A family history of smart TV.

A survey of my loft reveals a story from more TV to smart TV. blog.mindrocketnow.com

In my last post, I came to the not really surprising conclusion that the intervening years between Mum’s last TV and her current has brought vast improvements. It’s a feature of technology that it advances at a breakneck speed. But it’s also a feature of technology, that the rapid pace of advancement isn’t accompanied by an explanation of how to use it. Let me illustrate with a personal history of smart TV.

My history with smartening TV probably starts with TiVo. Once you realise that you aren’t tied to a schedule, there’s no going back. TiVo showed that not only could I watch what I wanted whenever I wanted, thanks to its accurate recommendations service, I could also watch things I didn’t know I wanted to watch too.

However, TiVo in the UK was hamstrung by lack of channels, at least on good-old analogue terrestrial. So I got cable. I also chose a cable box with a hard drive to reduce the box count, but no TiVo recommendations meant that I had to choose what to record myself. This turned out to be limited by my own experiences, with little discovery of new content.

When iPlayer came along, with its presentation of a range of BBC programming, this made content discovery a bit easier. However, I could only watch on a computer, which could be hooked into the TV with the right cable, but was far from an integrated experience.

The Wii was my first under-TV device to enable smart TV functions through its implementation of the Opera browser, and BBC’s TV-resolution iPlayer site. The picture was soft, and there was some buffer lag, but I could now control iPlayer with a wiimote, albeit a different remote from the TV. Once booted, it was now simple enough for DD1 to navigate at the age of 3. However, the quality was unsatisfying, and couldn’t compete with PVR recordings.

When we upgraded TVs to an HD panel, smart functions still weren’t built in, so I installed a Mac Mini as my do-it-all under-TV box.  It almost did everything: iPlayer, YouTube, DVDs (Apple still doesn’t believe in blu ray). The only thing it didn’t do was to receive and record Freeview HD, for which I’d have to wait for a USB DVB-T2 tuner stick.

In the interim we decided to ditch cable and switch to Freeview. I got a Freeview HD box, chosen because it was upgradeable via software update. And upgrade I did, adding a hard drive when PVR functionality was enabled, and hooking up to the home cinema amp when Dolby Digital PCM output was enabled through another software update. And a third update brought iPlayer and YouTube to its portal feature. This was a much more satisfying experience than the Wii version from many years back, and so I actually used it.

Over the last few years, I’ve amassed quite the collection of little boxes that deliver TV via the Internet. Apple TV, Now TV, Google Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV all sit under my TV and I’ve run out of HDMI sockets. The Mac Mini has been displaced and has now become a desktop computer for actual work. This has revolutionised what I watch – I hardly every bother to walk the length of the lounge to get a blu ray any more.

The current generation of smart TVs do all of the things that my setup does, but instead of 6 boxes under the TV, it’s all within the smart TV. The TV industry feels like it’s finally matured from early adopter to mainstream, by increasing functionality yet decreasing complexity. Consequently, the loft of the early adopter is littered with discarded, but ever improving little boxes.

A survey of my loft reveals a story from more TV to smart TV. blog.mindrocketnow.com

In my last post, I came to the not really surprising conclusion that the intervening years between Mum’s last TV and her current has brought vast improvements. It’s a feature of technology that it advances at a breakneck speed. But it’s also a feature of technology, that the rapid pace of advancement isn’t accompanied by an explanation of how to use it. Let me illustrate with a personal history of smart TV.

My history with smartening TV probably starts with TiVo. Once you realise that you aren’t tied to a schedule, there’s no going back. TiVo showed that not only could I watch what I wanted whenever I wanted, thanks to its accurate recommendations service, I could also watch things I didn’t know I wanted to watch too.

However, TiVo in the UK was hamstrung by lack of channels, at least on good-old analogue terrestrial. So I got cable. I also chose a cable box with a hard drive to reduce the box count, but no TiVo recommendations meant that I had to choose what to record myself. This turned out to be limited by my own experiences, with little discovery of new content.

When iPlayer came along, with its presentation of a range of BBC programming, this made content discovery a bit easier. However, I could only watch on a computer, which could be hooked into the TV with the right cable, but was far from an integrated experience.

The Wii was my first under-TV device to enable smart TV functions through its implementation of the Opera browser, and BBC’s TV-resolution iPlayer site. The picture was soft, and there was some buffer lag, but I could now control iPlayer with a wiimote, albeit a different remote from the TV. Once booted, it was now simple enough for DD1 to navigate at the age of 3. However, the quality was unsatisfying, and couldn’t compete with PVR recordings.

When we upgraded TVs to an HD panel, smart functions still weren’t built in, so I installed a Mac Mini as my do-it-all under-TV box.  It almost did everything: iPlayer, YouTube, DVDs (Apple still doesn’t believe in blu ray). The only thing it didn’t do was to receive and record Freeview HD, for which I’d have to wait for a USB DVB-T2 tuner stick.

In the interim we decided to ditch cable and switch to Freeview. I got a Freeview HD box, chosen because it was upgradeable via software update. And upgrade I did, adding a hard drive when PVR functionality was enabled, and hooking up to the home cinema amp when Dolby Digital PCM output was enabled through another software update. And a third update brought iPlayer and YouTube to its portal feature. This was a much more satisfying experience than the Wii version from many years back, and so I actually used it.

Over the last few years, I’ve amassed quite the collection of little boxes that deliver TV via the Internet. Apple TV, Now TV, Google Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV all sit under my TV and I’ve run out of HDMI sockets. The Mac Mini has been displaced and has now become a desktop computer for actual work. This has revolutionised what I watch – I hardly every bother to walk the length of the lounge to get a blu ray any more.

The current generation of smart TVs do all of the things that my setup does, but instead of 6 boxes under the TV, it’s all within the smart TV. The TV industry feels like it’s finally matured from early adopter to mainstream, by increasing functionality yet decreasing complexity. Consequently, the loft of the early adopter is littered with discarded, but ever improving little boxes.

The price of early adoption is hidden behind the TV

Smart and Smarter TV.

Mum has finally caught up with 21^st century TV. And 21^st century TV is finally simple enough for her to use. blog.mindrocketnow.com

Last weekend, I helped Mum buy her first new TV in two decades. She had an old 32 inch CRT TV, which weighed as much as I do, and occupied more volume. It took me a good 10 min of shoving and puffing to move it out of the way. Then I carried her new 32 inch LCD TV with one hand over to the stand – what a difference! The change in TV technology has not just benefited those of us to whom their mothers delegate manual labour. Nearly every aspect has improved in absolute terms: picture quality, sound quality, design aesthetic, cost, and the quality of content available.

The TV we chose (a Samsung UE32H5500 for £280 from the very nice people at Richer Sounds) is a very smart TV. It is a full HD panel, with lovely colour gamut and deep blacks, making the picture vibrant. The standard picture settings are well implemented, and need no further tuning. The sound is pretty impressive too, considering that they’re flat panel speakers; I don’t think Mum will miss not having a full-on amp+speakers setup.

Design, in common with all current TVs, is very minimalist. However, when you compare with the old CRT you can really see how the technology has enabled the svelte form. With all that volume gone, and no bezel to speak of, there’s nothing to distract from the screen, nothing to distract from what you’re watching. The only visual context is the furniture that the TV is sitting on, so the same screen size does seem a lot smaller.

For what you get, the TV was an extraordinary bargain. It has a Freeview HD tuner built in, so no need for an additional set top box. It has smart TV functions, apps like iPlayer, YouTube so no need to hook up a laptop. It even has third party platforms like Amazon Fire TV, so no need for another dedicated set top box. If you want to record off air, you can simply connect a hard drive. I found a 1TB drive for £50. If you want to play blu ray discs, you can pick up a very good smart player for another £55. Grand total = £385. This is less than the first DVD player that I bought 15 years ago (OK, maybe I did overpay a little).

A lot of thought has gone into the user interface, and the result is a very pretty user interface, and a very easy first boot experience. When you first plug in, the TV plays an impressive animation, full of fast-moving blemish-free computer-generated effects. The set up process takes 7 screens (complete with uplifting background pop) of tuning through all the DTT broadcast channels, finding the Wi-Fi, and of course, downloading the latest software version. And within an hour, the TV has learned enough about your viewing habits to start to present favourites and recommendations, which improve over time.

All this would be rendered moot if there were nothing available to watch. But Samsung has addressed this by opening the smart TV platform to a wide variety of third party apps that give access to their own content, as well as Samsung’s own TV portal. The content catalogue when aggregated across all of these platforms is so vast, that there will always be something to watch. Within moments of first boot, Mum was able to find a Bengali movie on YouTube and recreate the desi filmi experience.

It’s not all good – there are a few areas that still need work. Samsung hasn’t solved the problem of search, which means that Mum will have to learn which programme is best watched on which platform. She will have to compute whether to record Dallas onto the hard drive or to watch on Demand 5 – as long as she has enough time this week. There is still no integrated view of content catalogue.

Integration with third party hardware is also a problem. The hard drive works seamlessly when setting a recording, but playing it back at a later date requires navigating a folder structure of meaningless technical labels, as if driving a computer. Not user friendly. Also, Samsung has implemented the HDMI-CEC function (under its branding Anynet+), but it doesn’t play nice with the Sony blu ray player (Sony calls it Bravia Sync), which is disappointing. So I’ll have to figure out how to programme the blu ray controls into the TV remote.

Not all apps are of the same quality – iPlayer goes to the top of the class for being able to stream HD with Dolby sound. Sony Entertainment Network has let the class down, and itself down, for not being able to stream even a low-res commercial without buffering to a standstill. So the computation of what to watch needs to take into account expected quality as well.

Finally, subscribing to all of the smart TV services would be very expensive indeed. So even though the potential content catalogue is vast, most people won’t subscribe to all. Therefore the computation of what to watch will also need to take into account whether it’s within the service package.

So far, this post reads like a product review of the Samsung TV that we chose. The thing I find most surprising is that you could apply many of these observations to competitor offerings also. The entire TV market has improved. Some TVs are smarter than others, some TVs are prettier than others, some TVs perform better than others. However, smart, pretty and high quality is the baseline expectation for TVs nowadays, and that can only be good for the consumer.

It’s good to see that new features are still being crammed in, but these features are well-implemented and easy to use – which means they actually get used. As these features get used, the flaws are illuminated, so TV manufacturers will have to continue to improve, as well as to innovate. And this can only be good for the consumer too.

One thing is the same after all these years: after installing it at home, Mum complained that the screen size was too small. I remember making that same complaint of the old family TV too, two decades ago. 

Too many Set Top Boxes.

There’s a lot of choice in online TV right now. Amazon Fire TV is the newest, but is it the best? (Spoiler: yes.) blog.mindrocketnow.com

I’ve run out of HDMI sockets! But on the bright side, I’ve a new TV toy, Amazon Fire TV. I’ve had it for a month now, and it’s really impressive. The unique selling point of voice search works really well – within some limitations, the range of content is very good – with some reservations, and the picture and sound quality is the best of the lot.

Voice search is simple to use – hold the button on the remote down whilst you say the name of what you’re looking for, let got and let Fire TV think, then select from options presented. It’s supposed to learn your voice, but in practice it can understand any of the family, and other visitors that have tried it out.

Its limitation is that it only searches within the Amazon catalogue. Results are from each of the three tiers: free, free with Prime, and paid. But results don’t include for example, iPlayer, so search results aren’t necessarily the cheapest. Searching for episode 1 of this season’s Doctor Who will take you to an option to buy for £3.49, rather than to watch for free on iPlayer.

	Freeview HD	Apple TV	Now TV	Chromecast	Amazon Fire TV
	The incumbent	The hobby	The heavyweight	The outsider	The newcomer
Exclusive Shows	Live broadcast	What we’ve bought from iTunes	First catch-up of Sky shows; Live broadcast of Sky 1, Sky Arts 1, Sky Atlantic	Premiership football from BT Sport; Anything we’ve bought on Google Play	Old Doctor Who; The Vikings
Can we watch Agents of SHIELD?	Yes – on C4 at broadcast, or catch-up on 4OD app, or from PVR recording	Yes – catch-up on 4OD app, or box set on Now TV app	Yes – catch-up on 4OD app, or box set on Now TV	Yes – catch-up on 4OD app, or box set on Now TV app	Yes – box set from Amazon
Can we watch Doctor Who?	Yes – on BBC at broadcast, or catch-up on iPlayer app, or from PVR recording	Yes – catch-up on iPlayer app	Yes – catch-up on iPlayer app	Yes – catch-up on iPlayer app	Yes – catch-up on iPlayer app – and we can watch old Doctor Who box sets on Amazon
Can we watch Game of Thrones?	No – it’s on Sky	Yes – live broadcast, first catch-up, and box set on Now TV app	Yes – live broadcast on Sky Atlantic, first catch-up and box set on Now TV	Yes – live broadcast, first catch-up, and box set on Now TV app	No – it’s on Sky
Services	Broadcast iPlayer YouTube	iTunes Store Now TV Podcasts YouTube	CNET TV Demand 5 iPlayer ITV Player Now TV TED Talks TWiT YouTube	BT Sport Google Play iPlayer Now TV Red Bull TV Wukai YouTube	Amazon Fire TV Games iPlayer
Other features	New services are downloadable (though few are available)	Many iOS apps can stream to ATV; Mac OSX can stream to ATV; New services are downloadable; Can be jailbroken with e.g. Plex	Live streaming of major Sky channels included; New services are downloadable; Can be jailbroken with e.g. Plex	Rich search via iPhone; Any site can be “cast” via iPhone	Games use dedicated controller; 4k content coming
Picture quality	576i, 720p and 1080i Excellent for Freeview HD, acceptable for iPlayer HD, poor for broadcast SD and other apps	720p Excellent for iTunes store content, poor for others	720p Excellent for on demand, poor for live streaming	Very variable up to 1080p depending on bandwidth. Some acceptable, some poor	1080p
Sound quality	Dolby Digital on some BBC iPlayer, others Dolby Pro Logic II or stereo	Dolby Digital on iTunes content, all others stereo	Dolby Digital on Sky content, all others stereo	Stereo except some rare YouTube content	Dolby Digital plus on Amazon content, all others stereo

So it turns out that we can watch most of the things we want to watch if we use the right combination of app + set top box. So the deciding factor becomes: which platform has the shortest path to starting to watch?

When we know what we want to watch, we choose between Now TV or Amazon Fire TV. Even though our phones are barely out of reach, it’s still easier to use the STB by itself. Now TV’s menu options are easy to understand, but scrolling does take a while. Amazon Fire TV’s voice search makes getting to the chosen show a doddle, so if it’s a choice between the two, Amazon Fire TV wins on ease of search.

When we don’t know what to watch, choosing is much more difficult. Amazon has the familiar “people like you” recommended titles, which are generally worthwhile pursuing. Now TV has curated content presented like playlists. iPlayer curates individual titles, and is moving towards greater effective personalisation.

Smartphone apps make it much quicker to sift through content catalogues. More information can be presented and assessed quickly. Show images and notes can link to IMDB entries or rotten tomatoes reviews. The only trouble is, each platform has its own app, so you have to launch each in turn.

What we don’t generally do, is to launch the each of the apps in turn to surf for something to watch. It’s too slow and not at all impulsive to launch-close-launch each app.  The UI design for many of these apps are also shockingly poor; they are studies in how to turn away eyeballs. ITV player is the worst: unenticing synopses, organised by channel rather than anything meaningful to a potential viewer, paucity of choice, makes for a painful experience.

The most favoured idle surfing technique is the oldest; it’s still to flick through the EPG, pressing “info” now and again, to see how long it takes before the quality threshold lowers enough to make selecting movies4men a good idea. None of the new methods have yet to beat this “spreadsheet” view in ease to finding something.

Actually, for me, the deciding factor is: which combination gives the best picture and sound quality? It’s a different computation depending on what I want to watch. Because I’ve recorded the latest series of Agents of SHIELD onto the PVR from C4HD, the picture and sound is better than catch-up from 4OD – 1080i and Dolby Digital. However, in a general case, Amazon Fire TV is very impressive indeed. Picture quality is 1080p and sound is Dolby Digital plus, both from Amazon content and some content from apps like iPlayer.

So in summary: Amazon Fire is now the family go-to set top box for watching TV, because we can go from knowing what we want to watch to actually watching it, with the least amount of cognitive friction. However, none of our boxes help us to conjure something from nothing to watch on the TV.