Introduction to GlideTV What’s On Service

When I first wrote about the Glide TV Navigator five months ago, I didn’t realize I’d get involved with the company and help them develop and release their “What’s On” service. But that’s where we are today and therefore, a disclaimer is in order. I worked on this project and am therefore biased.

As a second disclaimer, I write this as myself, not as a representative of Glide TV. These are my own interpretations and are not endorsed nor necessarily supported by the company.

What is What’s On?

It’s a web site that provides a searchable and browsable catalog of video content provided by sites like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc. presented in a nice “scrollable video wall” interface designed for the living room.

What’s On is designed for use on a computer connected to a TV.  It works on a laptop or desktop PC or Mac, but it really shines when used with the computer connected to a TV, where typical websites are difficult to read and use from across the room on the couch – What’s On provides an interface that is specifically designed for that case, to be effective and enjoyable from a TV watching distance.

Home Page

The “What’s On” home page provides a collage of video thumbnails for what is most popular right now.

The collage contains popular Movies and TV episodes as well as up to the minute News and Sports stories.

The home screen “wall” uses essentially the same “scrollable video wall” user-interface used throughout the site, including search results.  Click the left or right “arrows” that appear transparently over the video wall, to scroll the wall to the left or right – quickly scroll through dozens and dozens of videos.

When you mouse over a video thumbnail, the full name for that video will be displayed; if it’s a TV episode, the season and episode number will be shown.

From the Home screen, the links along the bottom select categories of videos: Movies, TV, Music, News, and Sports.

Movies and TV

The Movies and TV categories are formally organized with metadata for specific TV shows/episodes and Movies.  It includes paid and free content. The What’s On catalog only includes legitimate (legal) sources of content, such as Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes (and network sites, like Comedy Central etc.)

There is a “Genre” slider just below the video wall where you can narrow the videos by Genre, such as Action, Drama, Comedy etc.

Movies / Drama Genre Selected

On the bottom menu is a “Free filter” button, with the options “All” and “Free”.  By selecting “Free” only videos that have a free source will be displayed. This is handy when you are not in the mood to wade through $2.99 videos.

The Details Page

When you click a thumbnail, you will see the details page for that video (or TV Show), showing information like the rating, the runtime, the cast and crew, and a full description.

Movie Details Page

Also will be the links to watch the video, as shown above.  In some cases, the video can play embedded within What’s On, in other cases you will be taken to the source site to watch the video.

When you go to the details page for a TV show, the information for the show will be displayed, along with a link to either Free episodes (if any episodes are available free) along with a link to all episodes, and showing the number of free episodes available.

TV Show Details showing number of Free Episodes available

Searching

On the lower right of the screen is a search box.  It is context-sensitive, searching within the category and genre selected (if any).  The search hint shown in the search box will show what kind of search you’re doing. This search is tuned to video content, so it generally gives much more specific, and more useful in a video context, results than a generic Google search. All the metadata available is indexed, such as name, genre(s), and description, as well as cast and crew, etc.  Try it: http://whatson.glidetv.com/search?q=anna+paquin

Searching from the home page searches across both Movies and TV.  Searching within a category, such as News, searches only that category.  If a genre is selected, results will be limited to just that genre within the current category.  Furthermore, if the “free” mode is activated, only free videos (if any) matching the search will be displayed. Note: a quirk, “free” when searching, includes Netflix instant watch videos.

Music, News, and Sports

Unlike TV and Movies, these categories are less formally organized. They contain more clips and less full-length episodes. This is simply due to the kind of video content that is available on the Internet in these categories.

The “video wall” in these categories have an added unexpected benefit, especially News and Sports, quickly giving a visual indication of what is being talked about around the world right now.

As with Movies and TV, these categories also have a Genre slider below the video wall.  They do not, however, have the “free” mode because all the videos in News, Music, and Sports are currently all free videos.

Final Thoughts

The What’s On service was really designed to work with the Glide TV Navigator using the custom GlideTV browser, on a television set, at one of the HDTV resolutions, either 720p (1280×720) or 1080p (1920×1080).  It was only very recently decided to open the site up to anyone to use, even without the GlideTV browser and Navigator hardware.

Therefore the site still works best with the GlideTV browser full screen at 720p or 1080p.  If you don’t use it full-screen, for best results, you want to shape your browser window to the shape and size of a TV, or near to it, either 1280×720 and 1920×1080 are best, but something close to that will work.  The main thing is for whatever height you have your browser window set to, make it wide enough to see at least 5 thumbnails across on the “video wall” and so that the bottom menu is not squished/overlapped.

The site works best in Firefox, but is also usable in Safari and Chrome (and maybe IE7 or newer).

This is the first release of this service. We made compromises to get it out the door. Obviously there is room for improvement and there are a number of features planned (most notably more filtering and sorting options).  We could really use your (constructive) feedback.  Thanks!

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Glide TV “Navigator” looks really slick

I ran into Chris Painter a few months back at a local SF East Bay New Tech Meetup event. I know Chris from his Sony days.  I found out at the time that Chris now has started a new venture, Glide.TV and their first product looks really cool.  It’s called the “Navigator” and it’s a combination of really innovative touch-based input device and custom-browser and software keyboard.

Unfortunately I don’t have the actual device myself yet, because they have temporarily sold out. But I got some time to speak with Chris who provided a lot of info.  When I get some time with my hands on a real Navigator myself, I’ll post a follow-up review.

Basically, the Navigator starts off as a plug-and-play (no drivers needed) mouse. Then, Glide.TV provides software for a soft (on-screen) keyboard and a customized browser specifically designed for the living room experience. The software works on Mac and PC (and even Linux, I’m told). Chris gave me a demo and let me try using the navigator myself. I was able to use it effectively right away.

At home, I have a Mac Mini permanently installed as part of my living room TV entertainment setup. I still have “old school” TV but increasingly, we’re watching Youtube, Netflix, Hulu, and other online content from the couch – and a traditional mouse and keyboard are just not the best living room input devices. The Glide.TV Navigator lets you operate PC or Mac-based TV with one hand, the way we’re used to, without a bulky keyboard in our lap or having to hunch over the coffee table to use the mouse.

Overall, it looks really impressive and I can’t wait to get one for my home setup.

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Why I Can’t Break Up With Cable/Sat TV (yet) but it’s still doomed

There are a lot of monthly bills I really don’t like paying, where I know I’m not really getting my money’s worth. My iPhone bill is in that category ($30/mo for data alone!) But today, I’m going to talk about the Cable bill and, in my case, the DirecTV Satellite TV bill – yes, I have both. I pay about $1,800/yr to DirecTV and I pay another $800/yr to Comcast. $2,600 per year.

Needless to say, I grew up in a TV generation. My wife is even worse. The whole reason we have BOTH Cable and Satellite TV is because the cable lets us hook up the “extra” TVs in spare rooms and such around the house without a cable or satellite box. We use DirecTV in the three “main” TV rooms. We have TVs everywhere – it is so 1992 around here.

So that makes me odd (I’m sure you’re surprised) and not exactly a model use case, where the real reason that I continue to just grin and bear it is laziness and habit. But even without these lame excuses, I’ve looked at some of the reasons why it’s harder to quit than I’d like and I think some of these may apply more generally.

Issue 1: The Social Side of TV

One of the positives of TV, especially TV series, is sharing with friends – Laughing together about the latest 30 Rock etc. You lose this if you haven’t seen the program yet because it hasn’t come out on DVD yet. One of the problems with using the Internet or VOD, or worse, Netflix, to watch TV series shows is that you won’t see the show until it’s “old news” – you miss out on that sharing experience while it’s “new” and “hot”.

I think this is a much bigger deal and I have not seen it come up much in the “dump cable” discussions.

Issue 2: HD

We all have paid for that fancy HD TV – it would be nice to watch HD content on it. Today, there is barely SD content on the Internet or in streaming video.  And HD uses a lot of bandwidth, so one needs a good pipe and good pipe provider to get HD over the Internet. That’s even worse if there are people watching different shows on multiple TVs.

Issue 3: User Interface

Internet TV is still too clunky and difficult to use. It’s getting better, but it’s not there yet. You can’t get enough content in one place with one interface (no matter what the marketers tell you). A mouse and a keyboard are still the only practical answer if you want to really get to the best content, and a mouse and a keyboard are simply not the ideal TV watching tools. Nobody has a good TV-simple one-thumb remote interface yet. This will be a big factor in crossing the chasm to mass adoption.

Some Good News

There are some areas where things have really improved in recent years.  One is sports. There is a lot of sports TV available on-line. These guys know where the money is and I think they are really leading things (well, after porn that is).

Another is Live TV News. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, pretty much all the local channels have live feeds of their main news broadcasts. I suspect this is true in most reasonably sized markets.  And of course, you can also get out-of-area “local” news, which is something you can’t get with Cable TV.

I’m so locked into the old way that I personally may never fully drop Cable/Sat TV – but I can see how close this is to bursting wide open. What happens to Comcast, DirecTV and DISH etc. in this scenario?

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Diversion: SF Giants 2009 HDTV games

I put a schedule like this together for 2008 and I’ve seen a number of hits looking for a 2009 version. Sorry for the delay folks, but here it is.

Once again, I combined data from the SF Giants site “broadcast schedule” and the Comcast Sports Net Bay Area site “Giants schedule” to produce a list of all games planned to be broadcast in HD this year. It assumes NBC and FOX are available in hi-def.

A ZIP file containing a CSV and ICS calendar can be downloaded here: hdgames2009.zip

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Speaking of U-Verse

Om Malik notes a Lazard Capital Market analyst report suggesting that AT&T is having trouble signing up the 1 million “triple-play” U-verse subscribers that it promised by the end of this year.

However, we are increasingly concerned by the possibility of AT&T missing its annual projection of 1M subs, and believe that unit expectations will need to be reduced further in light of the macroeconomic environment. We believe it is more likely that AT&T will reach 30K subs per week by year-end, rather than 40K.

I realize it’s just anecdotal, but I was recently attending a street fair type event where AT&T had set up a booth trying to sell U-Verse.  The poor sales reps staffing the booth were being bombarded by irate U-Verse customers complaining about all manner of problems, mostly with the TV service and the DVR features.  These booth reps were probably outside consultants, not even AT&T employees. They most likely were getting paid on commission.  I felt sorry for them, since they obviously were having second thoughts about hitching their wagon to the U-verse horse.

It looks like AT&T may be out of their league, or at least that they underestimated the challenge of providing TV service, and how long it takes to develop a mature TV and DVR experience, and how far they are behind their competition in this area.

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Roku Netflix Player

Well, I was going to get one of these, but now I see that it doesn’t have an interface for searching and selecting movies. You have to first log into your Netflix account and add the movie to your queue using your computer. The Roku Netflix Player only allows you to browse titles in your Netflix Instant Queue.

The other problem for me is the lack of buffer (the player only has 256MB of RAM) and reports of barely passable video quality (due to bandwidth limitations). Roku recommends a minimum 1.5Mbps connection; movies average a bit-rate of 2.2Mbps.

Macworld said:

I found the image quality underwhelming… the image looked flat, with muted colors. Some standard def content was downright blurry: the opening credits for some films and television shows were difficult to read

Now that I’ve got HDTV over satellite, the last thing I want to do is step backwards to something less than standard 480p DVD.

I’d rather wait a little while for a higher quality bitrate video to download than suffer poor video quality if my connection can’t keep up in real-time – especially for HD content (the Roku doesn’t support HD yet, but is supposed to in the future). So that means a box with a lot more RAM (or flash, or a small hard disk), which probably means it will cost more than $99.

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Sluggish sales for Blu-Ray DVD

Even now that the Hi-def DVD format wars are over and Blue-Ray has won, sales of the new DVD players are still sluggish. Previously, the slow sales were blamed on the assumption that consumers were waiting to see which format would dominate (survive). Now, the “experts” are finding new excuses and believe the interest will surge in another year or two.

ABI Research analyst Steve Wilson said it is just as well for consumers if they don’t jump on the Blu-ray bandwagon yet. Wilson said he expects Blu-ray players to drop to $250 by this holiday season and $200 by the end of 2009. That’s when he expects mainstream adoption of the movie format to catch on.

I wonder. Or perhaps I just flat doubt it. I think people are sick of hard media and if some kind of IP-based on-demand service, such as Apple TV, can deliver Hi-def movies and other content with sufficient quality and reliability, DVD players will be a thing of the past entirely. Heck, it might even spell the end of expensive cable and satellite TV packages where, instead, people subscribe to just a basic TV package for news and other local channels/content and use on-demand (perhaps over IP) for everything else.

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DirecTV reports strong Q4, but many long time customers ticked off

Last month, DirectTV reported that their profits had risen to $1 billion for the quarter ending 2007 and they reported 275,000 net subscriber additions in the US.

At the same time, there is a growing wave of customer dissatisfaction. Take, for example

Or DirecTV Dumps TiVo, I Dump DirecTV:

Or this one:

That pretty much sums up my take on it as well. DirecTV had a perfectly reasonable service and they decided to “fix” it and here’s where it goes awry:

1. Must lease the box – cannot buy it – adds to the monthly cost
2. Additional fees for channels users already used to get
3. 2-year contract – With the service going down hill, the last thing people want is to get locked up with DirecTV for two long years.

It sort of makes one think maybe we should just wait for AppleTV or some form of on-demand or IPTV. The worst part for me personally is no HD football or other sports in the mean time.

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DirecTV – all good things must come to an end

Until recently, DirecTV is one service I was mostly happy with. How many services can you say that about? Cell phone? Landline? Cable TV? Internet? When News Corp acquired DirecTV, I was worried and rightly so, it turned out; but when News Corp sold off their stake last year, I was optimistic again.

I’ve been a customer since the mid 90′s. I paid something like $1,000 for the initial setup back then. I have been a mostly happy customer all this time (even if I was “worried” at times) – but now with the forced migration to their DVR box, involving significant loss in functionality and reliability, this blissful situation may be coming to an end. Here’s what they are doing to a long-time loyal customer:

1. Forcing me to replace my TiVo-based HD DVR with a buggy DirecTV-designed DVR with a junky remote, terrible user interface, severe limitations, and reliability problems.
2. Forcing me into a two-year contract, even though I have been a customer for over 10 years!
3. Charging me an additional $4.99/mo. to keep HD channels I receive now (UHD, HDNM, etc.)
4. Charging me $20 for the unwanted swap.

I guess at this point my options are:

1. Keep the HD TiVo and wait until DirecTV stops sending it signals it can receive.
2. See if I can get HD Cable service with a stand-alone HD TiVo (this may not really be an option, since the cable company [Comcast] has told me in the past that service in my area is not very good and they don’t know when or if they will fix it).
3. Buy a DVR on Ebay and see if DirecTV will support it to avoid the 2-year contract? These are supposedly “lease-only” units, so this may also not be a practical option.
4. Accept the new DirecTV DVR with all the limitations and 2-year contract (What do I do then, if this new DVR really is unusable?)

I guess we customers are just not supposed to actually like the services we pay for — Cell phone, landline, cable TV, Internet service. And now Satellite TV too. Maybe they get their jollies by showing that we suckers will continue to subscribe to their crappy services, no matter how much they screw us over.

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DirecTV loses 10 million subscribers

Well, that’s my headline for sometime in the next 12-18 months, or whenever Rupert forces his Tivo owners to switch to his “new” DVR.

Here’s what I’m expecting so far, based on all I’ve read about the DVR DirecTV is going to shove down our throats:

1. No more “peanut” remote. It sounds trivial, but that remote is very comfortable. If you haven’t used it, you can’t relate. And the new DirecTV remote supposedly doesn’t control the on/off or volume on many makes/models of TVs, so you you end up needing two remotes.

2. No multiple live buffer streams to select between. With TiVo DirecTV units we can jump back and forth between two live programs, with buffer. Supposedly not so with the new DVRs.

3. GUI sucks. Comments include “hard to navigate” “a whole new horror” “not intuitive at all” “It BLOWS” “It is a fancy VCR, but not a Tivo” “amazingly difficult to use” “All the software people should be fired” See examples here.

4. Lease-only going forward, means higher monthly fees.

The tech support line apparently has an automated voice that tells you “most problems are resolved by rebooting.” What does that tell you about the quality of the software (and DirecTV’s contempt for their customers).

I’ve been a DirecTV subscriber for over 10 years. When DirecTV abandons all support for TiVo it looks like I’ll be stuck switching to cable (which totally sucks around here). Apparently I won’t be alone. Nobody that’s used TiVo for more than a few months is ever going to move as far backwards as DirecTV is trying to send us. It’s looking like it will be a mass exodus. What an effective way to take perfectly happy customers and send them straight to your competitors.

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