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TV: Now What?

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Re: TV: Now What?

#31

Post by foobiekr »

geerlingguy wrote: post #5

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…

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.

Re: TV: Now What?

#32

Post by hotnfresh »

jmbwell wrote: post #15

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 ha…

> 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.

Re: TV: Now What?

#33

Post by slovette »

bmy78 wrote: post #29
Osiris wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

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.

Re: TV: Now What?

#34

Post by ghaff »

slovette wrote: post #33
bmy78 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: TV: Now What?

#35

Post by yaur »

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.

Re: TV: Now What?

#36

Post by aschla »

slg wrote: post #26
buildbot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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...

Re: TV: Now What?

#37

Post by hotnfresh »

kolanos wrote: post #8

> 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.

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.

Re: TV: Now What?

#38

Post by hatsix »

slovette wrote: post #33
bmy78 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the last base package I subscribed to was $80

Re: TV: Now What?

#39

Post by CharlesW »

hammock wrote: post #3
jadbox wrote: post #2

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.

Re: TV: Now What?

#40

Post by madeofpalk »

gavinray wrote: post #17

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:…

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.

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