Sounds as if old Squirter himself has been transmogrified into some kind of new nerd.
Ha! My first thought at hearing the term "flinging"... was that the MS software guy responsible for Zune "ejaculating" music to other Zunes -- now works for Google.
There is a huge, huge difference between using a remote app on an iPhone or iPad to control a UI that is on a different screen vs simply using the iPhone or iPad's netflix app to navigate to and play your content.
And remote control volume uses the CEC standard. You aren't controlling the volume with amplitude modulation, which is an awful way to control volume on a TV. You are actually controlling the actual volume. The volume control gets to the TV via CEC over HDMI instead of from IR from your remote.
I watched the intro video and read the specs to see what it does.
Set aside your bias and think about how brilliant this design is. Apple simplified the remote, Google got rid of it all together. You find your content the exact same way you would find it to play on your iPad or iPhone, then you play it on your TV with one button. The TV doesn't have to be on. It doesn't have to be on the right input. You don't have to find our touch your TV's remote to start watching, to pause, to fast forward, to change the volume. And you get the same 1080p quality you would get from AppleTV or any other Netflix device.
I see this as mainly Google's attempt to get people to conveniently/easily watch YouTube videos and ads on your TV -- their whole preso was YT-centric.
I dislike YT more each time I visit because of the ever-encroaching ads -- and the feeling that YT/Google is watching me (instead of me watching YT).
I suspect that for most consumers, AirPlay (and such) are a relatively minor part of the TV viewing experience.
What this and AirPlay services fail to address is that most users will continually switch among, cable TV, local TV, sports networks, home videos, iTunes A'V, etc. The operative words are "continually switch". Thus, this adds nothing to the bulk of the TV experience -- except another device to be used as a remote.
The well equipped TV consumer needs something like this:
What's funny? Don't you understand Google's business model? How else do you think they're making money off this device if not for analytics and ads?
Trust me, you will need to sign into a Google account and once that has happened, they will harvest your data because you have agreed to it.
...and the danger is? When you sign into your Apple account your data is harvested because you agreed to it. Somehow I just can't seem to get myself upset over an ad that may or may not be of interest to me.
What's funny? Don't you understand Google's business model? How else do you think they're making money off this device if not for analytics and ads?
Trust me, you will need to sign into a Google account and once that has happened, they will harvest your data because you have agreed to it.
...and the danger is? When you sign into your Apple account your data is harvested because you agreed to it. Somehow I just can't seem to get myself upset over an ad that may or may not be of interest to me.
I'll bite: you don't think there is a difference here? Google obviously uses that data to make money and create services for signed-in users. Apple doesn't try to make money off users who are leaving data; they create products and services for its users, who may opt to pay for it, if they even ask a price for it. A lot of stuff from Apple is 'free', well, free of charge, as they want to create a good experience. With Google, looking at the 'experience' they create for its users, not so much.
I'll bite: you don't think there is a difference here? Google obviously uses that data to make money and create services for signed-in users. Apple doesn't try to make money off users who are leaving data; they create products and services for its users, who may opt to pay for it, if they even ask a price for it. A lot of stuff from Apple is 'free', well, free of charge, as they want to create a good experience. With Google, looking at the 'experience' they create for its users, not so much.
Why is this an issue? Google isn't the only company that knows xyz about you. The only reason people bash Google for it is because Google competes with Apple on some devices.
I guarantee that if Apple and Google were still on great terms (and they may be, we don't actually know) none of you would worry a bit.
It's so silly. So you get a great service in exchange for seeing an ad about an aquarium? Seriously, who give a F.
It's so silly. So you get a great service in exchange for seeing an ad about an aquarium? Seriously, who give a F.
That's valid. And your opinion. I just don't like ads. I don't watch TV (not because of ads), but do use the internet, and think almost every ad is pathetic, over the top, deceitful and not even necessary if the product can stand on its on. I've never seen an ad from Rolls Royce, yet they get sold.
That's valid. And your opinion. I just don't like ads. I don't watch TV (not because of ads), but do use the internet, and think almost every ad is pathetic, over the top, deceitful and not even necessary if the product can stand on its on. I've never seen an ad from Rolls Royce, yet they get sold.
Hey as long as folks form their own opinion by THINKING, I don't care. Perhaps you have. Some here don't.
For me, multi platforms is brilliant. I am not interested in being locked in to either, I want the best tools where and when needed.
My initial thought on this was, "hey, for $11 after my Netflix credit, I'll definitely give this a shot." But after thinking/reading more about it, I don't think it's even worth $11 to me. I already have Apple TV's (and computers running XBMC and Plex which can also receive AirPlay streams) and have an iOS-dominated household, so this doesn't seem to offer me anything I don't already have.
I do applaud them for the approach of letting the mobile device effectively "hand off" the stream to the ChromeCast device, so that the ChromeCast does all of the heavy lifting. Since the release of the ATV2, and learning that it was running iOS inside, I wondered why Apple didn't design it to work the same way when streaming content like Netflix, YouTube, etc. Yes, the ATV has dedicated apps for those, but if you begin your YouTube searching on your iPhone and then push the video to the ATV, the ATV should be smart enough to get the stream from the internet itself, rather than the multi-hop approach of having the iPhone send it to the router, which then sends it to the ATV.
Regarding the need for USB power, I've read in a couple of places that if you have an HDMI v1.4 port, it can get power from that. If true, newer TVs can power it all by themselves. That said, they're definitely being deceptive by hiding the fact that for *most* people, that tiny dongle isn't going to be so tiny, since you're going to have to plug in extra cables and a wall wart.
They also kept touting the ability for 1080p surround sound video, but since this is WiFi only (as opposed to the ATV which has an ethernet port) and it's going to be stuck behind your TV, I wonder if this thing might be stutter-city for a lot of people. Does it have on-board storage memory to alleviate this through buffering?
The biggest takeaway for me is that this smells like Google pulling the plug on Google TV. Wouldn't the functionality of this make sense to integrate into Google TV? I would have liked to have seen them announce a software update to Google TV adding this feature, along with the release of this new ultra-cheap dongle. If Google TV is officially dead, then that was a short-lived experiment. We can complain about how the ATV lacks features we'd like to see, but one of the reasons why I remain in the iOS ecosystem is that Apple maintains support for their products for at least a few years before making something extinct.
In the end, I'm more excited about what software updates (and possibly hardware improvements) might be coming to the ATV next. WiFi direct and Bluetooth game controller support could open it up to become the king of gaming consoles (for the record, I'm not a gamer, and I fully realize that the CPU/GPU specs on an ATV don't compare to an XBox 360 or PS3, but I think the hardcore gamers are a minority in the overall market and the same casual gamers / families who jumped on the Nintendo Wii and made it a huge success, despite it having poor graphics compared to the 360 or PS3, would also be satisfied with iOS-capable games on their big screen via an ATV).
Lastly, I will say that I'm happy that Google and others do try to compete with Apple. If no one bothered to try, Apple would have less incentive to improve their products. Hopefully the idea of handing-off the video streaming (for Netflix, Youtube, Pandora, etc.) will make its way into a subsequent ATV software update.
<span style="color:rgb(24,24,24);font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif;line-height:19px;">"Unlike other solutions," one said in the course of the presentation, "we will not force you to have the same operating system on all your devices."</span>
<span style="color:rgb(24,24,24);font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif;line-height:19px;">That's dishonest because that's exactly what they're doing. This thing only works with Apps that have integrated Chrome into them to support it.</span>
<span style="color:rgb(24,24,24);font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif;line-height:19px;">AppleTV is not a dongle that lets you connect to the TV, it's a small computer itself. </span>
<span style="color:rgb(24,24,24);font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif;line-height:19px;">Typical google, I guess they think being disingenuous isn't "evil". </span>
I think there's a big difference between a app and a OS.
I'll bite: you don't think there is a difference here? Google obviously uses that data to make money and create services for signed-in users. Apple doesn't try to make money off users who are leaving data; they create products and services for its users, who may opt to pay for it, if they even ask a price for it. A lot of stuff from Apple is 'free', well, free of charge, as they want to create a good experience. With Google, looking at the 'experience' they create for its users, not so much.
So the great danger everyone's afraid of is a lesser user experience?
I'll bite: you don't think there is a difference here? Google obviously uses that data to make money and create services for signed-in users. Apple doesn't try to make money off users who are leaving data.
Of course Apple is trying to make money by monetizing their user's data. They just haven';t been overwhelmingly successful with it yet. With iRadio and targeted ads, their own maps app gathering user location data, better data-mining via iTunes and persistent rumors of a soon-to-launch Apple Ad Exchange they may get there.
I'll bite: you don't think there is a difference here? Google obviously uses that data to make money and create services for signed-in users. Apple doesn't try to make money off users who are leaving data.
Of course Apple is trying to make money by monetizing their user's data. They just haven';t been overwhelmingly successful with it yet. With iRadio and targeted ads, their own maps app gathering user location data, better data-mining via iTunes and persistent rumors of a soon-to-launch Apple Ad Exchange they may get there.
1) I'm not in the US, and haven't seen an iAd. Ever.
2) iRadio isn't available yet. We're talking about the here and now.
3) User location data gathering through iPhones is being done by crowd sourcing, not user specific after first logging into the Apple.com domain, which was the start of the discussion.
>>>snipped because I agree with everything you wrote... until..
Lastly, I will say that I'm happy that Google and others do try to compete with Apple. If no one bothered to try, Apple would have less incentive to improve their products. Hopefully the idea of handing-off the video streaming (for Netflix, Youtube, Pandora, etc.) will make its way into a subsequent ATV software update.
Sorry... but no. Apple never has followed any other tech company with innovation or the timetable that a different company chooses to bring to market their devices/tech... until THEY themselves are ready with THEIR products. That is when and if they think they can truly add something for a better user experience.
If what you're saying is true, they would have long ago released the iPhone Mini, Lite, and Max from their labs. They didn't for a reason. Don't be so naive to think that Apple doesn't have prototypes for years of just about every screen size and combination of tech available to them... including OSX running on an iPad.
Same thing with the AppleTV: it will be "relaunched" when Apple is ready and has all of the loose ends tied up to turn it from "just a hobby" to the next must-have device to add value not only for it's users, but adds value to the Apple Ecosystem.
With all of the Apple Fanboyism out of the way, for $35.00 I know of a few people that will jump on these and I'll be able to tinker with them i.e "try to make them work" once on the market. Most of those people in mind are twisted and masochistic Winbox/Android users and haven't a clue about tech, but only want to watch YouTube (egads!) on their TV. Nor do they have the necessary patience to save up for Apple gear.... which truly does come the closest to "It Just Works™" **... and I've stopped trying to persuade them.
* As opposed to Google who only plagiarizes the saying (which they did in the preso!)... and when it "It Just (Doesn't) Work"... has there fallback term "Beta" waiting for the naysayers who point this out (like: how dare they!)
* 99% of the time for all of the devices that Apple has sold and are being used today, iOS or Mac. Costumer satisfaction results points to that "assumption"; my experience of almost 30 years says it's darn close to fact.
NOTE: as a devoted Apple fan myself, there is nothing I hate worse than when people come to a forum and start spouting of nonsense before researching their bogus claims... and that be whether about Apple or any other company and their products, announcements... whatever. :devil:
As an avowed Apple Fanboy, I do believe in being fair.
This article at MacTrast (silly name but it is Apple-centric) sheds a little light on the "Who's Watching Who and How Much". Unfortunately i don't have the time to research the validity of the facts.... thought I'd just throw it on here to see what someone else productively does with it.
Hold your horses on the remote volume control bubba. Are you assuming your can control the volume? HDMI is a digital signal. HDMI and/or SPDIF has no overall amplitude control to my knowledge. The volume is controlled on the TV's build-in amplifier (once its converted to analog) or via attach Home Theater AV receiver.
If your TV or HDMI device supports HDMI CEC then an HDMI device can control power on, input selection and volume among other things.
First, they claim that you have to have the same operating system on all of your devices to use an AppleTV. This is flat out wrong since you can use iOS, or Mac OS X or, you can just use the AppleTV itself without requiring any other operating system. From what I can tell of this device, it requires you to have a compatible app or Chrome running.
Second, while you can run this on Windows... you need to use Chrome. If I'm on a Mac, or Windows and don't have Chrome, this thing is useless. Obviously it's easy enough to download, but I don't need Google spying on me, thank you.
Third, the AppleTV is as powerful as an iPod touch and can do much more than what it's doing now. The Google solution is more akin to a dongle with WiFi and HDMI. I'm not sure how powerful this is.
Lastly, if I'm following this correctly, there's a HUGE difference between the AppleTV and the Chromecast device... AirPlay. While Google is calling this "casting", I can almost guarantee you of what it's really doing. Ready? They release an API that puts a button in your video app. You can then tell it what video and where to start playing. This is sent to the Chromecast device which then goes out to the Internet and continues playback. This is a HUGE difference as compared to an AppleTV which streams directly from your device to the AppleTV and does not require an Internet connection.
This has huge implications! For one thing, the app I make uses AirPlay to allow my app (which is not a video app) to stream content to a TV as if it were an external screen. I can also use my TV as an external monitor with my Mac computers. All of this is down without an Internet connection at all, just WiFi. This is incredibly useful when you want to demonstrate things at a conference or tradeshow. It is also allowing more advanced applications in OS X Mavericks, and chances are good Apple is cooking up a more powerful AppleTV OS that they can just install onto the existing devices.
So is there a difference between a $99 and $35 device? I believe the answer is yes. Unfortunately, most consumers will be fooled into thinking they are the same thing because the marketing and specs look the same.
Comments
Ha! My first thought at hearing the term "flinging"... was that the MS software guy responsible for Zune "ejaculating" music to other Zunes -- now works for Google.
Quote:
Originally Posted by alandail
There is a huge, huge difference between using a remote app on an iPhone or iPad to control a UI that is on a different screen vs simply using the iPhone or iPad's netflix app to navigate to and play your content.
And remote control volume uses the CEC standard. You aren't controlling the volume with amplitude modulation, which is an awful way to control volume on a TV. You are actually controlling the actual volume. The volume control gets to the TV via CEC over HDMI instead of from IR from your remote.
I watched the intro video and read the specs to see what it does.
That makes more sense.
I see this as mainly Google's attempt to get people to conveniently/easily watch YouTube videos and ads on your TV -- their whole preso was YT-centric.
I dislike YT more each time I visit because of the ever-encroaching ads -- and the feeling that YT/Google is watching me (instead of me watching YT).
I suspect that for most consumers, AirPlay (and such) are a relatively minor part of the TV viewing experience.
What this and AirPlay services fail to address is that most users will continually switch among, cable TV, local TV, sports networks, home videos, iTunes A'V, etc. The operative words are "continually switch". Thus, this adds nothing to the bulk of the TV experience -- except another device to be used as a remote.
The well equipped TV consumer needs something like this:
...and the danger is? When you sign into your Apple account your data is harvested because you agreed to it. Somehow I just can't seem to get myself upset over an ad that may or may not be of interest to me.
I'll bite: you don't think there is a difference here? Google obviously uses that data to make money and create services for signed-in users. Apple doesn't try to make money off users who are leaving data; they create products and services for its users, who may opt to pay for it, if they even ask a price for it. A lot of stuff from Apple is 'free', well, free of charge, as they want to create a good experience. With Google, looking at the 'experience' they create for its users, not so much.
Why is this an issue? Google isn't the only company that knows xyz about you. The only reason people bash Google for it is because Google competes with Apple on some devices.
I guarantee that if Apple and Google were still on great terms (and they may be, we don't actually know) none of you would worry a bit.
It's so silly. So you get a great service in exchange for seeing an ad about an aquarium? Seriously, who give a F.
That's valid. And your opinion. I just don't like ads. I don't watch TV (not because of ads), but do use the internet, and think almost every ad is pathetic, over the top, deceitful and not even necessary if the product can stand on its on. I've never seen an ad from Rolls Royce, yet they get sold.
Hey as long as folks form their own opinion by THINKING, I don't care. Perhaps you have. Some here don't.
For me, multi platforms is brilliant. I am not interested in being locked in to either, I want the best tools where and when needed.
Just my .02
My initial thought on this was, "hey, for $11 after my Netflix credit, I'll definitely give this a shot." But after thinking/reading more about it, I don't think it's even worth $11 to me. I already have Apple TV's (and computers running XBMC and Plex which can also receive AirPlay streams) and have an iOS-dominated household, so this doesn't seem to offer me anything I don't already have.
I do applaud them for the approach of letting the mobile device effectively "hand off" the stream to the ChromeCast device, so that the ChromeCast does all of the heavy lifting. Since the release of the ATV2, and learning that it was running iOS inside, I wondered why Apple didn't design it to work the same way when streaming content like Netflix, YouTube, etc. Yes, the ATV has dedicated apps for those, but if you begin your YouTube searching on your iPhone and then push the video to the ATV, the ATV should be smart enough to get the stream from the internet itself, rather than the multi-hop approach of having the iPhone send it to the router, which then sends it to the ATV.
Regarding the need for USB power, I've read in a couple of places that if you have an HDMI v1.4 port, it can get power from that. If true, newer TVs can power it all by themselves. That said, they're definitely being deceptive by hiding the fact that for *most* people, that tiny dongle isn't going to be so tiny, since you're going to have to plug in extra cables and a wall wart.
They also kept touting the ability for 1080p surround sound video, but since this is WiFi only (as opposed to the ATV which has an ethernet port) and it's going to be stuck behind your TV, I wonder if this thing might be stutter-city for a lot of people. Does it have on-board storage memory to alleviate this through buffering?
The biggest takeaway for me is that this smells like Google pulling the plug on Google TV. Wouldn't the functionality of this make sense to integrate into Google TV? I would have liked to have seen them announce a software update to Google TV adding this feature, along with the release of this new ultra-cheap dongle. If Google TV is officially dead, then that was a short-lived experiment. We can complain about how the ATV lacks features we'd like to see, but one of the reasons why I remain in the iOS ecosystem is that Apple maintains support for their products for at least a few years before making something extinct.
In the end, I'm more excited about what software updates (and possibly hardware improvements) might be coming to the ATV next. WiFi direct and Bluetooth game controller support could open it up to become the king of gaming consoles (for the record, I'm not a gamer, and I fully realize that the CPU/GPU specs on an ATV don't compare to an XBox 360 or PS3, but I think the hardcore gamers are a minority in the overall market and the same casual gamers / families who jumped on the Nintendo Wii and made it a huge success, despite it having poor graphics compared to the 360 or PS3, would also be satisfied with iOS-capable games on their big screen via an ATV).
Lastly, I will say that I'm happy that Google and others do try to compete with Apple. If no one bothered to try, Apple would have less incentive to improve their products. Hopefully the idea of handing-off the video streaming (for Netflix, Youtube, Pandora, etc.) will make its way into a subsequent ATV software update.
I think there's a big difference between a app and a OS.
So the great danger everyone's afraid of is a lesser user experience?
Of course Apple is trying to make money by monetizing their user's data. They just haven';t been overwhelmingly successful with it yet. With iRadio and targeted ads, their own maps app gathering user location data, better data-mining via iTunes and persistent rumors of a soon-to-launch Apple Ad Exchange they may get there.
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-considers-launching-ad-exchange-2013-5
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-03/apple-said-to-shift-ad-focus-to-support-new-music-service.html
http://appleinsider.com/articles/10/07/06/150m_itunes_accounts_help_apple_create_targeted_iads
1) I'm not in the US, and haven't seen an iAd. Ever.
2) iRadio isn't available yet. We're talking about the here and now.
3) User location data gathering through iPhones is being done by crowd sourcing, not user specific after first logging into the Apple.com domain, which was the start of the discussion.
Well there you go. . . Evidence they haven't been very good at monetizing user data yet. But they're trying harder.
Sorry... but no. Apple never has followed any other tech company with innovation or the timetable that a different company chooses to bring to market their devices/tech... until THEY themselves are ready with THEIR products. That is when and if they think they can truly add something for a better user experience.
If what you're saying is true, they would have long ago released the iPhone Mini, Lite, and Max from their labs. They didn't for a reason. Don't be so naive to think that Apple doesn't have prototypes for years of just about every screen size and combination of tech available to them... including OSX running on an iPad.
Same thing with the AppleTV: it will be "relaunched" when Apple is ready and has all of the loose ends tied up to turn it from "just a hobby" to the next must-have device to add value not only for it's users, but adds value to the Apple Ecosystem.
With all of the Apple Fanboyism out of the way, for $35.00 I know of a few people that will jump on these and I'll be able to tinker with them i.e "try to make them work" once on the market. Most of those people in mind are twisted and masochistic Winbox/Android users and haven't a clue about tech, but only want to watch YouTube (egads!) on their TV. Nor do they have the necessary patience to save up for Apple gear.... which truly does come the closest to "It Just Works™" **... and I've stopped trying to persuade them.
* As opposed to Google who only plagiarizes the saying (which they did in the preso!)... and when it "It Just (Doesn't) Work"... has there fallback term "Beta" waiting for the naysayers who point this out (like: how dare they!)
* 99% of the time for all of the devices that Apple has sold and are being used today, iOS or Mac. Costumer satisfaction results points to that "assumption"; my experience of almost 30 years says it's darn close to fact.
NOTE: as a devoted Apple fan myself, there is nothing I hate worse than when people come to a forum and start spouting of nonsense before researching their bogus claims... and that be whether about Apple or any other company and their products, announcements... whatever. :devil:
Please DON'T do that! :no:
Please DO read and COMPREHEND MY SIG! :smokey:
This article at MacTrast (silly name but it is Apple-centric) sheds a little light on the "Who's Watching Who and How Much". Unfortunately i don't have the time to research the validity of the facts.... thought I'd just throw it on here to see what someone else productively does with it.
[URL=http://www.mactrast.com/2013/07/uncommon-comparisons-of-the-app-store-vs-google-play-infographic/]Uncommon Comparisons between Apple's vs. Google's App Stores[/URL]
*** See "Risky Business" at the bottom as it pertains to "Info Mining and Security"; specifically "Ad Networks".*
* It hurts a little!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Carthusia
What's funny? Don't you understand Google's business model? How else do you think they're making money off this device if not for analytics and ads?
Trust me, you will need to sign into a Google account and once that has happened, they will harvest your data because you have agreed to it.
Keep the laughs coming. Thanks!
Quote:
Originally Posted by snova
Hold your horses on the remote volume control bubba. Are you assuming your can control the volume? HDMI is a digital signal. HDMI and/or SPDIF has no overall amplitude control to my knowledge. The volume is controlled on the TV's build-in amplifier (once its converted to analog) or via attach Home Theater AV receiver.
If your TV or HDMI device supports HDMI CEC then an HDMI device can control power on, input selection and volume among other things.
Some observations:
First, they claim that you have to have the same operating system on all of your devices to use an AppleTV. This is flat out wrong since you can use iOS, or Mac OS X or, you can just use the AppleTV itself without requiring any other operating system. From what I can tell of this device, it requires you to have a compatible app or Chrome running.
Second, while you can run this on Windows... you need to use Chrome. If I'm on a Mac, or Windows and don't have Chrome, this thing is useless. Obviously it's easy enough to download, but I don't need Google spying on me, thank you.
Third, the AppleTV is as powerful as an iPod touch and can do much more than what it's doing now. The Google solution is more akin to a dongle with WiFi and HDMI. I'm not sure how powerful this is.
Lastly, if I'm following this correctly, there's a HUGE difference between the AppleTV and the Chromecast device... AirPlay. While Google is calling this "casting", I can almost guarantee you of what it's really doing. Ready? They release an API that puts a button in your video app. You can then tell it what video and where to start playing. This is sent to the Chromecast device which then goes out to the Internet and continues playback. This is a HUGE difference as compared to an AppleTV which streams directly from your device to the AppleTV and does not require an Internet connection.
This has huge implications! For one thing, the app I make uses AirPlay to allow my app (which is not a video app) to stream content to a TV as if it were an external screen. I can also use my TV as an external monitor with my Mac computers. All of this is down without an Internet connection at all, just WiFi. This is incredibly useful when you want to demonstrate things at a conference or tradeshow. It is also allowing more advanced applications in OS X Mavericks, and chances are good Apple is cooking up a more powerful AppleTV OS that they can just install onto the existing devices.
So is there a difference between a $99 and $35 device? I believe the answer is yes. Unfortunately, most consumers will be fooled into thinking they are the same thing because the marketing and specs look the same.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DroidFTW
I bought mine. You get three months of free Netflix too.
Wow, 3 months free Netflix covers more than half of the cost. I'll go get mine.