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By Brian Filed in Links, Misc Tagged with , , , , , , , , October 27th, 2011 @ 11:30 am

Yeah, one of those posts.

For my birthday back in August, Bridget and Charlotte bought me an Apple TV. You’ve probably read that Saint Steverino of Cupertino considered Apple TV merely a hobby, mainly because what he was really after was a way to reinvent the whole television, not just some box to deliver iTunes. Fast Company says that apparently His Holiness was on the verge of something Insanely Great, but now that he has gone to live in The Cloud, can his minions left here on Earth be trusted not to fuck it up? (Oh, and we really like the little Apple TV hobby box, but I don’t know if I would buy an Apple television set).

Continuing with the shtick of tying these links to my personal life, last week I took Charlotte to the pediatrician for her annual flu shot. Well, not a shot, actually. She gets the nasal version of the vaccine, which is one syringe-ful of vaccine up each nostril, like shotgunning Flonase. Flu shots are a crapshoot — the CDC or the WHO, or some other three-letter-organization tries to guess which flu will be The Big One each spring so they can start making vaccine to have ready in the fall, and they don’t alway guess right. On top of which, the vaccines are effective for as little as 30% of the people who get them. But now researchers are closing in on an all-purpose flu vaccine that would eliminate the guesswork and be more effective to boot.

Okay, can I do this one more time? Let’s see. If you are one of the people who stalk me on Facebook, you might remember that a couple of weekends ago we took Charlotte for her first dim sum brunch in Chinatown. She tried almost everything, including one tiny, reluctant bite of the chicken feet (which were utterly delicious). Now that she has reached the ripe old age of 10, we can take her to more interesting restaurants than we could when she was wee. She LOVES pho, enjoyed her Australian meat pie at KO Catering in South Boston, chowed down on smoky shredded chicken with cayenne at Sichuan Gourmet, and loved the Korean tacos at Gogi in Portland. What this all means is that we bascially NEVER have to eat at chain restaurants anymore unless we are desperate. I could go the rest of my limited days on Earth without ever stepping foot again in a Chili’s, Applebee’s, or TGI Friday’s. So I am not exactly heartbroken to read that the Great Recession Mark II is killing them all off.

Hey, whaddya know? It worked!

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And For $29.95 A Month, Paul The Octopus Will Come To Your House And Operate The Remote

By Brian Filed in Tech Tagged with , , , , , , , October 15th, 2010 @ 10:55 am

So, back in early September, Apple announced their revamp of Apple TV, and everybody was interested for about three minutes until they all realized that it didn’t matter if the little box was cool because the service still sucked.

Around the same time the first rumors about Apple TV (now iTV, of course), Google announced that they, too, would be putting together a similar sort of service package, but instead of making a box themselves, they would simply license out the Android-based software to the regular assortment of electronics manufacturers and let them figure it out. This worked pretty well with Android on smartphones, which has taken off quite strongly, while Google’s own Nexus One phone crashed and burned in the space of six months. So, sure, let someone else make the hardware.

Though there isn’t the same legion of frothing fanbois that Apple has at its beck and call, the initial response to the announcement generated a lot of hyperbolic optimism like this because Google has managed to hang on to a lot of positive feeling in the techie crowd, despite a whole slew of dud projects over the last year. However, the first actual “Google TV” product was unveiled this week by Sony, and you can almost hear the lead balloon hitting the floor. The remote control alone will kill this sucker deader than a doornail. This TechCrunch post captures the profound ambivalence from the technogeek crowd pretty well, because most gearheads look at a remote like that as a challenge to be mastered, but even they realize that this has no chance in hell with ordinary consumers.

Like other attempts to jam the Internet and television into the same appliance, this hits the same wall: people may like to watch TV on their computers, but they don’t seem to want to use their TV *as* their computer. In this case, the iTV actually ends up looking better than the Google TV, since it adheres more closely to the idea of being a service enabler for your TV, even if the service offering is kinda weak. Yes, the iTV will probably make some apps available to run on your TV, but Apple seems to realize that there is a gulf of perception between the iPad and iTV in terms of how people will use the device, despite being able to bring the exact same stuff to either device. If Sony’s first-guy-in-the-pool effort is emblematic of how Google TV will position itself, get ready for another entry into the Unloved Technology Hall Of Fame right next to WebTV and laserdiscs.

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The Sound Of A Million Fanbois Fapping

By Brian Filed in Tech Tagged with , , August 26th, 2010 @ 10:13 am

And you thought it was the cicadas. Nope, they’re working up into a high whine over next week’s product announcements, with all signs pointing to this serious makeover of the otherwise underwhelming Apple TV set-top media box. This Fast Company post features FC’s usual unrestrained overzeal (while trying to pass the buck on to Kevin Rose of Digg, but we know better, right?) about the coming total revolution in all human communication that will be caused by the iTV. And Wired, also known for its willigness to get down on all fours for the PR boys from Cupertino, couldn’t wait to tell us how awesome it would be to rent TV shows from iTunes for 99 cents with our new awesome life-changing devices, which will make everything awesome. The one lone voice of sanity that I heard was over at CrunchGear, where writer John Biggs flat out says the existing Apple TV sucks and that the new one, which will bring the tightly-controlled content delivery mechanisms of the iPhone/iPad and iOS, is likely to be even less adaptable to anything but Total Submission To Steve.

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Coming To A Riesenfernseher Near You!

By Brian Filed in Media, Tech Tagged with , , , , , , , , August 12th, 2010 @ 11:19 am

While Hollywood still seems intent on turning every movie made into a 3D extravamaganza whether it needs to be or not, apparently TV makers are now running away from 3D like residents of Tokyo in a Godzilla movie. Two years ago, they couldn’t get on board with the upcoming All-3D-All-The-Time Revolution fast enough, but the 3D backlash is so in full-swing that even Time Magazine has reported on it. CrunchGear says that with four months to go before CES 2011, electronics makers have already stopped promoting 3DTV and have moved on to another fad: apps. And by “apps”, they mean the combination of built-in wireless networking (a feature that has been coming along without too much fanfare for a while) and software widgets that let viewers access Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and so on. Verizon added that functionality into its FiOS service last year, but this would be independent of your service provider because it would be controlled by the television itself.

The reason they’re all talking about this now instead of waiting for CES? The Apple fanboi propaganda machine started spinning in overdrive this week for what might be the Next Big Announcement at Apple’s September press event: the much-anticipated overhaul of Apple TV into a cloud-based set top box redubbed (what else?) iTV. All the gadget websites are talking about the leaked details this morning, but here’s Fast Company’s run-down. The box will drop Mac OS for iOS, and the video output will only be 720p, but in addition to streaming video and music, the iTV will be able to download and run iTunes App Store apps natively because it will essentially be that ginormous iPad we all joked about. Unlike some of the more fanciful pre-launch rumors about the iPad, the stories in the tech press are all pretty consistent and reasonable, and Apple needs to do something to make up for the gaffes with the iPhone 4, so I think the confidence level about this should be a lock.

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One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

By Brian Filed in Media, Tech Tagged with , , , , , , October 24th, 2008 @ 2:17 pm

All the cool kids have stopped watching TV on their TVs and watch TV on their computers. That’s what I hear, anyway. Over the Columbus Day weekend, I showed Charlotte how she could watch DVDs on her computer, and she already knows about all the funny videos on YouTube (but luckily JUST the funny ones…for now). Most television content that’s available via the Internet right now seems to be aimed squarely at the teen and young adult audience, so there’s not much that she’d be all that interested in at the moment, but I thoroughly anticipate that by the time she reaches the demographically-desirable tween years every show she’ll want to watch will be online. On the plus side, though, that means I won’t have to fight her for the big-screen plasma HD set in the living room any more.

My wife watches a lot of BBC America (I watch several shows along with her, as well), but quite a few of the shows are at least one year behind what’s currently being shown in Britain. Some of their staple programs, the ones that they repeat over and over and over (like “Cash In The Attic” or “Ground Force”), are actually up to several years old, as they maximize their return on already-produced episodes. People who live in the U.K. (and have a paid-up television license), can watch current BBC programming online via their iPlayer site, but due to copyright issues and DRM restrictions people outside the U.K. can’t view the streaming video directly. The most common solution to date has been to use a proxy server, although some people who are a bit more hardcore are actually ponying up to use U.K.-based VPNs which charge subscription fees. Dave Zatz at Zatz Not Funny offers a little insight into his experiences with both of these methods, and also recommends chumming up to a Brit with a Slingbox, but he used to work for SlingMedia, so he might be a little biased in that regard.

Things still have quite a way to go in the realm of Internet television broadcasting. At NewTeeVee.com, editor Chris Albrecht lists a bunch of very sound reasons why it’s not anywhere near time to cancel your cable TV service. As he points out, just the current pricing models alone should discourage you from cancelling cable and going all-online: buying a season’s pass from iTunes that gives you a sampling of ten TV shows costs half as much as the price for a whole year’s cable subscription, which offers dozens, nay hundreds of channels and literally thousands of programs.

Steverino From Cupertino has mixed opinions, too. Speaking to Wall Street analysts last month for Apple’s 4Q08 earnings statement, he told them that he sees Internet television and even Apple’s own AppleTV product to be little more than “a hobby” at this stage in the game. He managed to ruffle a few feathers with that remark, but I think he’s not too far off. I’d argue that it went beyond the hobby stage with the successful launch of Hulu.com earlier this year, but still has another year of experimentation to develop into its fully-fledged self. Charlotte will be 12 in 2013, and I would bet anything that in five years it will all be settled.

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