Tag Archives: internettv

Daily del.icio.us for December 30th through January 5th

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  • InfoQ: Deriving Agility from SOA and BPM – Ten Things that Separate the Winners from the Losers – In this presentation from SOA Symposium 2010, Manas Deb and Clemens Utschig-Utschig discuss how to derive business agility from SOA and BPM, motivations for agility, developing and nurturing agility, influencers and dependencies, how SOA and BPM enable agility, pitfalls and recommendations for organizational culture, and pitfalls and recommendations for business and technical architectures.
  • InfoQ: Introduction to Spring Roo – In this presentation from SpringOne/2GX 2010, Rod Johnson and Stefan Schmidt introduce Spring Roo, how to build a sample application with Spring Roo and SpringSource Tool Suite
  • InfoQ: Mobile HTML 5.0 – In this presentation from Strange Loop 2010, Michael Galpin discusses developing mobile web applications, HTML 5, WebKit, ACID 3, PhoneGap and Appcelerator, Viewports, geolocation, DOM storage, Web Workers, Web Sockets and server-side data pushing, Canvas, CSS 3.0, application cache, the Device API, touch events, video/audio, meta tags, and support for each of these on assorted mobile platforms.
  • Cisco’s Videoscape: Ready to Reinvent TV? : Online Video News « – What brings this strategy together is a new family of devices carrying the Videoscape brand that carry a common software architecture, which Cisco promises will deliver a consistent quality of experience across devices
  • Griffin Technology: Your Leader in Essentials for iPod, iPhone, and iPad – Crayola ColorStudio HD is an entirely new digital play experience, coupling a multi-activity drawing application for iPad (Crayola ColorStudio HD App) with a custom-built digital stylus, called Crayola iMarker
  • 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
  • aria2 – The next generation download utilty – aria2 is a lightweight multi-protocol & multi-source download utility operated in command-line. It supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, BitTorrent and Metalink. aria2 has built-in XML-RPC interface. You can manipulate aria2 via XML-RPC interface.
  • Our Top Ten HTML5 Wishes for 2011 – Sencha – Blog – 2010 has been a fantastic year for HTML5 – But there’s still a lot of work still to do. As the new year approaches, we’re taking a stab at a HTML5 wish list for 2011
  • The Best of JIRA 2010 – Similar to the GreenHopper and Confluence teams, 2010 was a very exciting year for the JIRA team. We doubled the size of the dev team – forcing us to move into a new building across the street – adding a new skillsets and evolving new roles
  • Cassandra vs MongoDB vs CouchDB vs Redis vs Riak vs HBase comparison :: KKovacs – In this light, here is a comparison of Cassandra, Mongodb, CouchDB, Redis, Riak and HBase:
  • Can Individuals hold values which are contrary to their employer’s view? – Leadership is a game of thinking where you are always looking for a better way to make your employees (followers) happy. If you are simply attempting to make them conform, you have lowered yourself to a manager
  • The busy manager’s view of Android mobile development – One of Android's greatest "pluses," from a Java team manager's view, is that 90% of the tooling, ecosystem, and experience is one that is familiar to the Java development team
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Netflix Player by Roku – Internet TV done right

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I just want to say that if the future of Internet TV is anything like the Netflix Player by Roku, we are going to be just fine. I was one of the lucky ones who ordered the Netflix Player by Roku right away and have had the opportunity to play with it for the last few weeks. I absolutely love my Netflix player box – unequivocally 🙂 If you haven’t heard anything about the Netflix player, it is a little hardware device (box) that allows instant streaming direct to your TV over the Internet.

The box, made by Roku is a $99.99 one-time purchase which connects to your existing broadband (wired or wireless) connection and allows you to instantly watch content from Netflix web site. This box plugs into the same infrastructure over at Netflix that lets you watch streaming movies and TV shows on your PC. The nice thing is that this is part of your standard Netflix membership and there are no extra monthly charges. The same flat fee DVDs you receive are not impacted by your instant streaming. The Netflix/Roku box connects to any TV using HDMI, component, s-video, composite or good old RCA and you get full DVD video quality if your bandwidth permits.

I’ve had the pleasure of using this box and I have been completely and totally impressed with the design of box, the software and the actual quality of the content being streamed. Setup/installation was incredibly easy and I was able to get the box to connect to my WPA secured wireless network in seconds. The first thing the box did was download an update from Netflix and automatically update itself – nice feature. Once the box was up and running, I was able to link the Netflix box to my online Netflix account and anything in my ‘Watch Instantly’ queue was available for viewing on my TV. So I start watching Blade Runner and it’s almost an hour before I realize that I’m not watching a DVD on my TV and it’s actually being streamed live over the Internet. The picture and sound quality is unbelievable and rewind/fast-forward is decent with the little time-series snapshot of scenes to help gauge how far or back you’re going. The box supports HD but Netflix doesn’t support that at the moment but I fully anticipate Netflix enabling that feature as they build up a bigger library of on-demand material that is of HD quality.

I only have two complaints with the box and I think one of them will probably be handled in a software update. The first one is the lack of a power button – Once the box is plugged in and turned on, you cannot turn it off. There is no OFF button on the box or the remote and that’s just annoying. There is a little light that’s always on and it’s not blindingly bright or anything but I would like to be able to turn it off. The second missing feature is the lack of Closed Captioning – I think this is a big miss and a must for me as I’m often watching movies late at night while my wife and daughter are sleeping. I can live without the power button but I really want Closed Captioning enabled in the next software release – please!!

In closing, I cannot stress how good the quality of the picture is and I haven’t had a single issue with video glitches or slowness or pauses while it’s buffering or anything like that. I’ve seen several long movies along with the most of the first season of Heroes and I haven’t had a single issue. I do have a nice broadband connection with 15 Mbps down and 1 Mbp up but that’s fairly standard these days and Netflix recommends about 3-4 Mbps for the service. The other nice thing about this box and the use of the Flash memory is that it doesn’t have a fan and so its whisper quiet. I am also excited about the future as this box runs on a embedded Linux OS and Roku has released a lot (if not all) of the code under GPL. I can’t wait for all the mods/patched kernels and apps that are going to surface in the coming weeks and months.