[HN Gopher] TV: Now What?
___________________________________________________________________
TV: Now What?
Author : ingve
Score : 54 points
Date : 2023-11-18 16:41 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (commonsware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (commonsware.com)
| jadbox wrote:
| This seems likely to me as well.
|
| > To me, this level of fragmentation, coupled with the nature of
| content-centric TV apps, suggests that a server-defined UI
| approach might work well.
| hammock wrote:
| There still has to be some client side interface, an OS, a
| browser, thin client, I/O, some layer right?
|
| Trying to thing of another example where a screen is just a
| dumb-as-can-be terminal
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Trying to thing of another example where a screen is just
| a dumb-as-can-be terminal_
|
| CarPlay and Android Auto come to mind.
| badrabbit wrote:
| The thing is, apps for TVs work relativley well. If I could run
| something in an RPI that accepts infrared remote control as an
| input device and have run all the drm-y media services, and have
| it work reliably with low maintenance, I would much prefer that!
|
| If Amazon makes their custom Linux OS open source and allow users
| to modify and update the fire tv sticks, that would be even
| better!
| midasuni wrote:
| Amazon are double dipping -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38194818
|
| Only consumer equipment company I "trust" are Apple.
| petepete wrote:
| If your TV supports CEC you'll be able to control your
| Raspberry Pi with your TV remote. It works perfectly with
| OpenELEC, I suspect other platforms are fine too.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Plex, Jellyfin, LibreELEC, Kodi... those are the best solutions
| for those wanting to manage their own destiny and TV experience.
|
| You can run them on practically anything and there are Tiny PCs,
| stick-form-factor Raspberry Pi devices (like CM4 TV Stick), and
| other silent small boxes you can attach to a TV for a thin client
| interface or just a shared media library / TV experience.
|
| It'd be nice if Amazon, Apple, Netflix, et all had integrations
| though, besides wrapping a browser window.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > Plex, Jellyfin, LibreELEC, Kodi... those are the best
| solutions for those wanting to manage their own destiny and TV
| experience.
|
| As long as one produces their own content, right?
| buildbot wrote:
| Correct me if I am wrong, but hasn't it been found (In the
| US) that making a digital copy of a DVD you own totally okay?
| MobileVet wrote:
| Correct. Personal archival is protected under fair use. [1]
|
| 1. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/202
| 1-23...
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Correct (as long as you don't distribute it), but not all
| content is available on DVDs, and many things come to DVDs
| much later than they are available elsewhere.
|
| That said, there is a _less legal_ solution to those
| problems...
| slg wrote:
| Sure, and the "water pipe" they sell on the boardwalk is
| for "tobacco use only".
|
| Let's be honest, most people use this software to serve up
| their library of pirated content. The number of people who
| are even still buying physical media is relatively tiny.
| That is why retailers like Best Buy are abandoning that
| market. The population of people who buy that physical
| media and then manually rip it has to be miniscule.
| aschla wrote:
| Quick side note on Best Buy abandoning selling physical
| media, the cashier at Best Buy said they'll probably just
| throw the rest of their stock in the trash when they stop
| selling them in early 2024. So if anyone is interested in
| some free blu-rays and doesn't mind dumpster diving...
| elcomet wrote:
| Those all have apps for Netflix and others, as well as video
| on demand.
| dartharva wrote:
| what do you think
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| What exactly are you implying? You think I can't rip a Blue-
| Ray or DVD?
| mindslight wrote:
| No, just pirate. I can kind of understand why people started
| giving Netflix money for the convenience, despite that
| supporting an industry desperately trying to destroy the
| Internet. But now with a thousand and five different
| "services", continually squeezing users for more revenue,
| digital restrictions management that makes perfectly good
| hardware stop working, and ever more surveillance telemetry
| in the various apps and devices? Rent an off the shelf
| seedbox, or set up your own with a consumer VPN, and don't
| think twice. Consider it just another "service" and see if it
| wins out in your life. And if down the line you end up
| deciding it doesn't work well for you, you still get to keep
| access to everything you've obtained!
| scarface_74 wrote:
| So instead of just paying a few bucks a month I'm going to
| go through the trouble of trawling the internet to find a
| good torrent and then set up my own Plex server (been those
| done that) - alternative I can just open an app and not
| think about it.
| mindslight wrote:
| Judging by the various threads on this topic, the current
| streaming reality isn't "a few bucks" and it actually
| involves quite a lot of cognitive overhead (exactly when
| you just want to be relaxing!). Neither do you have to go
| "trawling" for torrents - public trackers/catalogs easily
| get you the contemporary zeitgeist and its back catalog.
| But sure, keep on enjoying the simulated liberation of
| the corporate sandbox. My comment was meant for those on
| the fence.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| It's funny you mention that. Convenience is exactly why I
| switched to piracy earlier this year.
|
| To watch content legally, I first have to work out who
| owns the rights in Australia (it can be different to the
| US, and often changes - e.g. last time I watched The
| Terminator it was on Netflix but now it's on Amazon
| Prime), see if I have that app (I'm not signing up to an
| app to watch one film, even if it were free it's not
| worth the bullshit), and if not pick a different film and
| start the whole process again. It's worse for TV shows,
| where season 1 could be exclusive to Netflix but seasons
| 2-7 are only on Stan.
|
| To pirate content, I open the Elementum tab in Kodi, type
| in what I want to watch, and 20 seconds later it's
| directly streaming from the bittorrent network in
| fantastic HD quality.
|
| Elementum is a plugin for Kodi, works great.
| snvzz wrote:
| These days you get a much worse service if you pay[0].
|
| Can't make that shit up.
|
| 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4GZUCwVRLs
| Tajnymag wrote:
| This is, unfortunately, a point very much tied to the
| region you live in. In my region, even if I pay the same
| price as the users from US, not only do I pay much more
| in terms of percentage of my income, but I also get just
| a fraction of the content available.
|
| Imagine, I'd want to watch some Doctor Who for example,
| there's exactly zero streaming services offering the show
| in my country.
| adamomada wrote:
| For a while now there are services out there (usually on
| discord) who will rent you a plex container hooked up to
| a ridiculous size media library (I've seen multiple in
| the 1.5 PB+ range) with basically everything from every
| streaming service , Bluray, or DVD in the original bit
| for bit download, just sans-DRM
|
| This is probably going to catch on more and more - it's
| not free, you have to pay, but! - it's $10 a month for
| everything like Spotify
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Popcorn Time is "just an app" too.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| I've never understood this idea of good torrents being
| hard to find. TPB has been around for a long time.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Archive.org has vast amounts of video; from public domain
| through "that's not supposed to be here."
|
| There's lots of other sources too.
| all2 wrote:
| I'm curious now, can you give an example of one of the
| 'that's not supposed to be here' things?
| h2odragon wrote:
| cheerfully!
|
| Here's 3 examples of movies of Cultural Import * that are
| copyrighted and technically, probably shouldn't be there.
| But they're unavailable, or hard to find; possibly
| outlawed in some places.
|
| I'm quite grateful to someone for taking the trouble to
| find, digitize, and upload these classics, and that
| archive.org can host them.
|
| + I'll leave it to you to figure out what the "cultural
| import" is in each case here. As with all Art, it's
| certainly debatable.
|
| https://archive.org/download/rollerblade/rollerblade.mp4
|
| https://archive.org/download/flesh-
| gordon-1974_20220429/Fles...
|
| https://archive.org/download/barbarella_202110/Barbarella
| .mp...
| slothtrop wrote:
| Since all of these streaming platforms are available on the
| browser, it should be trivial to run this through a pc/pi even
| without API support, if a little cumbersome. SHould also run
| faster than the ad-ridden software on
| Firestick/Chromecast/Apple-tv.
| jwells89 wrote:
| A PC will work fine for general viewing but might be a
| problem for those looking for more advanced features, e.g.
| Dolby Vision.
|
| Apple TV has a few things one may consider "ads", but they're
| limited to promotion of Apple's own shows (no third parties)
| and can be done away with by simply ignoring the stock TV app
| and moving it off the top row of the home screen where it'll
| never get highlighted. They haven't bothered me personally,
| and my Apple TV 4K working flawlessly since buying it in 2017
| is worth that tiny tradeoff.
| foobiekr wrote:
| The Jellyfin user experience would be a ton better if the
| client app for the iphone/ipad actually took advantage of local
| playback instead of relying on transcoding. Random seeks,
| rewinds, and especially subtitles timing are all better if the
| client is just accessing a file stream. This is especially true
| as the codecs change and the on-NAS GPUs fall behind due to the
| lifecycle differences.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You can't run Plex well on just about anything if you need to
| support transcoding
| boerseth wrote:
| The pendulum swings back to server-side.
| ghaff wrote:
| The thing is I'm not sure that people in general have a lot of
| issue with client-side fragmentation. It's more the content
| silos on the server side. But then people didn't like cable
| bundles either.
| kolanos wrote:
| > Roku uses a proprietary language and UI toolkit
|
| I thought Roku was originally based on Silverlight, but I may be
| misremembering. I can't find any source to validate that.
|
| But Roku still quietly has the biggest market share in this
| space.
| thakoppno wrote:
| Brightscript is the name of their application language. Sounds
| similar enough to Silverlight to me. I bet it's just a mix-up.
| bitshiffed wrote:
| SceneGraph, the XML, UI-layout component of Roku development
| is similar to XAML from Silverlight; but BrightScript, the
| language, is much closer to a modified VB6 than anything
| .NET.
| justinator wrote:
| I know Netflix was def. Silverlight to begin with due to
| supporting DRM.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| They use a language called BrigthScript that's closest to
| Visual Basic. It was originally intended for digital signage. A
| few years back they "improved" it with XML crap that you have
| to use to describe public methods of your objects(!) and stuff.
| It was better before (docs and examples for old and new style
| exist).
|
| Notable quirks include the XML companion files for code
| interface descriptions (in the newer SDK, anyway), and single =
| doing double-duty as assignment and comparison.
|
| [edit] oh but my understanding is that big players get a
| different SDK with the ability to e.g. use C libraries, which
| is how they're able to look & work so much like they do on
| other platforms.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| With sufficient head-scratching and ingenuity it's possible
| to use BS to create a UI like the "big players" have. But
| yes, they get to do roughly what they want as I understand it
| - C and/or HTML/JS.
|
| Quite annoying when, in this space, the most common
| requirement is "make it like Netflix".
| sanitycheck wrote:
| As someone who's used BS & Silverlight, I would say they are
| not alike except very superficially (XML for layout - but
| Android also has that).
|
| I'd have to look quite hard to find a language I like less than
| BrightScript, it's horrible.
| jmbwell wrote:
| The fragmentation is both a flaw and a feature. It means we have
| diversity in media vendors, at the cost of a pretty high
| cognitive load to just watch something... which app is it on?
| What's the account login? Search the device main search, then go
| to each app and do its own individual search. All while dodging
| ads and autoplay and "what's new" and "for you."
|
| It sucks for users. But it also sucks for developers, who have to
| maintain multiple apps for multiple platforms, even multiple
| generations per platform. And this affects users too, when a
| version of an app eventually gets dropped because the developer
| decides it's too costly to maintain.
|
| The diversity and competition is good, but there's got to be a
| better way. The AppleTV platform makes some effort to bridge the
| gaps, but apps have to play along, and many decide to roll their
| own instead of using the provided APIs, complaining about the
| APIs not letting them do what they want to do the way they want
| to do it. To which I say, getting all these apps to do something
| in a consistent way is the point.
|
| But whatever. I'm in no hurry to go back to huge cable bills. We
| told the industry to get on board with streaming if they don't
| want piracy, and they did, so now here we are. Instead of digging
| through BitTorrent and newsgroups, we are juggling apps.
| -\\_(deg_o)_/-
| Osiris wrote:
| "Huge cable bills" - we're already back there. Netflix is $23,
| Apple TV just increased to $10c Disney+ is now $14, Hulu is
| $20, Max is $16, Paramount is $10, Peacock is $6.
|
| You can easily spend $100 /mn on streaming services.
| ghaff wrote:
| Prices have been creeping up (and Netflix is the worst
| offender). But, if you can live without live TV and can do
| without that _one_ show on such and such a service, it 's
| still a pretty good deal relative to the cable TV bundle
| especially if you _also_ had one or two premium stations
| /streaming services like HBO.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| $7.99 in 2010 is $11.27 today. The remaining $4.22 delta is
| reasonable given that their business model has changed from
| purely licensing with zero competition to being locked out
| of popular content and forced to produce their own.
| ghaff wrote:
| Oh, I understand the reasons. It's just one of services
| where my monthly payments are yellow to red on my radar.
| I keep them but it's on the bubble.
| bmy78 wrote:
| No one says you have to subscribe to ALL of the streaming
| platforms at once.
|
| If cost is an issue, pick 1 or 2 services, watch the shows
| you're interested in, then cancel those and pick 1 or 2.
| Rince and repeat.
|
| You have choice with this approach and you don't need every
| service offered.
| slovette wrote:
| While perhaps a nominal iteration of improvement, cable was
| this way too. You didn't have to have the $100 /month
| service package. There was always the $30 /mo basic cable
| (no guide box).
|
| The industry simply recycling its business model in new
| delivery methods is a valid complaint/perception.
| ghaff wrote:
| I didn't have a guide box--had a TiVo from pretty early
| on--and I was still over $100/month before my HBO monthly
| fee.
| hatsix wrote:
| the last base package I subscribed to was $80
| Eisenstein wrote:
| The problem with cable was you couldn't have 'basic cable
| + FX' or 'basic + AMC' it was $30 for lame selection of
| mostly crap and then $80 - $100 for anything better.
| nullindividual wrote:
| But! With cable, if you didn't buy the upper tier
| packages, you may have missed out on some great
| shows/networks (e.g., HBO). And cable companies often use
| contracts to make downgrading expensive. With streaming
| services, cancelling after you've binge watch the shows
| you're interested in comes with no penalty.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Mind boggling that someone can compare the utility to
| cost ratio of cable/satellite TV requiring contracts and
| installations to on demand libraries of near unlimited
| content with instant sign up and cancel abilities on
| every device.
|
| Exact opposite of a "nominal iteration".
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| The fragmentation is a phase until the industry matures. Take a
| look at other industries, like woodworking. They have
| established practices which don't change much.
|
| The software industry has so much potential I don't expect it
| to mature for another hundred years. Although some patterns are
| emerging, like strong typing and universal cross-platform
| runtimes (most notably Web).
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Yes because cross platform frameworks like Electron and
| before that Java Spring were the bees knees
| hotnfresh wrote:
| > The fragmentation is both a flaw and a feature
|
| It'd be _purely_ a feature if we banned shared ownership of
| distribution and production, like we did with movie studios and
| movie theaters for decades.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| This is monumentally a bad idea. Do you really want to ban
| all producers from being able to distribute their own goods
| and depend on middlemen?
|
| Whether you know it or not, since the 1930s things have
| changed, TVs are popular, there is this thing called the
| internet and websites.
|
| Do you also want to ban software developers and song writers
| from being able to publish their own work on websites?
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > Do you really want to ban all producers from being able
| to distribute their own goods and depend on middlemen?
|
| Yes.
|
| > Whether you know it or not, since the 1930s things have
| changed, TVs are popular, there is this thing called the
| internet and websites.
|
| So?
|
| > Do you also want to ban software developers and song
| writers from being able to publish their own work on
| websites?
|
| Maybe. It doesn't appear to be a problem yet, but if it is
| then let's pursue that option.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You agree with the fact that iOS developers must go
| through the App Store? Would you want it to be illegal
| for you to distribute any content you produce and for you
| to have to go through a middle man?
|
| Does that also mean if that I wanted to create my own
| Indy movie I couldn't sell it on my own website?
|
| How does it help the consumer for all content to have to
| go through a middle man where they get a cut?
|
| And it matters because the law was there in the thirties
| when the only way to get movie content out was via the
| movie theaters. Now anyone can publish content
| bawolff wrote:
| > You agree with the fact that iOS developers must go
| through the App Store? Would you want it to be illegal
| for you to distribute any content you produce and for you
| to have to go through a middle man?
|
| I mean, honestly, having app stores be separate from the
| phone maker sounds like a great idea. The monopoly that
| apple has on the app store is harmful to both producers
| and consumers of apps.
|
| > Would you want it to be illegal for you to distribute
| any content
|
| Isn't this already effectively the case in the phobe
| market? Not illegal per se, but practically speaking
| impossible.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| That's not what you're saying. You're saying that a
| content producer should never be allowed to distribute on
| their own site and that you as a software developer,
| author, music producer, etc should not be allowed to
| distribute your own work.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| It would be better for consumers if productions were
| available through more outlets rather than fewer, so yes.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You didn't answer the question , are you really saying
| that it should be illegal for any content producer to
| distribute their own content on their own website?
|
| I'm assuming you would apply those same standards to
| software developers, writers, song writers and any video
| content?
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| I wonder if anyone is saving statistics on torrent traffic. It
| was huge in the 00s, then dropped as streaming became a thing.
|
| Now that the companies are back to rent-chasing (it's abhorrent
| that some of them still show ads even when you pay), it would
| be interesting to see what the numbers look like. Could be cool
| to compare to music, because Spotify and Pandora have been
| relatively not scummy.
| 01100011 wrote:
| I'd love to see the feds step in and force content providers to
| make their content available to anyone willing to make a
| compliant (sorry, DRM likely required)frontend. I should be
| able to buy content from, say, Paramount using Hulu and not be
| forced to use Paramount's app.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| The answer is streaming sites like SFlix
| gavinray wrote:
| Server-driven UI is a thing that's been gaining traction in
| recent years.
|
| To my knowledge, at least a few FAANG companies have adopted this
| for the reasons mentioned in the article (AirBnB, Lyft, Expedia)
|
| https://github.com/csmets/Server-Driven-UI
|
| There are a few frameworks that cater to this -- most of them are
| variations on an API that returns JSON describing view components
| and state/actions.
|
| For instance, DivKit:
|
| - https://github.com/divkit/divkit
|
| - https://divkit.tech/playground
|
| It's a decent idea IMO, though I have no personal experience with
| it. I guess time will tell whether it catches on at-large though.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| This is hardly new in TV-land.
|
| The second generation Apple TV's app runtime was all server-
| driven XML. TVMLKit is the "modern" replacement for this style
| of Apple TV app (mostly to make it easier to port I guess)
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/tvmlkit
|
| Archived example
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170813035144/http://trailers.a...
|
| TV's "native" platforms are also similar, or just straight up
| HTML/CSS/JS.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| I decompiled Apple TV's Android app when it first launched,
| and was surprised by how well made it was. Rather than rely
| on a WebView to parse markup and display a GUI as most other
| major media apps do, it integrated NodeJS for scripting, a
| native XML parsing library, and then drew the entire UI
| directly to the display as if it was a full screen video
| game. This allowed it to have smooth, consistent animations
| on hardware which choked on Chromium's bloated resource
| needs. It also let Apple have a cross platform UX without
| needing to rely on any of Android's native UI controls.
|
| I was pretty astounded by its elegance, simplicity and power.
| Apple was able to build off the work they had already done
| for Apple TV and the end result was a compact and relatively
| straightforward application. I bet it's even easier to
| maintain than apps which use standard Android dev tools and
| libraries.
| ctoth wrote:
| Please consider accessibility while you're building this. The
| number of TV apps which don't use the Accessibility APIs is
| probably worse than on any other platform. Apple TV (as usual) is
| the best, but still has issues.
| yaur wrote:
| A bunch of smart tvs already use react native so from the
| perspective of a developer that already has to support everything
| we don't expect this to require a ton of work.
|
| About 2/3 of our users are on some version of Android (which
| excludes fire tv) so will still be our most relevant target
| platform.
| epaulson wrote:
| The article is about what UI toolkits are used to build content
| apps for TVs and TV devices like FireTV/Apple TV, but I wish for
| a world where using those apps weren't my only options.
|
| It'd be nice if TVs and streaming service apps were better
| participants in the open-protocol smart home. I'd like it to be
| possible to call an API on my TV from say Home Assistant to tell
| my TV to turn on, switch to Netflix, and play the next episode of
| a show - though honestly I'd settle for just control over linear
| TV channels and to be able to say 'switch to channel 55' at an
| API level and have it work cross-vendor without having to use
| their native app. Maybe you can do this with CEC and stick a
| little raspberry PI and stick it into the TV with HDMI, but the
| CEC content controls seem very limited.
|
| Apple's got some kind of a start for this since they've got a way
| to feed data into Siri and their internal guide, including
| telling the AppleTV device what's currently playing and what
| should be considered 'up next' but they're all private APIs, I
| think, and only work if the content providers sign deals with
| Apple directly.
|
| Maybe a future version of the Matter standard will incorporate
| media playback, right now I think it's just changing volume and
| pausing whatever's playing on a speaker, and so a long way from
| being able to control what the actual content being played is.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I would guess that you can do a LOT with VLC and a little bit
| of scripting ?
| jwells89 wrote:
| A standardized approach would also let you use the OS' standard
| video player widget which is practically always and upgrade
| from whatever needlessly custom-rolled players streaming apps
| tend to use. In fact the entire reason I subscribe to some
| services via Apple TV channels rather than directly is so I can
| watch their content on the standard tvOS player and skip the
| official apps.
| analog31 wrote:
| Granted, we're kind of Luddites, but my wife and I were going
| home from a social gathering, where some people were talking
| about the latest TV shows. My wife said to me: "I was embarrassed
| to admit it, but I don't know how to watch TV any more."
| pmontra wrote:
| What if we ban subscriptions and have to pay per view? Of course
| that would be great for me because I watch one episode of one or
| two TV series per week when there is something I like to watch
| and then nothing for months. It would be probably bad for people
| that like to watch something every day, unless prices are
| substantially low or there are volume discounts. But a volume
| discount is more or less the definition of a subscription.
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(page generated 2023-11-18 23:00 UTC)