch to channel 55' at an API level and have it work cross-vendor without having to use their native app. Maybe you can do this with CEC and stick a little raspberry PI and stick it into the TV with HDMI, but the CEC content controls seem very limited.

Apple's got some kind of a start for this since they've got a way to feed data into Siri and their internal guide, including telling the AppleTV device what's currently playing and what should be considered 'up next' but they're all private APIs, I think, and only work if the content providers sign deals with Apple directly.

Maybe a future version of the Matter standard will incorporate media playback, right now I think it's just changing volume and pausing whatever's playing on a speaker, and so a long way from being able to control what the actual content being played is.

I would guess that you can do a LOT with VLC and a little bit of scripting ?

A standardized approach would also let you use the OS’ standard video player widget which is practically always and upgrade from whatever needlessly custom-rolled players streaming apps tend to use. In fact the entire reason I subscribe to some services via Apple TV channels rather than directly is so I can watch their content on the standard tvOS player and skip the official apps.

The thing is, apps for TVs work relativley well. If I could run something in an RPI that accepts infrared remote control as an input device and have run all the drm-y media services, and have it work reliably with low maintenance, I would much prefer that!

If Amazon makes their custom Linux OS open source and allow users to modify and update the fire tv sticks, that would be even better!

Amazon are double dipping - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38194818

Only consumer equipment company I “trust” are Apple.

If your TV supports CEC you'll be able to control your Raspberry Pi with your TV remote. It works perfectly with OpenELEC, I suspect other platforms are fine too.

Damn! This why I love HN! Thanks, I never heard of CEC before and will look into it.

No problem. Unfortunately every TV company has its own name for it (Anynet, Simplink, Bravia Sync) which doesn't make it obvious it's a proper standard.

A bunch of smart tvs already use react native so from the perspective of a developer that already has to support everything we don’t expect this to require a ton of work.

About 2/3 of our users are on some version of Android (which excludes fire tv) so will still be our most relevant target platform.

The pendulum swings back to server-side.

The thing is I'm not sure that people in general have a lot of issue with client-side fragmentation. It's more the content silos on the server side. But then people didn't like cable bundles either.

What if we ban subscriptions and have to pay per view? Of course that would be great for me because I watch one episode of one or two TV series per week when there is something I like to watch and then nothing for months. It would be probably bad for people that like to watch something every day, unless prices are substantially low or there are volume discounts. But a volume discount is more or less the definition of a subscription.

I kind of imagine a "toll road" style streaming service where the cost per minute or per view is told up front. Endless opportunity for dynamic pricing which is how the companies would justify the effort to implement such a model. Some offerings can be free through promotions or other means, and demand can be much more readily quantified on the supply side by calculating net profit.

I think YouTube runs as some kind of browser-based app on a lot of devices. Mainly due to fragmentation and development challenges but it also gives them a consistent environment to integrate custom codecs and DRM checks. The UI is pared down to be a convincing app.

This seems likely to me as well.

> To me, this level of fragmentation, coupled with the nature of content-centric TV apps, suggests that a server-defined UI approach might work well.

There still has to be some client side interface, an OS, a browser, thin client, I/O, some layer right?

Trying to thing of another example where a screen is just a dumb-as-can-be terminal

> Trying to thing of another example where a screen is just a dumb-as-can-be terminal

CarPlay and Android Auto come to mind.

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