farangfakthong
Google Chromecast follows Apple TV in doing the living room right
Amazon has the Google Chromecast listed as a "HDMI streaming media player", but it's way more than that. It's a very clever little device that shows how to do the living room right. Last month I wrote a piece called "How Apple does not care about your living room". The idea behind this piece is that all those companies that are desperately trying to push complex technology to modify the main television in the living room are rather missing the point. 1960s The living room isn't as important as it once was. This isn't the 1960s where we all cluster round and spend all our time as a happy little nuclear family in one place. The home is now a place where we consume content through mobile devices wherever we happen to be inside it. Increasingly, we're spending more time away from broadcast television, plus more time relating to others through social networking services. Sitting down and actually watching TV together is happening less. In that context it makes far more sense to invent a little device that can somehow improve every television in the house in some way. Which is exactly what Chromecast is. Spend $35, somehow work out how to get power to it, somehow set it up, and your existing TV is a little bit improved. I'm a big fan of Apple TV, not necessarily because it's any good (it's "just OK" implementation-wise), but because Apple has managed to invade living rooms in a totally stealthy way. There's nothing flashy or complex about Apple TV -- it's just a little box that lets you play content you buy from iTunes, or Netflix, and do some other things. Like Chromecast, it's not clever or flashy. It's cheap, and it makes the television that it's connected to a little bit better. A small improvement. Compare this to Xbox One, which is designed from the perspective of doing an "HDMI pass-through". In this arrangement, the Xbox One drives an existing cable TV box in order to get live content on the screen. Presuming people still watch live TV. Which they're increasing not preferring on-demand, pick-and-choose-whatever style consumption. Plus, the Xbox One experience will be forever irreparably broken by the fact that the last thing the cable TV companies want is Microsoft (or anyone) sitting in the middle of their channel reducing the amount of direct customer they have with their customers. Xbox One is, classicly, overly engineered, and technologist-led. It's not a simple, cheap device that makes a television set a little bit better. Boards I subscribe to the school of thought that the post-PC devices that we are enjoying today are rooted in work done as part of the "ubiquitious computing" movement. Often shortened to "ubicomp", I've written about this before, as has my ZDNet colleague Simon Bisson: "Post-PC, or just the return of ubicomp". The basic idea of ubicomp is that you have simple devices always around you that you use to easily access your "digital life". A smartphone is a good example of a ubicomp device. For example, you might be out with the kids, you'll take a photo of it and share it on Instagram. The thing that you're doing is playing with the kids. You access a ubicomp device (your smartphone) to take the photo and then share the photo on your social network. The man who spearheaded the ubicomp movement, Mark Weiser, saw that ubicomp would have three types of devices. Specifically, "tabs", "pads", and "boards". Tabs are what we call smartphones. Pads are what we call tablets (or even "iPad"). Boards, however, are missing. In ubicomp, the different devices are defined by their size. Tabs are supposed to be "wearable", pads are supposed to be "decimetre-scale", and boards are supposed to be "metre-scale". (Wearable in a ubicomp context applied to the reality of what the market has provided today really means "hyperportable" -- i.e. so small you take it with you everywhere.) In domestic settings, we have metre-scale "things", and we happen to call them television sets. But they're not very smart. They just take a signal and translate it. Manufacturers have tried to make the TV smarter -- like Samsung with it's Smart TV app catalogue, although rarely people consume this smartness.
Google Chromecast follows Apple TV in doing the living room right
Amazon has the Google Chromecast listed as a "HDMI streaming media player", but it's way more than that. It's a very clever little device that shows how to do the living room right. Last month I wrote a piece called "How Apple does not care about your living room". The idea behind this piece is that all those companies that are desperately trying to push complex technology to modify the main television in the living room are rather missing the point. 1960s The living room isn't as important as it once was. This isn't the 1960s where we all cluster round and spend all our time as a happy little nuclear family in one place. The home is now a place where we consume content through mobile devices wherever we happen to be inside it. Increasingly, we're spending more time away from broadcast television, plus more time relating to others through social networking services. Sitting down and actually watching TV together is happening less. In that context it makes far more sense to invent a little device that can somehow improve every television in the house in some way. Which is exactly what Chromecast is. Spend $35, somehow work out how to get power to it, somehow set it up, and your existing TV is a little bit improved. I'm a big fan of Apple TV, not necessarily because it's any good (it's "just OK" implementation-wise), but because Apple has managed to invade living rooms in a totally stealthy way. There's nothing flashy or complex about Apple TV -- it's just a little box that lets you play content you buy from iTunes, or Netflix, and do some other things. Like Chromecast, it's not clever or flashy. It's cheap, and it makes the television that it's connected to a little bit better. A small improvement. Compare this to Xbox One, which is designed from the perspective of doing an "HDMI pass-through". In this arrangement, the Xbox One drives an existing cable TV box in order to get live content on the screen. Presuming people still watch live TV. Which they're increasing not preferring on-demand, pick-and-choose-whatever style consumption. Plus, the Xbox One experience will be forever irreparably broken by the fact that the last thing the cable TV companies want is Microsoft (or anyone) sitting in the middle of their channel reducing the amount of direct customer they have with their customers. Xbox One is, classicly, overly engineered, and technologist-led. It's not a simple, cheap device that makes a television set a little bit better. Boards I subscribe to the school of thought that the post-PC devices that we are enjoying today are rooted in work done as part of the "ubiquitious computing" movement. Often shortened to "ubicomp", I've written about this before, as has my ZDNet colleague Simon Bisson: "Post-PC, or just the return of ubicomp". The basic idea of ubicomp is that you have simple devices always around you that you use to easily access your "digital life". A smartphone is a good example of a ubicomp device. For example, you might be out with the kids, you'll take a photo of it and share it on Instagram. The thing that you're doing is playing with the kids. You access a ubicomp device (your smartphone) to take the photo and then share the photo on your social network. The man who spearheaded the ubicomp movement, Mark Weiser, saw that ubicomp would have three types of devices. Specifically, "tabs", "pads", and "boards". Tabs are what we call smartphones. Pads are what we call tablets (or even "iPad"). Boards, however, are missing. In ubicomp, the different devices are defined by their size. Tabs are supposed to be "wearable", pads are supposed to be "decimetre-scale", and boards are supposed to be "metre-scale". (Wearable in a ubicomp context applied to the reality of what the market has provided today really means "hyperportable" -- i.e. so small you take it with you everywhere.) In domestic settings, we have metre-scale "things", and we happen to call them television sets. But they're not very smart. They just take a signal and translate it. Manufacturers have tried to make the TV smarter -- like Samsung with it's Smart TV app catalogue, although rarely people consume this smartness.