Philips to drop Google TV for European-based Titan OS | Hacker News Reader

Philips to drop Google TV for European-based Titan OS

9to5google.com

40 pointspentagrama34 comments

I miss dumb tvs. Just give me the option for a dumb tv that i plug whatever "smart" device I need into. Something that is snappy and responsive. No one really uses the built in thing for long, everyone who can ways gets frustrated and opts for 3rd party eventually so now your tv just scrapes your data, draws more power, and offers nothing.

too bad noone is producing dumb tv with 4k oled tv with high refresh rate

When I bought a Sony TV, I was excited that it ran on Google TV because I thought Google would do software better than Sony could. Oh, how I was wrong. I have been so frustrated by the experience that I just got Apple TVs just so I could avoid having to navigate the molasses-slow interface chock-full of ads.

It's too late for you, but for others reading this: You can get rid of most ads on Android TV by enabling "Apps only mode".

The only downside to enabling this mode is that it's a bit more difficult to access the play store when you need it because they hide the home shortcut to it as a final f you.

When you need to install a new app you can still access it by going to settings -> apps -> show system apps -> scroll -> scroll more -> keep scrolling -> Google Play Store -> Open.

Honestly, I don't mind the ads as much. The interface is just so slow. You press a button and the TV does nothing. Then you press again but now the TV registers both clicks! Now you have to reverse the second click. Repeat over and over again. Ugh!

The frustrating thing about having so many "smart" TV OSes and streaming platforms is that it's basically guaranteed that I'll end up needing a dongle for at least one service anyway, because its app is not available for my TV.

And at that point, I can just get a dongle that supports everything, which defeats the point of having a smart TV in the first place.

Which is precisely why the death of good dumb TVs are the biggest tragedy of all of this.

I don’t WANT my TV to do the job of a computer. I want it to display whatever it is that the computer it is attached to is sending out via HDMI (I’d rather have DisplayPort but that’s another battle entirely).

I detest the idea of Smart TVs and it irks me to hell and back that they are the standard now. I just want TVs to be TVs, not entertainment centres.

I can theoretically really get behind the idea of avoiding the need for a dongle, and I'd love a TV that's usable without one. Personally I'm about 90% there, as the brand I've been using for the past few years is actually quite usable, and my dongle is seeing less and less use.

But practically, it seems like the economic reality means these systems will always be stacked against consumers. Nobody cares enough about an open ecosystem when making the purchase decision if it means a difference of more than a few dollars, so we end up with streaming service logos on the remote, exclusivity deals with a given TV brand etc.

From : https://docs.titanos.tv/introduction

"Titan OS is the European, independent Linux-based smart TV operating system from Titan OS S.L, the technology, entertainment, and advertising company based in Barcelona."

Also :

"Titan OS operates on a Chromium browser, offering support for standard audio and video codecs, streaming protocols, and DRM options"

I don't watch TV, but have a non-smart Samsung hooked up to a laptop running Linux. I wonder how locked down or hackable this OS would be? Would an EU based system be better for privacy? I'd love to have a better option for when I update the "TV" I have in my living room.

The OS itself is not FOSS or even available without a partnership, the apps are all online websites, and running your own apps requires going through their partner portal. So don't get your hopes up.

GPLv2 means at the very least kernel sources must be available on demand for any buyer of a TV shipped with this OS

Which is the reason only Linux kernel survives nowadays in such platforms.

Additionally there is an increasing number of embedded OSes alternatives with permissive licenses, meaning eventually not even the Linux kernel will be taken into account.

Being able.to examine the kernel is of little value in the tivoization described.

so it's electron on underpowered hardware, is how i read it

The shift toward open source in consumer electronics is long overdue. The real question is whether Titan OS will allow users to actually control what data leaves their TV. Most smart TV platforms treat the device as a data collection endpoint first and a TV second. Open source at least gives someone the ability to audit that.

A somewhere over 10 years ago a certain Linux distro company commissioned a company I worked for to make a TV specific distro. The team built something amazing, as a DVR it would have been better than anything on the market. Think people who professionally build software for millions of TVs and STBs for years, getting told they can do anything they need to in order to build a Linux based, open-source focused distro for TVs/STBs/DVRs.

Then that well known distro company realised they couldn't get any TV company to actually license it. So they abandoned the project and asked us to remove their name from it. We then went out to the market and tried to sell it to the TV and STB manufacturers. Europe, Japan, USA, China, we visited everyone we could. I met with so many companies you'd recognise. We couldn't get anyone to license it.

We considered just releasing it, but it needed tidying up and the Distro company still had an option on it, but we didn't get an adequate answer on releasing it for free.

Eventually, under the burden of building something no one wanted to pay for, the company got sold to a Russian company for not enough. And the code was effectively lost inside that organisation.

Writing a distro for smart TVs is harder than you'd think. MStar, who makes >90% of the chipsets, has their own version of GStreamer which is not quite compatible and quite outdated (last time I was involved). Managing the lifecycle of apps in a resource constrained environment with a lean-back experience (e.g. no mouse and keyboard), requires experience. Almost all consumers want Android/AppleTV levels of simplicity, not ArchLinux with a full screen browser.

So it's good when people who know what they're doing maintain the software that goes into TVs.

But getting organisations to pay for the support and development is hard. Especially when TVs are horrifically unprofitable for most companies. And that's the key part that most people don't understand. When I was working on this strategy, most companies had 9 months to make any profit on a new TV model before the market put price pressures enough that each unit sold wasn't helping. TVs have become ridiculously cheap in the past 20 years, and every extra penny the manufacturers spend hurts their bottom line.

Ultimately, this is one of the reasons why TV manufacturers are always looking for new ways of making money (like adverts in menus), because TVs aren't a profitable business to be in. Notice how large screen PC monitors are usually much more expensive than the comparable TV but with less tech?

I bet it will be as freely available as TVs powered by Tizen or WebOS.

I see this like OpenWRT; an open solution means commercial televisions can be flashed with an open, citizen friendly software solution.

You wish. This will be just another wave of TV hardware that will be left behind once they inevitably stop supporting it. People aren’t really running around hacking and creating custom firms for every TV under the sun.

Just kill the idea of Smart TVs outright. Dumb TVs are superior in every conceivable way.

https://www.titanos.tv/

From that page:

grow your business by creating ongoing revenue streams

a.k.a they sell your customers' eyeballs. I don't want these creeps near my tv, european or not.

To the best of my knowledge, so does every other TV OS. So, we need an option that doesn't. If an open option is available, it can be stripped of the capabilities you mention.

What we need is for TVs to go back to just being dumb panels, let me plug in whatever I want, and stay out of my way, no OS, just some little firmware overlay for a handful of settings.

This is unlikely, as consumers have little control hardware manufacturing, so the best we can do is ensure that free software can run on the hardware mass produced. Perhaps there is room for the EU to regulate?

"We must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be." - Maurice Allais

Nice quote, would be relevant if we actually had any power over any of this.

But if they decide to lock these devices down, there’s little that can be done given that those that would be willing to put in the work to break it open aren’t likely to do it since there are a billion and one types of devices in this hardware space—the chance of yours being gifted with a working hack of such is ridiculously small.

Consumers also have little control over the firmware & software flashed onto that hardware in manufacturing.

Irrelevant as long as you can flash while in your possession.

An irrelevantly small number of consumers are doing that.

I don’t even understand the point of smart tvs. Too slow to run anything I always end up plugging in an Apple TV or an Xbox eventually. (Although Xbox is going down the drain too)

Does it generate enough revenue to match the google/roku tv hardware cost subsidies? If so, how, if not Titan TVs cost more?

Dropping google for ....

> Titan OS operates on a Chromium browser,

Google....

Worse: dropping Google for Google’s idea of a browser (aka hell).

This is basically an Electron-powered TV. Fuck me, people really do not want to write native code anymore these days, do they?

The problem is all these platforms in the first place, instead of trying to invent something new, if they would all just use Android with their own UI on top, then it would be possible to have native apps.

Imagine how many "TV" targets Netflix builds app for. I would not be surprised if it's in the hundreds. They are not going to build and maintain a fully native app for some obscure platform which 0.03% of their customers use, when they can just build a wrapper around their web interface.

More reason to not have smart TVs at all and leave the processing and app stores to actual dongle platforms.

Man I hate smart TVs.

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