People, wake up! Your media center apps are wrong for me!
They want to bring computing power to the TV. In that, they succeed. But they make that power unavailable to me. Because they’re built wrong!
Apple TV? Built wrong!
Front Row? Built wrong!
Windows Media Center? Awesome! But built wrong!
XBMC, Boxee, Plex… wrong, wrong, wrong.
That’s because they all assume the user is willing to interact with his TV when it’s time to play stuff.
I tried an insane number of media center apps, hoping to find The One. And all this time I’ve been frustrated by the sorry state of consumer video playback on TV. None of them passes my main use case, which is as follows: After five to eight hours spent studying and working, I come back home, get into the living room, turn on the TV and get my sorry ass on the sofa, ready to shut down my brain. I don’t have enough mental strength to get anything but changing a channel on a remote.
Regular TV passes the test: content is right there to be seen and I don’t have to think about it. Except it’s not usually the content I want to look at: I want to see the latest anime on Crunchyroll or my fave podcast much more than I want to see bland, generic TV programming. TV wins on user experience and loses on content quality.
Media center apps surely have the stuff I want. And yet, they lose on user experience, because they INVARIABLY require me to dig into menus and/or organize stuff beforehand.
“NO, DUDE, I’M TOO TIRED. DO IT FOR ME.” goes my head as I throw myself on the sofa after eight hours spent doing something else.
And yet no one does. The computer can and should provide me with the programming I’ve signaled I want. I want to point it into the generic direction of stuff and have it figure out transparently what to do. App! Show me episodes of a series in order. Prepare an hour and an half of programming from what you have. Do not play silly anime back to back with gritty serials; pick by genre, pick stuff I haven’t seen in a while, put the highest-rated stuff first. I want TV channels that are and behave as iTunes smart playlists, except I don’t want to set ‘em up. And when I start you up, do not have me dig stuff and then hit play and then — just start playing right away, dammit! Me interacting with you is an exception, not something I want to do every time I want to play stuff.
I’ll be working on this space in my spare time, believe me.
Very good point and I could agree with you more. Hulu desktop is the first media player app I have seen do this. Hopefully the others will get the hint.
I think instead of it working like smart playlists, it should be even lazier and work like genius and start to learn what kinda of tv you like. Also this would be better for advertisers because they can send more effective ads.
Yep, we need Genius for *everything*. That’s exactly my point.
Dude, I’m with you.
Take revision 3.
I like a lot of their shows, but I can’t download each and every one of them in iTunes, expecially when they can be conveniently streamed.
But sometimes I don’t want to choose, and pick, and set, and tweak….I just want CONTENT THROWN AT ME. Let me pick my shows beforehand and let me just chose the genre I’m interested in. Then I can lose my apple remote in the couch, as I normally do.
Listen to Fred Wilson from about min:sec 4:40 (if memory serves) or so. How does that sound?
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/06/the-watch-later-project.html
whoever wrote afloat deserves a f*cking prize.
> content is right there to be seen and I don’t have to think about it. Except it’s not usually the content I want to look at: I want to see the latest anime on Crunchyroll or my fave podcast much more than I want to see bland, generic TV programming
Hooray, Crunchyroll!
I have a love-hate relationship with tee vee. If I’m watching some after work it means:
* my brain is dead and i need to chill out
* i’m not writing or practicing my instrument, etc
But you need to chill out sometimes, you do. I’m not sure we can really expect a kind of Genius or personalized aggregator to do it for us. I’m thinking that’s why people love their Tivo so much (but not Crunchyroll there) and why so many other people just watch whatever show they like directly on the network websites.
Maybe your ultimate media center is a kind of RSS aggregator for visual media, and you just tell it what “channels” to watch, and maybe they can be from “anywhere” with a wide variety of codec support. I’m actually a little surprised there isn’t such a thing now.
As a side note, I think this is why Al3x Payne has it all wrong about feed readers being the “wrong” way to aggregate the Stuff You Like (aside from the fact that Twitter sees RSS as the devil). As you come across video feeds, add them to your list. When you sit down at night, have the media center play video from them, allow you to thumb through the feeds with your remote.
Hey,
I agree with your post… but my comment is completely off-topic. The contact link on the Afloat download page didn’t work… so I’ll post here:
I’d like to report a small bug in Afloat!
Adium’s chat window loses its “afloat” status when a new tab is opened. Transparency and multi-space state remains consistent, but it becomes a regular window again.
I’m guessing this is because Adium has a customised Window menu on the menu bar. Rather than a “Chats” window, it shows as a list of the specific tabs within the window.
I don’t know if you would consider this a legitimate bug, but Adium is the app I use Afloat for most often… so it would be awesome if it could be made compatible.
Cheers