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RIP Michael Cronan, creator of the name "TiVo" and mascot

Unfortunate news tonight that Micahel Cronan, a designer from the Bay Area has died at age 61. The New York Times has more about Michael, including a story of him coming up with the name "Kindle" for Amazon as well.

Thanks to a friend being at one of his parties, I was lucky enough to interview him a few years ago on this very blog, asking him what the early prototypes of TiVo were like and how he came up with the name and mascot. Michael definitely made an impact on the technology industry and will be missed.

Wired on TVs

Two great articles on TVs just showed up on Wired's site, both by my friend Mat Honan. In the first, Mat nails the problem with new TVs, and why you don't really need one since video technology is outpacing the user interfaces of finding anything worth watching. Sure 4K video sounds impressive but there's no content out there for it, and even more important, no good content. The kind of interface Mat envisions sounds like a nice evolution of a Harmony-style remote. Give me an app tied to my TV that lets me say "Play the last episode of Mad Men" and have the app not only figure out what components in my cabinet to power on, but also where to search/download/rent/buy the program.

I was thinking about interfaces the other day at a Christmas party when I spent a bit of time trying to get Spotify songs to play on my home theater system (which features GoogleTV, Boxee, a Mac mini, TiVo Premiere, and an AppleTV). It took some fussing and finagling to get it right and I wondered how on earth a normal non-geek could venture through these waters. I would guess half my friends (mostly technology geeks themselves) don't regularly send internet video to their TV screen due to the interface difficulties.

That brings us to the second article at Wired, concering Smart TVs. Their user interfaces are mostly terrible and are such a chore to use that most people don't use them. The article is based on this recent study of Smart TV owners, showing that very few of them regularly use any of the internet features.

Last Spring I bought the newest latest, greatest Samsung Plasma for my home theater and it featured tons of SmartTV features. What I quickly found was that setup was difficult (I had to change the plug the main HDMI cable when into, to return sound to my A/V unit) and the experience was much like buying a Windows PC in the late 90s. My "desktop" home screen on the samsung featured half a dozen apps I don't use or need and couldn't delete, presumably put there by advertising partner deals that ensured their visibility. The apps were also slow to load, buggy to use, and added several minutes to the time you put down a computer and say "boy, I want to watch this on the couch instead, let me just go bring it up there."

Marc Andreesen has famously said a TV from Apple is coming possibly next year or the year after that should re-invent interfaces and how we interact with shows, but given the complexities of movie studios and cable company deals, I'm not entirely optimistic that they can solve it.

Dave Zatz reviews the TiVo Stream

Dave Zatz got his hands on an early release of the upcoming TiVo Stream, a small $130 box you attach to your TiVo Premiere that lets you stream recordings to iOS devices and also gives you the ability to download shows to those devices. 

Ever since I installed the TiVo iPhone and iPad clients, I've long wanted a way to stream the shows to my iPad in the house. At one time I had a Slingbox especially for this purpose but it was finicky and a pain to maintain and I eventually gave up on it. Personally, watching a dramatic show on an iPad with headphones is a really great way to get fully engrossed in a story and I'm really looking forward to this product.

Yesterday Dave also shared a sneaky way to pre-order one by phone.

How Your New TV Ruins Movies

The Prolost blog's post Your New TV Ruins Movies is over a year old but still packed with relevant information on why shopping for a new TV is difficult in a busy store as well as the settings that environment requires and how it affects your experience when you take it home:

Maybe you got a new TV for Christmas. Or maybe you just got one recently. Maybe you are thinking of buying one. Whichever is the case, take heed: your TV will try very, very hard to make whatever movies you watch on it look not just bad, but aggressively, satanically, puppy-drowningly bad.

It features a handy guide to turning down the brightness and moving your TV into at least a general "movie mode" as well as how to turn off the motion smoothing that can ruin lots of TV and almost all movies.

I always do two things when buying a new TV: one is going through the options to make sure automatic stuff like motion smoothing is turned off, and the other thing I do is Google search the phrase "cnet reviews calibration tv [model number]". Cnet reviews consistently has the newest reviews and part of every TV review is how to calibrate your TV to match their optimal settings. They include every single option screen's settings and it frequently takes me about 20 minutes to complete but it is worth the effort and I'm always rewarded with a really high quality picture.

Pocket TV on Kickstarter

Over on Kickstarter, I just backed a cool looking idea: a smart TV operating system that fits in a HDMI dongle.

The Pocket TV looks like it can be added to any HDMI-equipped television and runs a full version of the latest Android. That means you can run any browser, games, apps, and other things designed for a phone. They offer two different remotes as well. I like the idea that it could be forever upgradeable by the user instead of having to wait for your TV manufacturer to update an existing TV's functionality. I'm not a huge fan of Android on a TV, since it looks pretty complicated and could use a simpler living room UI, but it does look pretty impressive in a small package that will work with most any TV. Looks like their target price after the Kickstarter campaign will be around $160 and availability looks to be this Fall.

It's already 2/3 funded so I suspect it will have an easy time making it over its first run goal in the next month.

IKEA's new home entertainment system (including TV)

 

The biggest problem with integrating today's newest TVs into your home is finding a competent home theater installer (or having enough DIY knowhow) to properly mount your TV, hide your components, and then hide the wires, which is no small task. 

IKEA, probably tired of seeing their clean lined modern home theater units and stands covered in wires set out to solve the problem of mounting, hiding, and even getting things down to a single remote controller. They're calling this system UPPLEVA.

IKEA is going to start selling TVs with integrated home theater setups including a 1080p LED TV, DivX playback, Blu-ray/DVD/CD player, WiFi, as well as speakers including a wireless subwoofer. It looks pretty good and will solve a lot of problems for a large audience. I look forward to seeing what the pricing is like and what the capabilities are.

Promise.tv - records all content in a 7-day window

An interesting project out of the UK: Promise.tv. It has the ability to record all Freeview (British TV) streams including TV and radio (about 60 channels total) in a one-week buffer, allowing you to watch anything broadcast in the past seven days. No more season passes, no more suggested recordings, instead you get the ability to see anything at all on any channel recorded.

It's pretty crazy that this kind of heavy multistream recording is possible now in a single small box.

(via BoingBoing, who is offering a 50% off price when ordering direct)

DirecTiVo now nationwide

Looks like the previously announced official TiVo unit for DirecTV that launched in December is now nationwide in the US. I live outside of their launch cities but noticed I can now sign up for new service and receive a free TiVo unit for it.

(I just may sign up and have DirecTV alongside my ailing fiber service from Frontier Communications, who has almost completely phased out TV service)

TiVo's Margret Schmidt tweets screenshots of updates for Premiere units

Head of TiVo's design group Margret Schmidt (interview from a few years ago here) has been tweeting teaser screenshots of a new TiVo release. It sounds like it is destined only for the new Premiere units and will slowly be deployed over the following few weeks (she also mentioned you can email her to get on the early list). Here are some shots she has shared:

Multi-room streaming
Still offers 4 tuner recording
New (HD) TiVo central
New Search screens (HD)
New info banner during playback
New info banner expanded
New smaller on-screen guide option
New expanded guide layout
New expanded guide selections

These are likely all teasers of what's to come from TiVo at CES next week. They'e also announced a new Android TiVo app.

GoogleTV coming to most TVs?

Last month there was news that made some waves when Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated that in about six months, most TVs would include GoogleTV. Most tech pundits thought it was a bit silly and a bit too early to make such a claim but with the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) coming to Las Vegas next week, the GoogleTV blog has listed a bunch of announcements coming soon from Sony, Vizio, Samsung, LG, Marvell, and MediaTek.

I generally like my GoogleTV device, though I don't use it much beyond playing DVDs and occasionally watching some online video (it is the only device I've found that can reliably play flash video from any site on my TV), so I never really saw a standalone box becoming a big seller in the marketplace. If Google could get GoogleTV baked into TVs in lieu of each TV manufacturer having to custom program their own online UI (I have a Samsung TV with all the Samsung apps and they are harder to use than any of my set top box devices attached to it) I think this can be a big hit with customers buying new TVs and casually starting to use technology such as GoogleTV.