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!

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.

Mr. Seidenberg said that his “thinking has matured” and that trying to predict when the company would stop losing voice landlines “is like the dog chasing the bus.”

This is being touted as the most progressive thing anyone has ever heard (which might be true, coming from a telecom exec), but the irony is this:

“Video is going to be the core product in the fixed-line business,” Mr. Seidenberg declared. And the focus will move from selling bundles of video and landline to video and cellphones, he added.

That’s freaking hilarious. Verizon thinks video will replace all their landline revenue losses. They are jumping into Video just as it is approaching its end of life, or the beginning of the end anyway. People are starting to “cut their video cord” just as they began cutting their landline cord a few years ago.

My son’s dorm room at college includes a landline phone, Internet, and a cable TV connection. They actually have a phone plugged into the landline (probably mostly to talk to the school’s internal numbers, like the I.T. dept to keep the Internet working). They do not have a TV and don’t have anything connected to the CATV wall jack – and they don’t seem to miss it much.

Over the years to come, there will be as many people dropping Verizon’s video service as there are people dropping landlines today.  So this seemingly “progressive” view is sort of like saying we’re finally abandoning Betamax and embracing HD DVD!

This paper was originally written in 2003 but I was not able to publish until now, for various reasons.  But I stand by the research and conclusions.

Some of the more controversial positions include:

The present work totally abandons video as a substitute for face-to-face communication, and in fact suggests uses that are not videoconferencing, in any existing sense, at all. Further, we conclude that another common application of videoconferencing, that implemented by most desktop software, specifically the person-to-person video call, is nearly void of utility, particularly for business communications.

Please look it over and flame away.

Andrew MacDonald tried to see what’s his perceived audio quality threshold. He shows that improving audio quality improves the medium and the cues it provides.

Ok, no problem. Many years of research bear this out. Audio quality has a direct impact on the effectiveness of interactions. But then Tsahi takes a leap:

Video adds visual cues which are not available in voice calls. And high definition video gives more visual cues than its SD counterpart.

This is where the research does not support Tsahi’s assertion. Video can add visual cues, but not the ones people expect and assume. Further, audio provides more non-verbal cues than is usually assumed.

Ten years ago, Steve Whittaker at ATT research looked at research going back many years prior to that, and found:

We first evaluate evidence for the utility of providing non-verbal communication information using video. We conclude that previous work has overestimated the importance of supplying non-verbal information at the expense of speech.

And nothing has changed today. There is still way too much assumed about the value of non-verbal communication potential in video. People put way too much focus on this and, therefore, neglect other, much more effective, uses of video, such as for presence, shared context, and its role in facilitating opportunistic interactions.

Furthermore, while we often overestimate the value of video providing non-verbal cues, we also tend to under-estimate the degree to which audio provides non-verbal cues.  Other research cited in the above paper has shown this to be true as well:

The research (Chapanis) compared two media conditions: audio only communication, and high quality video/audio. If video does indeed provide useful cognitive cues, then there should be benefits for providing visual information in these types of collaborative problem solving tasks, where it is important to track the understanding and attention of remote participants. However, the studies showed that adding visual information did not increase the efficiency of problem solving, or produce higher quality problem solving.

We humans tend to assume that video must provided these non-verbal cues. It’s so intuitive and obvious. But when one looks at it objectively, again and again, the data proves otherwise.

It’s easy to say video does provide such cues, casually. No one would question it, unless they’ve looked at the years and years of research.

We should note that Mr. Levent-Levi works at RADVISION, a company that makes video-conferencing products. They need to go where the money is – and that’s in people beating the 20-year long dead horse of “talking heads” video as a substitute for face to face meetings – not in far more effective, but less sexy, uses of video.

[research published in 1971] revealed that only seven per cent of our understanding comes from pure words, and that 40 per cent is gleaned from the tone of the voice and 53 per cent from visual cues.

What they fail to note is that all the research has shown that video is not very good at providing those “visual cues” especially more subtle ones.

For many years, videoconferencing technologies have been applied as a substitute for face-to-face meetings. Spending for videoconferencing technology is typically based on a presumed increased productivity or savings due to a presumed reduction in travel. Despite countless deployments and projects deployed over decades, on the whole, the technology has failed to provide these anticipated benefits.

When videoconferencing has failed to meet expectations, it has almost always been attributed to some “other” factors. There seems to be a powerful intuitive desire in people to find something else to blame. I was guilty of this myself, for a long time. We keep telling ourselves some detail of the implementation needs improvement. If we just used a better camera here, a little more bandwidth there, an improved user-interface, one more update of some kind, all will be well.

However, the answer is right there in prior research. We will find that many others before us had fallen into the same trap. And it’s not because these projects were using old hardware. There have been some deployments using absurdly expensive hardware and software that would never be practical in a wide deployment. And even such sophisticated systems could not deliver on the presumed power of videoconferencing technologies to substitute for face-to-face communications. It wasn’t the hardware or network. The most expensive hardware in the world can’t address some of the fundamental limitations of real-time videoconferencing.

The elephant in the room is that even high quality audio and video cannot replicate the rich nature of face-to-face communication. Period.

Further, experience shows that this is very very difficult for people to accept. It is much easier to find something else to blame. We tend to point at problems in the details of the specific implementation rather than accept the reality that real-time videoconferencing is inherently limiting and then work within those limitations.

In Cisco’s paper, they say:

“We observed the value of visual cues in successful meetings, and video technologies that maximise this, such as telepresence, are ideal for maintaining excellent relationships.

“However, individuals who approach meetings with a positive attitude, leaders who understand and support the different personalities and cultures in their teams, and organisations that provide the resources and training to make video communications the norm, are also essential to effective video-enabled meetings.”

So what they’re saying is when the technology doesn’t work, or doesn’t give all the benefits people expect (because it never does), it’s your fault because you failed to “understand and support the different personalities and cultures in your teams.” Nice preemptive scapegoat, Cisco.

Then I decided to run back to Costco and pick one up before the US supply runs out. It was $229.99

Spykee was created by a French company, Meccano and is being distributed in the USA under the Erector brand.  The robot has been available in the UK and Europe for some time – it was at one time called Spyke, but probably as a result of some trademark issues, now is called Spykee.

The basic idea is that the robot connects via wifi and therefore can be controlled either locally on the same wi-fi network, or remotely from any IP address.  It’s sort of a remote-controlled webcam that you can drive around.

It’s supposedly a kid’s toy, but I’m not sure it’s going to be all that fun for kids, frankly. It’s very cool, and I hope to do some fun (and perhaps even interesting) stuff with it, but here are a few of my gripes:

1. The building process is overall poor. The instructions are terrible.  The fasteners that Meccano provide with it are really junk and awful for load bearing – I substituted my own nylon screws with nuts to end the thing falling apart at the slightest touch/bump.
2. Meccano support sucks. Well actually, it just doesn’t exist at all. The toy doesn’t come with a CD or printed manuals. You have to download them.  But the catch is that Meccano doesn’t seem to know how to operate either a web server or a mail server. Their web server takes users to the UK site with no links back to the US site, for reference, you can get to the US site by manually entering this address in your browser: http://www.spykeeworld.com/US/
3. As I note, they can’t run a mail server either, apparently, because mail to the address they list for support bounces (and it has been this way for a long time, according to forums around the net).
4. The robot looks like it has arms that move, but the entire body of the robot is just a frame to hold the webcam. It serves no function and doesn’t do anything (cannot be moved via remote control). The “active” parts of the robot are the base with the tracks and CPU etc. and the webcam “module” which also houses the LED light and microphone.  The rest of it is inanimate, just for show.
5. The Spykee is not very autonomous. It only does things while one is connected to it from the “console” software. You can’t activate a function, then log out, and expect it to do anything (like act as a surveillance camera).
6. There is no web interface – the only way to connect to the robot and interact with it is to use a specific binary application (Mac and Windows supported). So that app has to be installed on any computer you want to use to interact with Spykee and those computers have to be a Mac or Windows PC (i.e. no iPhone or othe such).
7. The name has the word “Spy” in it, but Spykee is not very stealthy. It’s not going to sneak up on anybody (It’s LOUD).
8. You can theoretically talk beween the remote PC and somebody near the robot, but it doesn’t work very well, at least not on the Mac version. It has horrible delay and no echo handling, so is near useless.  If you mute the mic on the PC side, you can use this feature to listen to sounds near the robot, but it’s hard to interact.
9. The manual says the software is “open source” but it is nowhere to be found (people keep saying it will be released, but there’s no dates anywhere that I’ve found).

There’s a good YouTube video out there listing some of the above and a few other criticisms here.

I got Spykee because it supports the Mac. The other wifi robot, Rovio, only works with Windows.

I haven’t done anything with the Spykee yet except the “officially supported” things, which are actually pretty cool, but limiting.  I want to connect to the device directly with my own software, with web services etc. Unfortunately, the protocols are not released, nor is the supposed “open source software”, so this will require hardcore reverse engineering.  I haven’t spent any time on that yet, so I can’t provide any details yet.

In getting the remote control mode to work, you setup a name/password for your robot on SpykeeWorld.com and then connect from a remote place using that name. One thing I found out is that this name/password must be simple letters with no spaces or other punctuation. It will let you set a name with these characters, but when you try to connect, it won’t work (and the diagnostic “recipient not available” is not helpful).  I have been able to use the remote access (from outside on the Internet to the robot behind a NAT/firewall) with the robot sitting behind many different makes and models of firewalls and routers, and I even tried two layers of firewalls and that worked too, which surprised me.  I’m not sure yet how it gets through the NAT/firewall.

Like I said, I rushed out and bought it because I didn’t want to miss this wave of US shipments, but before you do the same thing, you might want to be aware of the above caveats.

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.

Videoconferencing – a much talked about, but seldom-used technology – may finally be earning its spurs within the enterprise.

85 per cent of respondents polled either use or plan to use video conferencing.

Forty one per cent of those questioned are also using, or investigating the use of so-called telepresence

But here’s the thing: We’ve seen this before. For example:

“Videoconferencing gains momentum”
Jul 18, 2007

“Video Conferencing Gains Ground”
Sep 17, 2007

“Videoconferencing is likely to gain momentum”
Apr 4, 2007

“Videoconferencing Gains Momentum”
Sep 7, 2001

Despite years of false starts and unfulfilled promises, here we go again. Whether we are talking one year ago, seven years ago, or 25 years ago, the theme is always the same. It goes like this: “while we acknowledge that videoconferencing has never met adoption expectations in the past, we believe that is because of INSERT EXCUSE HERE and with our new INSERT WIZBANG TECHNOLOGY DIFFERENCE HERE we are sure adoption will explode this time.”

Hint – it’s not a technology problem.

Users “aren’t interested” in video-calling, mainly because they find the angle a handset must be held at for the best quality video-call “isn’t very flattering”.

UPDATE: in short, he was saying people don’t use videoconferencing because it makes them look fat. How funny to read this today, since this is exactly what I said just a couple of weeks ago as my top two reasons why talking-heads video-calling will never take off:

real people are not attractive – we are not movie stars or models. people on TV are not normal. we are not used to seeing normal people on “TV” (in the form of real-time video).

we are not directors. we do not know how to properly produce video content, how to light it, frame it etc

Other excuses given by Nokia for why video-calling hasn’t been embraced included:

“[The technology] hit the market too early”

“There wasn’t enough support from carriers”

“The marketing push wasn’t big enough”

We have seen this all before. Video-calling has repeatedly failed to meet expectations. And each time we see the experts grasping at straws as to why. Comments like “maybe it will still be a success” from Nokia’s Sari Ståhlberg suggest that we’re sure to see it repeat again. Instead of learning, they believe their own spin and use the excuses like the above to throw more good money after bad on this fundamentally broken idea – video-calling is a classic case of a “solution in search of a problem”. It’s irresistibly cool – unfortunately, it’s a money sink without a market