brain trust: streaming TV
I've been thinking about updating my streaming. You can help. :-)
Apple TV (forthcoming) and Roku are both attractive and are clearly competitors. Both offer voice input, and "hey Siri, find $movie_title" would be way, way easier than using a remote control or phone to type a search, perhaps multiple times (once per channel/app). How well it works, and whether Siri will make it hard to find free alternatives to things in the Apple store, are open questions. I do not care one whit about playing games on my TV.
I have a first-edition Roku ("Roku 1", except it was just "Roku" then) and its user interface is pretty good, though I haven't gotten software updates for a year or two now (no longer supported) so I don't know what the modern UI looks like. One thing that I find annoying on my Roku is that you can only rewind or fast-forward in "steps" that are about 10-15 seconds apart, and when you jump it pauses to contemplate its navel before resuming (at which point you find out if you hit the spot you meant). So advancing to the end of the opening credits or backing up to hear that dialogue again is tedious and should be seamless. I much prefer the conventional rewind/fast-forward of my DVD and TiVo, where you see sped-up video as it goes by.
I mentioned TiVo, which streams. But TiVo's UI for streaming is really bad for people with less-than-stellar vision and measly little 42" TVs. If I can't read the titles from my chair, it's not very useful.
I also have a (new) Chromecast, an inexpensive experiment to see if that would do the job. I like it in principle, and you can't beat either the price or the footprint, but I've run into two issues. One is that it needs my phone's WiFi to be on and that sucks battery. That's probably livable because I keep a spare battery charged. The other is that Chromecast is only as good as the phone apps that drive it, and I really, really need a better Netflix app and haven't been able to find it.
The Netflix Android app is all about the eye candy. When viewing either my queue or search results, it shows me the cover art for each title -- but not the names in plain old text. Consider cover art, three to the row, scaled for a phone. I can't see that, and the app doesn't support zoom. I've found no setting to toggle between cover art and a text list. I've searched the app store for "Netflix" hoping to find third-party apps, but no luck so far. (By the way, the Crackle app has the same problem.)
Also, rewinding or fast-forwarding by moving a YouTube-style pointer really, really stinks. Netflix, where are the rewind/fast-forward buttons?
I'm mentioning Netflix a lot because that's really the only thing I stream from now. Roku has hundreds of channels but you have to interact with them individually, so I never do -- a unified search, on the other hand, would provide an entry to that. Since I'm already paying for Netflix I'm otherwise only interested in the free ones; I had thought that included Hulu but the phone app suggests that it's all paid now.
Dear readers who are technologically way ahead of me, any input?
Apple TV (forthcoming) and Roku are both attractive and are clearly competitors. Both offer voice input, and "hey Siri, find $movie_title" would be way, way easier than using a remote control or phone to type a search, perhaps multiple times (once per channel/app). How well it works, and whether Siri will make it hard to find free alternatives to things in the Apple store, are open questions. I do not care one whit about playing games on my TV.
I have a first-edition Roku ("Roku 1", except it was just "Roku" then) and its user interface is pretty good, though I haven't gotten software updates for a year or two now (no longer supported) so I don't know what the modern UI looks like. One thing that I find annoying on my Roku is that you can only rewind or fast-forward in "steps" that are about 10-15 seconds apart, and when you jump it pauses to contemplate its navel before resuming (at which point you find out if you hit the spot you meant). So advancing to the end of the opening credits or backing up to hear that dialogue again is tedious and should be seamless. I much prefer the conventional rewind/fast-forward of my DVD and TiVo, where you see sped-up video as it goes by.
I mentioned TiVo, which streams. But TiVo's UI for streaming is really bad for people with less-than-stellar vision and measly little 42" TVs. If I can't read the titles from my chair, it's not very useful.
I also have a (new) Chromecast, an inexpensive experiment to see if that would do the job. I like it in principle, and you can't beat either the price or the footprint, but I've run into two issues. One is that it needs my phone's WiFi to be on and that sucks battery. That's probably livable because I keep a spare battery charged. The other is that Chromecast is only as good as the phone apps that drive it, and I really, really need a better Netflix app and haven't been able to find it.
The Netflix Android app is all about the eye candy. When viewing either my queue or search results, it shows me the cover art for each title -- but not the names in plain old text. Consider cover art, three to the row, scaled for a phone. I can't see that, and the app doesn't support zoom. I've found no setting to toggle between cover art and a text list. I've searched the app store for "Netflix" hoping to find third-party apps, but no luck so far. (By the way, the Crackle app has the same problem.)
Also, rewinding or fast-forwarding by moving a YouTube-style pointer really, really stinks. Netflix, where are the rewind/fast-forward buttons?
I'm mentioning Netflix a lot because that's really the only thing I stream from now. Roku has hundreds of channels but you have to interact with them individually, so I never do -- a unified search, on the other hand, would provide an entry to that. Since I'm already paying for Netflix I'm otherwise only interested in the free ones; I had thought that included Hulu but the phone app suggests that it's all paid now.
Dear readers who are technologically way ahead of me, any input?