Saw these post online showing the Ubuntu UI and I must say that the Unity UI stinks as a PC UI but as a TV UI it is sure pretty. I hope someone will post some video of it so we can see if its flow is as nice as the static shots.
It’s still just a proof of concept, which is a bit of a disappointment, but Ubuntu TV was here at CES making its public debut.
I have worked with a number of clients in the delivery of new STB code and new STBs over my career. I have prided myself that I could work a team to identify bugs that ultimately would be seen as customer defects (the difference between bugs and defects is something worthy of an entire post in itself) and then work out the best resolution and then get it implemented. However I would limit myself to dealing only with a certain type of bug and not real live ones.
Man, those Greedy Cable Companies have some nerve, am I right? Always showing up late, charging us for channels we dont want, under-delivering on broadband speeds. But at least theyre not infesting our homes with bugs! Oh, wait.
Then again, a resolution is clear and simple to these bugs compared to the average timing issue.
There is going to be a lot said about Steve Jobs in the coming days, but I would just say two things.
1. Jobsian – an approach to product development that was singularly successful and others aspire to.
2. Watch his 2005 Stanford commencement address and be inspired.
IBC has rolled round again and we will be enjoying the delights of the RAI – hot dogs and Coke Lite that are almost as expensive as Inkjet Printer Ink (that is the most expensive thing by volume on the planet I understand) – for the 14th year in a row, over the coming days starting today – 9th September and going through to the end. As for many it will be a hard work expo with quite a bit of networking with the aim of not expiring under the green bottles, and hitting those 9am and 10am meetings feeling refreshed (and not damp under rain). The weather forecast is mixed from warm days to rainy days… Amsterdam is always a little different.
The word on the street is that we will see ‘Cloud’ everywhere, whether it is content delivery or production, and quite a number of hybrid broadcast/IPTV and OTT solutions. We shall see really what that brings, and whether there is good business, poor business or pure hype.
If you want to meet up at all then feel free to tweet me at @iannock, and follow me there as I tweet the occasional on-the-spot experience from the show.
Last summer I blogged about the differing approaches that Apple and Google have taken with respect to the development of their respective phone (and now tablet) platforms. In the post, I postulated that iOS4 could be the last time that Apple enjoyed an advantage over Google Android, and that the multiple path development approach taken by Google would cause it to overtake Apple in features. In some respects I can say Yes – Google is now ahead of Apple. My latest phone is the excellent Samsung SII which is thinner, lighter and more powerful than any iPhone available today, with all of the useability issues that were experienced in earlier Android phones a distant memory (like limited app space, poor memory management, short battery life). This device runs the 2.3.3 version of the Android OS and it is as nimble as it is light.
However there is a mixed bag here, as Google changed its approach with 3.0 (Honeycomb) and effectively focused onto a small number (initially only one) of hardware makers to product their tablets and look to follow that approach with Ice Cream Sandwich, the 2.4/4.0 harmonisation release. The pace of improvement has slowed to a crawl for Google such that I would say that they are now only ‘just’ ahead of Apple, and that is also because Apple have struggled to keep up the advance by releases iOS5 on the 12 month cycle – it is now running to a 15 month period before iOS5 creeps out of the gate and ends up on the iDevices. I can only hope that Google finds its ability to innovate strongly in the near future, otherwise iOS5 could eat its lunch and rest the advantage back.
Google has though rested control of the brand back by being more restrictive on modifications to the base OS, and also by filtering out ‘low quality’ devices from the food chain. In other words dealing with the negatives of its parallelised development approach. The only fly in the ointment now for Google is how to sort out the IP/Patents mess, which it is trying to do by purchasing Motorola in some part. However that purchase has its own challenges, which is of deep interest to the TV world – what will it do with the STB side of Moto? Will it divest itself of this along with the phone hardware business, or all the combinations that are possible? Or will it seek to integrate the STB side of Moto with the near death Google TV business?
Time will tell, but it will certainly be an interesting and entertaining year ahead. I feel I will hold back my views until after the joys of IBC 2011 at the end of next week, when more ‘intelligence’ will be available about this and other industry moves, and also the effect of the second dip in the double dip recession may also be discerned. The first dip seen just after IBC2008 was a little painful and I hope the second dip that is now happening will only be felt gently by the TV industry.
I am a functional kind of guy – the product has to do fantastic things and I am less concerned about how it looks. It does still have to look reasonable though. This post I found on Business Insider tells us that we have to look beyond our current product set and take a view that a great customer experience is more important than function… to an extent.
Research in Motion thought the iPhone would bomb, basically, because its not a BlackBerry.
via Research in Motion: Executives Thought The iPhone Was “Badly Flawed,” And Assumed It Would Bomb.
However I don’t go fully for the form over function argument. The iPhone did a great number of things very well compared to its competition whilst being a passable phone and the article does touch on these. Even today, the iPhone has the edge, in my book, over Android with respect to web browsing. One area though it really shines – Music and Podcasts. No other phone has the level of integration from store to content to device that the Apple iPhone has and I am missing that in my new Android phone. However Google has a stratospheric development cycle from having so many different partners on hardware and software, so I hope that will be resolved soon.
A great lesson for product developers – Passable to good function, and great form. Oh, and don’t rest on your laurels.
It is the elephant in the room when it comes to OTT – Can the content owner be sure that they get paid for their content? Boxee and Netflix are working to resolve Boxee’s specific issues.
We’re in a bit of an awkward spot at the moment.The Netflix app is up and running on Boxee we watched the intro to Full Metal Jacket earlier today, but we have not yet satisfied Netflix’s security requirements. We anticipate availability soon. It’s terrible to be so close to releasing and yet still be waiting on one thing to fall into place.
However this is a wider issue that was faced in the old traditional TV arena with the introduction of content protection (CGMS-A/Macrovision and, to a more limited extent in the old world, DRM) alongside the imperative of conditional access. In the traditional PayTV arena, the issue could be solved as there was generally a single platform with a single (or double) set of technologies that could be controlled by having managed hardware at the consumer end.
Today however, the TV companies (new OTT and old traditional Cable/Satellite) are facing the fact that the content they will be producing will be seen by customers on many different platforms, at least the customer wants to see it on all their platforms, most of which are completely outside of the control of the operator. There is not just the issue of whether a customer can watch it on platform A, and copy it to watch on platform B – there is the Connected TV issue that content can be watched on platform A only in location X and can pay a little extra to watch it in location Y on platform B. This is a complexity that is being drawn not only because content owners are living a little in the past, but that content distributors are living a little too much in the future and hoping for really profitable business models that layer incremental revenue onto just getting the content to the customer.
This is a huge software development and security tools headache, to ensure that none of the many platforms have a flaw that allows wholesale copying or use of the content in a way that is against the wishes of the content owner. After usability and getting the content, this is the biggest technical issue in my view.
There was once a time (once being even today in some product companies), when companies would spend two to three years on making a new product. That was the competitive environment back in the day. These days though products are developed in much less time than that, with new product being produced at least every year. These annual companies are dependent on making that product successful, and making sure that they do not make mistakes. The natural improvement for that has been to reduce that timescale down to three or four months, as it has happened in the consumer electronics industry.
Let us look at Apple and Google in the mobile phone space. Apple is in this annual process of incremental improvement, with new improvements appearing every June. Google however has an improvement to that approach of the rapid product development lifecycle combined with parallelism of product development with many companies. The product development lifecycle for each company in this space with Android in the mix is less than four months but combined together with the parallelism of multiple companies, the effective lifecycle of the product has become monthly! It is through this that Android has caught up with Apple in such a short time – rapid iteration of new product features through many development companies.
This is a revolution in the principle of evolution that has come into the tech space. Place your code in the open source space and do deals to ensure as many companies are involved in product development at the same time, which leads to many gradual improvements being made to the product in a very short timescale.However this has a downside in that buyers remorse comes into effect almost immediately, which I believe has held back aspects of Android roll-out, but Google are now moving into a more stable development period – largely because the 80% of the improvements necessary to catch Apple have been made now. Now it is about building brand ownership in the customer’s mind. Brand ownership is a major component of the Apple geek, and I believe Google is trying for this in the Android customer.
Will this June be the last point at which Apple is perceived as being ahead of the game with the iPhone?
Who else could use the parallel iteration development approach? STB companies? TV companies? Laptop companies?
Note: I have heard recently that Sony is opening up its Vaio brand to 2nd tier suppliers. This sounds very much like Sony trying to parallelise its product lifecycle.
This is a reminder for many of you, and that is that this blog maintains an aggregate news feed of hand picked content that is pertinent to the Broadband and Digital TV industries, paying quite a bit of attention towards consumer devices such as STBs and other video/information devices. You can access this information off the masthead – see the ‘News Headlines in Detail‘ option, or for the information deficient amongst us you can subscribe to the RSS feed via the same page.
Give it a try and get access to the best of the best sites and content out there… who knows you may actually start visiting these great sites directly yourself!
There is some speculation based on the flimsiest of a job posting (Apple To Bring iPhone OS To New Gadgets) that Apple could be looking to expand beyond the iPad device, as that being a first step beyond the phone and handheld information device world – perhaps into the mainstream TV world.
Apple have had Apple TV for sometime but that has taken a different evolutionary approach, basing itself on the full OSX implementation rather than the more single focused one found within the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices. It is not that much of a stretch though to see Apple switch the OS, just as Microsoft has now pushed their Windows Phone 7 into the single tasking world, from the more PC like 6.5 and earlier. What could this do though since the Apple TV has had very limited success?
Personally, I see this as a bit of a long shot and a market that would be a tough nut to crack, for a couple of reasons. The TV and STB market are now sparking off technologies such as OCAP, Flash, MHP/GEM/True2Way and HTML – technologies that have taken years in the making for the STB makers of today. The other reason, is that these technologies offer the ability to emulate the ‘App Store’ and grid model quite easily, rather than having the need to implement OSX on a new device. The TV market is finalising its transition to the Linux OS world, away from proprietary OS and Middleware combinations. All Apple would be, is just another proprietary OS and Middleware. I am not sure that Apple would have the clout to reverse this trend quickly.
Do you believe Apple could move into the TV world?