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TV: Now What?

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Re: TV: Now What?

#41

Post by h2odragon »

barbazoo wrote: post #6
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…

> 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?

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.

Re: TV: Now What?

#42

Post by StableAlkyne »

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…

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.

Re: TV: Now What?

#43

Post by scarface_74 »

hotnfresh wrote: post #32
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.

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?

Re: TV: Now What?

#44

Post by epaulson »

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.

Re: TV: Now What?

#45

Post by scarface_74 »

Aerbil313 wrote: post #30
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 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

Re: TV: Now What?

#46

Post by scarface_74 »

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…

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

Re: TV: Now What?

#47

Post by scarface_74 »

mindslight wrote: post #28
barbazoo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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 app…

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.

Re: TV: Now What?

#48

Post by russellbeattie »

madeofpalk wrote: post #40
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.

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.

Re: TV: Now What?

#49

Post by [deleted] »

Osiris wrote: post #19
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…

“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.

[deleted]

Re: TV: Now What?

#50

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

ghaff wrote: post #20
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.

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.
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