11 ms·

TV: Now What?

80 points by ingve 3y ago

jadbox 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    > Trying to thing of another example where a screen is just a dumb-as-can-be terminal CarPlay and Android Auto come to mind.
_8j50 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Amazon are double dipping - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38194818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38194818 Only consumer equipment company I “trust” are Apple.
- petepete 3y ago
  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.
  - _8j50 3y ago
    Damn! This why I love HN! Thanks, I never heard of CEC before and will look into it.
    - petepete 3y ago
      No problem. Unfortunately every TV company has its own name for it (Anynet, Simplink, Bravia Sync) which doesn't make it obvious it's a proper standard.
geerlingguy 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      Correct. Personal archival is protected under fair use. [1] 1. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23311/exemption-to-prohibition-on-circumvention-of-copyright-protection-systems-for-access-control https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23...
      - Caboose8685 3y ago
        Personal archival isn't exempt anymore, that dropped some years ago. The only archival exemption now is for "qualifying institutions".
        cmeacham98 3y ago
        You have a source on that? I can't find anything - so as far as I can tell you're just spreading misinformation.
boerseth 3y ago
The pendulum swings back to server-side.
- ghaff 3y ago
  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 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  Brightscript is the name of their application language. Sounds similar enough to Silverlight to me. I bet it’s just a mix-up.
  - bitshiffed 3y ago
    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 3y ago
  I know Netflix was def. Silverlight to begin with due to supporting DRM.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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".
jmbwell 3y ago
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. ¯\_(°_o)_/¯
- hakfoo 3y ago
  The answer is mandatory licensing. Maybe permit some limited ability to offer a very narrow window of exclusivity (weeks, not years) in exchange for getting a lower rate later (because we should treat attempts to wall off parts of shared culture as a an antisocial act, rather than a nifty business model.) Every platform can have everything, at a predictable standardized rate card, so they can compete on their own merits: * We have the best CDN/apps/software support * We have a better recommendation/discovery experience (which could include "positive curation" like "we could license everything, but our niche is Namibian Sitcoms From 1983, so we won't") * We'll cut corners (lesser encoding quality to save disc/bandwidth, or no bespoke speculative content creation) to deliver the cheapest possible experience. The "content people" and "tech people" come from different universes with different skills and expectations, and having to wrangle the two into individual platform teams helps nobody.
- Osiris 3y ago
  “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.
gavinray 3y ago
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 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://github.com/divkit/divkit - https://divkit.tech/playground 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 3y ago
  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 https://developer.apple.com/documentation/tvmlkit Archived example https://web.archive.org/web/20170813035144/http://trailers.apple.com/appletv/index.xml https://web.archive.org/web/20170813035144/http://trailers.a... TV's "native" platforms are also similar, or just straight up HTML/CSS/JS.
  - russellbeattie 3y ago
    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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  I would guess that you can do a LOT with VLC and a little bit of scripting ?
- jwells89 3y ago
  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.
Kacidoo 3y ago
[flagged]
analog31 3y ago
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."
- therealdrag0 3y ago
  You made me realize that I grew up without cable and not having some or all the streaming services is basically the same. It doesn’t matter too much.
pmontra 3y ago
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.
- uoaei 3y ago
  I kind of imagine a "toll road" style streaming service where the cost per minute or per view is told up front. Endless opportunity for dynamic pricing which is how the companies would justify the effort to implement such a model. Some offerings can be free through promotions or other means, and demand can be much more readily quantified on the supply side by calculating net profit.
asow92 3y ago
There's a Canadian company that tried to do this a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/user/YouiLabs https://www.youtube.com/user/YouiLabs Not sure what's come of it since their cert at https://youi.tv https://youi.tv is broken at the moment. My experience with it was working at a big tv network who was trying to port all of their native tv apps over to this platform. From what I recall: It was a pain for designers because they had to retool their Sketch workflow to Adobe After Effects, which nobody liked. The idea was that the designer would design the view layer in AF and pass it along to the dev for integration. In retrospect, I think this was a mistake: developers should have been doing that from the beginning, as the workflow was similar to VBA or Storyboards and required intimate knowledge of how the view would be integrated into the code. Most developers who worked with it loved it or hated it. It bridged the gap between platforms, but came at the cost of losing out on unique native platform features without writing complicated C++ bridging code on each platform. The idea sounds solid at first, but you're really just trading one massive problem for another.
ggm 3y ago
So hear me out, I have this crazy idea. For all the people who can't afford OTT services like hbo and Netflix and prime and apple tv, how about we remove all the excess IP overhead and send the mp4 over broadcast RF using a band like 700mhz from local hills or if need be make towers. We can pay by watching ads or something. I mean sure, call me crazy, imagine everyone having to watch the news and movie at the same time, neat right? Wouldn't that be cool. Hell we could probably even send about 5 or so different signals out.
- easeout 3y ago
  Last year, I puzzled over how to watch my local sports team of choice and got mired in questions about streaming services and local blackouts and licensing. Then I bought a ten dollar antenna for my TV.
  - ggm 3y ago
    I have line of sight to the Brisbane transmitters across the river such that I think I may have an attenuator on the antenna feeds. I actually miss broadcast TV social norms. It was crap but we all talked about it. First release movies from last year at Christmas and a non stop feed of Hollywood B reels. Daytime soaps!
- cbsks 3y ago
  I only get 1 channel at my location: https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps
ugh123 3y ago
I think YouTube runs as some kind of browser-based app on a lot of devices. Mainly due to fragmentation and development challenges but it also gives them a consistent environment to integrate custom codecs and DRM checks. The UI is pared down to be a convincing app.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

80 points by ingve 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > Trying to thing of another example where a screen is just a dumb-as-can-be terminal CarPlay and Android Auto come to mind.

_8j50 3y ago

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 3y ago
Amazon are double dipping - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38194818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38194818 Only consumer equipment company I “trust” are Apple.
petepete 3y ago
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.
- _8j50 3y ago
  Damn! This why I love HN! Thanks, I never heard of CEC before and will look into it.
  - petepete 3y ago
    No problem. Unfortunately every TV company has its own name for it (Anynet, Simplink, Bravia Sync) which doesn't make it obvious it's a proper standard.

geerlingguy 3y ago

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 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Correct. Personal archival is protected under fair use. [1] 1. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23311/exemption-to-prohibition-on-circumvention-of-copyright-protection-systems-for-access-control https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23...
    - Caboose8685 3y ago
      Personal archival isn't exempt anymore, that dropped some years ago. The only archival exemption now is for "qualifying institutions".
      - cmeacham98 3y ago
        You have a source on that? I can't find anything - so as far as I can tell you're just spreading misinformation.

boerseth 3y ago

The pendulum swings back to server-side.

ghaff 3y ago
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 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
Brightscript is the name of their application language. Sounds similar enough to Silverlight to me. I bet it’s just a mix-up.
- bitshiffed 3y ago
  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 3y ago
I know Netflix was def. Silverlight to begin with due to supporting DRM.
hotnfresh 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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".

jmbwell 3y ago

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. ¯\_(°_o)_/¯

hakfoo 3y ago
The answer is mandatory licensing. Maybe permit some limited ability to offer a very narrow window of exclusivity (weeks, not years) in exchange for getting a lower rate later (because we should treat attempts to wall off parts of shared culture as a an antisocial act, rather than a nifty business model.) Every platform can have everything, at a predictable standardized rate card, so they can compete on their own merits: * We have the best CDN/apps/software support * We have a better recommendation/discovery experience (which could include "positive curation" like "we could license everything, but our niche is Namibian Sitcoms From 1983, so we won't") * We'll cut corners (lesser encoding quality to save disc/bandwidth, or no bespoke speculative content creation) to deliver the cheapest possible experience. The "content people" and "tech people" come from different universes with different skills and expectations, and having to wrangle the two into individual platform teams helps nobody.
Osiris 3y ago
“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.

gavinray 3y ago

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 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://github.com/divkit/divkit - https://divkit.tech/playground 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 3y ago
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 https://developer.apple.com/documentation/tvmlkit Archived example https://web.archive.org/web/20170813035144/http://trailers.apple.com/appletv/index.xml https://web.archive.org/web/20170813035144/http://trailers.a... TV's "native" platforms are also similar, or just straight up HTML/CSS/JS.
- russellbeattie 3y ago
  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 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago
I would guess that you can do a LOT with VLC and a little bit of scripting ?
jwells89 3y ago
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.

Kacidoo 3y ago

[flagged]

analog31 3y ago

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."

therealdrag0 3y ago
You made me realize that I grew up without cable and not having some or all the streaming services is basically the same. It doesn’t matter too much.

pmontra 3y ago

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.

uoaei 3y ago
I kind of imagine a "toll road" style streaming service where the cost per minute or per view is told up front. Endless opportunity for dynamic pricing which is how the companies would justify the effort to implement such a model. Some offerings can be free through promotions or other means, and demand can be much more readily quantified on the supply side by calculating net profit.

asow92 3y ago

There's a Canadian company that tried to do this a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/user/YouiLabs https://www.youtube.com/user/YouiLabs Not sure what's come of it since their cert at https://youi.tv https://youi.tv is broken at the moment. My experience with it was working at a big tv network who was trying to port all of their native tv apps over to this platform. From what I recall: It was a pain for designers because they had to retool their Sketch workflow to Adobe After Effects, which nobody liked. The idea was that the designer would design the view layer in AF and pass it along to the dev for integration. In retrospect, I think this was a mistake: developers should have been doing that from the beginning, as the workflow was similar to VBA or Storyboards and required intimate knowledge of how the view would be integrated into the code. Most developers who worked with it loved it or hated it. It bridged the gap between platforms, but came at the cost of losing out on unique native platform features without writing complicated C++ bridging code on each platform. The idea sounds solid at first, but you're really just trading one massive problem for another.

ggm 3y ago

So hear me out, I have this crazy idea. For all the people who can't afford OTT services like hbo and Netflix and prime and apple tv, how about we remove all the excess IP overhead and send the mp4 over broadcast RF using a band like 700mhz from local hills or if need be make towers. We can pay by watching ads or something. I mean sure, call me crazy, imagine everyone having to watch the news and movie at the same time, neat right? Wouldn't that be cool. Hell we could probably even send about 5 or so different signals out.

easeout 3y ago
Last year, I puzzled over how to watch my local sports team of choice and got mired in questions about streaming services and local blackouts and licensing. Then I bought a ten dollar antenna for my TV.
- ggm 3y ago
  I have line of sight to the Brisbane transmitters across the river such that I think I may have an attenuator on the antenna feeds. I actually miss broadcast TV social norms. It was crap but we all talked about it. First release movies from last year at Christmas and a non stop feed of Hollywood B reels. Daytime soaps!
cbsks 3y ago
I only get 1 channel at my location: https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps

ugh123 3y ago

I think YouTube runs as some kind of browser-based app on a lot of devices. Mainly due to fragmentation and development challenges but it also gives them a consistent environment to integrate custom codecs and DRM checks. The UI is pared down to be a convincing app.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]