281–290 of 408 posts
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It's a weird world where a company that does billions in annual revenue isn't considered big.
I think a lot of people use the phrase "big tech" to refer to the giants whom use lobbying, monopoly power, etc. to stay disproportionately big.
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You can say "Hey Siri drive to xyz using Google Maps".
Is that new? I swear I googled this so many times and the consensus was "You have to use Apple Maps with Siri." Thank you so much!
HBO Max was delayed in appearing on Roku because of negotiation breakdowns. In the case HBO it was Roku that seemed to have the demands. They are looking at revenue anywhere they can, but if their position weakens look for Google, ATT, and others to simply forgo working with them. I think Roku is in a perilous position in general. They generated a lot of buzz on Wallstreet with their high user counts. They also purch…
This is actually a declining trend. LG and Samsung do but Moore's law has gotten it to a point where Android TV and, in fact Roku's platform are becoming much more prevalent on TVs, particularly some of the newer lower end devices. There's a large cost to maintaining your own HTML based platform (which is what most 3rd parties are) and the HTML platforms pretty radically under-perform these days.
Android TV could win but much like the US cable operators the large CE providers aren't too excited about getting so closely tied to Google. Roku's continued independence is cool in a space where there is so much consolidation, and attractive to some CE manufacturers.
Ehh... I would wager on Roku being more dug-in here. For them, control over their hardware is an existential concern. For Google, streaming television is one of their many dalliances that may or not still be active 5 years from now. Every television that I've bought over the past 5-10 years has Roku built into it. I know that some people prefer to plug in Amazon devices instead, and that's perfectly fine (not that Am…
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On the one hand, like you I don't really care for voice commands in a remote. In the other, I really liked (and miss now that I have an Amazon firestick device) the built in CEC control of TV volume, and also the headphone jack. I also liked that it had a bit more weight to it. It was easier to find in the covers/sheets of my bed when I would occasionally lose track of it.
The latest Roku remotes have CEC control for power and volume. When my last Roku remote started flaking out, that was what prompted me to upgrade it despite the built in microphone.
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.
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That's not at all how voice assists are meant to work. Voice icon in cars/remotes are all meant to provide answers or take commands irrespective of what's happening on that device or other devices they control.
In a car sure. On a living room TV?
HBO Max was delayed in appearing on Roku because of negotiation breakdowns. In the case HBO it was Roku that seemed to have the demands. They are looking at revenue anywhere they can, but if their position weakens look for Google, ATT, and others to simply forgo working with them. I think Roku is in a perilous position in general. They generated a lot of buzz on Wallstreet with their high user counts. They also purch…
I have both a Roku and a Chromecast and the Roku works _much_ better. The Chromecast used to be fine, but a few years ago they refactored it in the Home app and now it constantly needs to be reconnected to the wifi. That would be annoying enough but the setup process also fails regularly. No other device in my house has this problem.
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The reason I picked and stay with Roku is that they aren't married to a single Big Tech co. I already suffer the lack of a proper YouTube app on my Echo Show because Amazon and Google are having a tiff. I don't want to pick an ecosystem and live exclusively inside of it. As it is, I'm already in a mixed household (Me with iOS and my wife with Android) and it's a pain to deal with the lack of cross-platform playing to…
> The reason I picked and stay with Roku is that they aren't married to a single Big Tech co. Same. I'm so sick of being locked into one system or another, having my eyeballs monetized, or getting the shitty version of an app because it isn't the vendor's platform. I got a Roku because they're as neutral as one can get, and so far I'm happy paying for YouTube Premium, Amazon Prime and Netflix. You tell me I can't run…
The thing is that Google shouldn't be forced to make their apps for the 30 different streaming box app stores if they don't want to. If there's no money to be made and they inherently lose money by tasking a team to keep the Roku app (or LG app or Samsung app, etc) up-to-date then they shouldn't have to.
The Google Cast protocol is actually pretty open in this regard - the apps are just a combination of html, js, websocket, and a protobuf server with no need to publish anything - all the TV makers would have to do is embed Chrome (they would also have to use a not-e-waste chip to do so, though, as supporting 4k hardware vp9 and drm is intense and expensive). There also really isn't an app store that needs moderation or business deals to happen for your casting to work - the only registration is really so Google has a paper trail of accountability in order to prevent malware and perform some API calls (https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/registration).
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Google: Look, you can buy a device with less storage, and store all your MP3s in the cloud! Me: This sounds terrible… but ok, let’s give it a go. Google: Now that you have all your music in the cloud, wouldn’t it be nice if you paid us monthly for access to a lot more music? Me: No. Google: I see you switched to another app while watching a YouTube video. If you paid us extra, you could keep playing that in the backg…
> Me: First, why would I ever want that? It’s bad enough YouTube now keeps playing videos in a little thumbnail when I try to exit them. Second, why are you charging a monthly fee for a feature that ought to just come with your app? It makes sense - Google can't run YouTube without ads. Ad buyers, which have ads in video form, don't want to run ads when the user isn't looking at the content nor able to easily click o…