Google's chic TV program platform, Google TV, is staid for its initial poignant renovate given it launched in Logitech and Sony hardware a year ago. Via over-the-air updates that should start streaming to hardware gadgets on October 30, Google TV users will find new TV-optimized Android Apps, an softened YouTube experience, and new features that supply easy, send breakthrough of TV and film content.
All this Googly kindness is wrapped up in a new user interface that aims to facilitate a severe data pattern - a pattern that's left many Google TV customers with a steady clarity of yuck.
When Google TV launched, it was ostensible to seamlessly co-mingle "live TV" (read: broadcast, heavenly body and cable) with streaming video services similar to YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon Video On Demand. You could moreover use your Google TV program to looking the web, and even access digital calm from your home network or trustworthy storage.
In theory: Fantastic. In practice: Difficult to use.
Whether you were running a Google TV set-top box made by Logitech or Sony, or right away drumming in to the Google TV program commissioned in assorted Sony TVs, you were faced with a array of menus that defied easy access and breakthrough of the calm you obviously longed for to see. And it's moreover probable you paid for your Google TV in the in error idea that it's a "cord-cutting" stage - that it would enable you to stop your line or heavenly body service, and instead watch your preferred TV shows around send Internet streaming.
After all, the TV networks river full TV episodes right away from their websites. So Google TV contingency be the best smoothness network for that content, right?
No, not so fast. The networks summarily shut off their online calm from looming on Google TV, giving a considerable subset of early adopters a more reason to kvetch about a hardware buy they wished they never made.
Well, all dreams of cord-cutting should be put to rest. As Rishi Chandra,director of product management, Google TV,told me, "There was a notice that you were a cord-cutting product, and that's something that you didn't do sufficient to dispel. Our indicate of perspective is that there's new calm coming, calm that you only haven't been able to access with your TV. Now we're bringing that content, and adding the breakthrough experience on tip of it."
So, no, Google TV can't be your all-in-one, zero-compromises, Internet-only video smoothness system. But what it can do well - namely, broach YouTube, Netflix and other web-based video to your HDTV - is about to obtain better. I not long ago journeyed to Google's domicile for a hands-on demo of the new software, and what I saw is a substantial alleviation over Google existing (however compromised) position quo.
Here are 4 key improvements you'll see in the next chronicle of Google TV. (Sony hardware gadgets will start reception over-the-air updates on Sunday, with Sony updates stability by the center of next week. Over-the-air updates for Logitech hardware will start before long thereafter.)
The initial chronicle of Google TV enclosed a home shade that dominated your TV manifestation when you summoned its presence. This original home screen, dirty with colossal thumbnails, was overt by any measure.
The new home screen, however, is tangible by a elementary menu club at the bottom of your manifestation (see screenshot above). It's clean, simple, and simply more fashion-forward than its predecessor. Likewise, the new Google TV program features a revised perspective of your All Apps menu. The aged perspective listed apps in a long, single-file list arrangement. The new perspective (see screenshot below) mimics an Android Honeycomb inscription interface. Apps are organised in rows of four, and the understanding is customizable.
These might not appear similar to big changes - unless you're already using Google TV, and have outlayed the final year coping with a cluttered, "something's arrange of ‘off' here" U.I . From what I saw in my hands-on demo, assorted key interface elements have been tweaked and finessed to do away with Google TV's formerly horsey (or at least user-antagonistic) pattern sensibility.
The original chronicle of Google TV had all the vital hooks in to TV and film content. It could catalogue all that was existing from your line or heavenly body provider, and moreover arrange by all the calm that was existing from Internet-based video-on-demand sources (or at least the ones that weren't restraint content). But obviously anticipating the right calm to watch was still considerably difficult.
Sure, you could strike the looking symbol of your Google TV remote, and key in an apt looking term. But the results you received were anything but Googly in their height and relevance, and weren't many-sided opposite all of Google TV's calm sources.
This has been addressed in the new update. First, looking results are now more thorough and detailed. Second, there's a new TV Movies app that lets you intuitively crop for high-end video content, using a full line-up of filters to slight choices pulled from line and satellite, together with YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, HBO GO and other reward online sources.
When you crop calm in the new app, you can head true to assorted thematic headings (e.g., comedy, drama, sports) to window emporium for a video that suits your fancy. You can moreover arrange by video quality, price, and according to when a video is personification (e.g., "On Now"). And these are only the low-hanging fruit of more courteous content-surfacing. Chandra says that if users opt-in, Google TV will moreover emanate browsing choices that reply to personal preferences.
And, wait, it gets more intelligent than that. Says Chandra: "Once you open up this board to other collection existing on the web, you can ask, ‘What are people tweeting about right now? What are people examination right now?' There are all these not similar measure that can help us rearrange what we're watching."
OK, I'm not certain I wish my friends - let alone the great unsanitary Internet rank and file - nudging me toward the final 15 mins of Bridalplasty . But I'm still heartened to pick up that Google thinks a content-surfacing apparatus for Bridalplasty is an engaging thing to build.
In the splendid intrigue of all the hardware you might ever link up to your TV, Google TV has always delivered an glorious YouTube experience. Its YouTube functionality is better than what you'll obtain from so-called "home drama PCs," Blu-ray players versed with YouTube apps, and YouTube apps built right away in to the "connected TV" services of the ultimate HDTVs.
In fact, for its YouTube and Netflix features alone, I regard Google TV - even the initial chronicle of the stage - is a chic buy for any person who can't already obtain these calm streams from existing living room hardware. After all, Logitech's Google TV set-top box, the Revue, expenses only $99.
And now a much-improved YouTube app creates Google TV even better. That's great headlines for YouTube junkies, and there contingency be a couple of out there as Google says YouTube boasts 800 million monthly viewers.
Google TV's new YouTube app is, at its heart, a TV-optimized Android app that's been fine-tuned for rapid video smoothness and a 10-foot user interface. During my demo, I was flabbergasted by how rapidly videos loaded. Load times were so quick, in fact, I asked Chandra if renouned videos were sitting in ultra-speedy cache on Google servers.
No, Chandra said. The swift bucket times were solely the outcome of program optimizations. Google focused on enhancing how rapidly the YouTube app pings its servers, leveraging all the program optimization tricks that Google deployed for YouTube in mobile devices. (Indeed, YouTube on phones and tablets contingency already duplicate with low-bandwidth, high-latency connections, so optimization has always been key to an Android YouTube strategy).
When all was mentioned and done, Chandra said, Google longed for Google TV to flip between videos as swift a heavenly body box flips between channels. We'll see how this plays out during hands-on testing, but the bucket times you saw at Google HQ tender us, to be sure.
Also impressive: Viewing full-screen, professionally produced, HD video on the YouTube app. I was wowed by the clarity and clarification of HD content, and is to initial time, I unequivocally longed for to find more YouTube video to examine out.
Well, the new app creates this simpler interjection to a channel-building underline that creates law videos playlists on the fly. Just come in a tenure in to the YouTube app's looking field, and it will separate out a thematic preference of videos that you can glance over at tip speed, "pivoting," as Google likes to explain it, from a video to the next. The screenshot on top of illustrates a looking for "Katy Perry."
Bottom line: If you've ever used YouTube's "Lean Back" mode on your P.C. desktop, you'll have a flattering great idea of what YouTube now brings to Google TV.
Except the Google TV smoothness seems faster.
In the many poignant Google TV refurbish of all, Android Apps now have a home on your big-screen TV.
Obviously, not all the apps in Android Market would even work for TV-screen deployment. For example, those that reply on hold gestures or GPS only wouldn't make clarity for Google TV (at least not as the stage is now deployed). But Chandra estimates a few 1,500 existing apps are already Google TV-compatible, and these will appear in the "filtered" chronicle of Android Market that appears in the new program interface.
The actual app gems, however, will be found in Google TV's "Featured For TV" section. These apps - 30 should be existing at launch - have been specifically created for big-screen deployment, and Google TV's unique talents.
Sure, a app I saw demoed is nothing more than a coupling for an HD yule-log video (see Classy Fireplace in the screenshot above). But others are diversion apps (yes, Google TV is now a defensible stage for unintentional games), and the best apps will expected be the ones that broach reward video content.
It's considerably ingenious: Google TV's new Android first move allows video-savvy media companies to do an end-run around chartering and placement deals with the line and heavenly body networks. Whether your media firm is an indie pretender or a blue-chip heavyweight, this binds promise.
Take, for example, the Wall Street Journal. "They're a reward brand," says Chandra, "and they have great content, but they do not wish to erect a 24-7 headlines cycle. They do not wish to bargain deals to obtain calm on the air, and they do not wish to pay to obtain access to users. So what do they do? They erect an app."
The possibilities: Dizzying. The proof: It waste in the pudding.
But as Mario Queiroz, Google's clamp boss of product management, told me, Google considers Google TV to be a marathon project, not a sprint.
"We ask, ‘How can you make the product better?' instead of belaboring what's being said," Queiroz said. "We've attempted to take what you could use constructively, and erect a better product with chronicle 2. As a Google mantra, you always launch early and iterate."
And iterate they will. Google will soon publicize new chipset allies for brand new Google TV hardware in 2012 (Samsung and Vizio are already on board). So, no, the story of Google TV does not start and finish with a singular program version, or only a tiny collection of set-top boxes and TVs from Sony and Logitech.
Google TV is actual and its aspiration levels sojourn high. Stay tuned for hands-on reviews of the new chronicle program and arriving Google TV hardware.
No comments:
Post a Comment