> Roku alleges Google has asked it to favor YouTube music results from voice commands made on the Roku remote while the YouTube app is open, even if the user's music preference is set to default to another music app, like Pandora.
> Roku says Google has threatened to require Roku to use certain chip sets or memory cards that would force Roku to increase the price of its hardware product, which competes directly with Google's Chromecast.
That's just straight evil - overriding user preferences to favor your own products... Some growth PM and/or business head is trying way too hard to hit their OKRs. I'd be surprised if Google could defend this in court.
> Roku alleges Google has asked it to favor YouTube music results from voice commands made on the Roku remote while the YouTube app is open, even if the user's music preference is set to default to another music app, like Pandora.
That's the behavior I would expect from a full screen app. ie, if I issue a command in a full screen app for the command to be interpreted in the context of that app.
>"When searching within an app, favor results from that app"
vs
>"When searching within an app, favor results from a related app"
There is a big difference between these two things. "Youtube" is not the same as "Youtube Music" in the same way that "Xbox" is not the same as "Xbox Live".
As p49k explained it - if you were trying to send an email from YouTube would you expect Gmail to come up or your preferred email app? What if Gmail was renamed to "Youtube Mail"? Would that change your expected behavior?
Sending an email is a different interaction than doing voice search.
Sending an email is an explicit intent - open whatever app I use to send emails.
Searching is an open query - find the most relevant results. What results are most relevant is subjective, hence why you would give the user a choice for what results to favor.
The separation between Youtube and Youtube Music is a technical minutia, they're both Youtube just different apps. If you want a technical solution, Roku should probably implement a search API such that doing a voice search would let the Roku query whatever app is currently running for results. Then any app can provide more relevant, context aware results.
>Sending an email is a different interaction than doing voice search.
Going from watching videos to playing music is a different interaction than doing voice search.
>Sending an email is an explicit intent - open whatever app I use to send emails.
Using a global voice commands (not search) has explicit behavior - use whatever app I have set to default for the functionality I am requesting. "Play Stairway to Heaven" should use my default music app. Note that "voice commands" is different from "voice search" in this context and is the alleged problem.
>Searching is an open query - find the most relevant results.
If I use Spotify as my default music app it is because I trust their music search more than YouTube Music. Otherwise YouTube Music would be my default music app.
There is also a massive contextual difference between a global Voice Search (using the Voice search icon on the Roku remote: it searches Roku) and using the Speech to Text option that may appear when already searching within a search field (which uses the search field of the app itself, in this case: Youtube)
>The separation between Youtube and Youtube Music is a technical minutia, they're both Youtube just different apps.
Google deciding there is a difference between the two means that there is a difference between the two for both a marketing perspective and whatever minor technical differences there are. If there were no differences there would not be a YouTube Music app and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous.
You're basically making the argument for why this should be a user preference.
Do I want the current app I'm using to influence the result of a voice command or not.
Unfortunately the line between voice commands and voice search is often fuzzy. Lines like this:
> Roku alleges Google has asked it to favor YouTube music results from voice commands made on the Roku remote while the YouTube app is open
make it unclear if it's talking about a search or a command.
Ideally Roku would implement a more fine grained API where a user can set permissions/preferences on an app by app basis, similar to Android and iOS permissions APIs and especially how notifications are handled.
Either way if Roku's allegations definitely don't paint Google in a good light here. It just seems like there could be more to this story.
If I'm actively using Google Maps, I'd love for Siri to respond to "get directions to McDonalds" within the Google Maps context instead of opening Apple's.
No it isn’t. If you have Google maps open and suddenly decide you want to go to McDonald’s, then sure, that voice command should go to Google Maps. But if you make a voice command to send an email to someone, it shouldn’t open Gmail instead of your default mail app just because Google maps is open.
Similarly, if you’re watching a video on YouTube and want to search for a cat video, sure, the voice command should search in YouTube. But if you want to listen to music and have Spotify set as your default music app, it shouldn’t send the request to YouTube Music just because YouTube is open.
But YouTube is a music streaming platform. The most popular, in fact (no, not YouTube music). I constantly listen to music across both Spotify and YouTube. YouTube serves video and doesn't present music in the way we usually think of it, albums sorted by artist, chronologically presented... But that isn't really how the younger gen listens to music. It is a music app and a common way a lot of people consume their music.
That's not at all how voice assists are meant to work. Voice icon in cars/remotes are all meant to provide answers or take commands irrespective of what's happening on that device or other devices they control.
I find FireTV stick (from Amazon) to be applying in this respect, it doesn't appear to know command that direct them input to a specific app. When I have Google open and ask it to search for $search-string it will do it in the Amazon store context, ie offer to sell me a program rather than find the string on Google.
Annoying. It relates to the lack of discoverability in voice interfaces, there may be an incantation to get the behaviouyr I want but there's no way within the interface that such methods is revealed.
> Roku says Google has threatened to require Roku to use certain chip sets or memory cards that would force Roku to increase the price of its hardware product, which competes directly with Google's Chromecast.
This could simply mean Google is requiring chips with hardware VP9 support
> Roku alleges Google has asked it to favor YouTube music results from voice commands made on the Roku remote while the YouTube app is open, even if the user's music preference is set to default to another music app, like Pandora.
This is both what many users would expect (if I have an app open, voice search works within that app), and a pretty reasonable ask for any business (don't show competitor's offering when searching within my app).
Not if I have the notion that search from a button on the remote is universal and I want to be taken directly to that content elsewhere. That’d be like suggesting Siri should only fetch content from the active app. It’s a signal for ranking, but not an absolute one.
You don’t always need to have a verb. The way I use my Apple TV is usually to just say the name of the content because I want to pick where it comes from.
But even if you say play, it could still ask you where from and/or confirm it got the right thing. Roku != Amazon Echo.
> This is both what many users would expect (if I have an app open, voice search works within that app)
No, it's not. Most YouTube users have a different primary music app.
Google is trying to artificially force a marriage of YouTube and YouTube Music because they have utterly failed to do it in the product experience and user base themselves.
If I'm watching a random YouTube video and then want to switch to music, I expect my music app to come up, not YouTube Music.
As a Roku user who thinks Google takes a pretty hostile approach to anyone using their App on Roku, I disagree. If I'm in an App and search, I expect my search to be localized to that App.
That being said, f*k Roku and their voice remote. They've been pushing that crap hard. Showing prompts on screen for upwards of 30 seconds to push the Mic button. I don't want my remote to have a microphone or be able to listen to me.
I replaced my Roku remote last month because the one I had started having connectivity issues and missing clicks all of the sudden. The first thing I did with the new remote was pop it open and rip the microphone off the PCB with a pair of pliers.
I really don't want an Android TV or Fire TV, and I'm not really keen on Apple TV either but Roku is making it really difficult to stick with them.
It doesn’t matter what the consumer prefers. This battle is about the _ability_ to implement a feature, and that power should reside with the application developer.
Monopolists can often have batter products as well as charging monopolistic pricing.
> and that power should reside with the application developer.
I guess the question is, who is the developer in this case? The Youtube App is running on the Roku Platform accessing the Google Platform. Both Roku and Google are acting in both roles.
The Roku Voice Search is weird, it's surfaced via a button alongside local media controls which are contextual but Roku appears to want their Search to be analogous to Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant as a platform level tool. The volume, and mute keys are the only other buttons that behave at a platform level. The Roku Home button is contextual.
As a user of a STB, if I search (voice or otherwise) I expect it to be contextualized. If I'm in an App then the search should be localized, if I'm at the home screen then I expect it to be global.
My preference with these devices is that instead of "apps" we have "plugins" which add content catalogs. Then playing music or video on the Roku (or any device) is a consistent experience.
> This battle is about the _ability_ to implement a feature, and that power should reside with the application developer.
Which begs the question: who, is _the_ developer? I think the argument can be convincingly made that both Roku and Google are “the” developer. It seems to be the fundamental disagreement underlying every modern accusation of antitrust.
Trying to think of analogies for this “dual developer” framework from the analog world and it’s difficult to come up with one that isn’t in a heavily regulated industry. Airplane & engine manufacturers maybe? Certainly no one would say Rolls Royce is the “manufacturer” of a plane but I would expect they still exercise some degree of control over what plane manufacturers can change and do to the engine. If planes with Rolls Royce engines started falling out of the sky it would be bad for business regardless of whether it was Boeing or Airbus’s doing. But the same can also be said for Boeing and Airbus. Probably more so.
Regardless, I worry the most recent claims of antitrust violation aren’t about consumer protection (as antitrust was intended) so much as they’re about consumer control.
When it comes to the device's global search feature, Roku is the developer, period. Google is only pushing this because they know they have market/end-user leverage, not because it's inherently better for the user. And even if it is, that's for Roku's product managers to decide.
Your airplane engine analogy doesn't really work; Roku doesn't want to modify the YouTube app; this is purely Roku's own global search feature. Yes, it will aggregate results from the YT app, but Roku doesn't want to modify that data source. Further, the Rolls->Boeing/Airbus relationship is more like a vendor->purchaser arrangement, which is nothing like the Roku->Google relationship here.
The behaviour I expect is that the voice search is global except when I specifically go to the search screen of the app. That’s how it works on Apple TV and that’s what is intuitive to me.
That's a reasonable expectation, not having ever used Apple TV though that isn't mine. Having only ever been on the Roku platform, my perception is that it's localized.
As an apple tv user, it has been trained into me that voice commands are Global unless specifically in the search field (not just the search screen). I fuck this up all the time.
What is naturally intuitive to me is to go to an app and anywhere in that app have a voice search specific for that app, as Google is requesting of Roku.
I hate the voice search on AppleTV for this very reason. I so wish that voice would just search within the app I am using instead of sending me to the itunes store or somewhere else. Why make me click and swipe extra times to get to the specific app search box...? If I want to search globally, I could just hit the home button and then search!
I purchased a Roku when my previous streaming device died. I specifically chose the Roku model because it did not have a voice remote. I have no brand loyalty but I prefer to buy from a company that does not create their own content and at this point non-features are as important as features.
I just don't get it. All these big companies pouring oceans of money and research into voice control. What makes this the holy grail of computing? What customer has a burning desire to sit there talking to a computer?
And after all this research, voice control is still primitive and limited, and its capabilities are impossible for a user to discover. If I want to search my E-mail for a message from a colleague about Project Abc, can I do this through voice control, or do I need to type into a search box? I could try voice control, and when it fails because it doesn't know what I want it to do (or it punts me to a generic web search), now I just wasted my time and feel silly for talking to a computer that doesn't understand me.
I'd enjoy a voice control which isn't tied to a device, but more like an Alexa+Siri+Google Now "in a stick with a button to initiate listening and a hardware switch to physically turn the mic off".
One that understands "Google, set a timer for 5 minutes" as well as "Siri, remind me to call X tomorrow" and "Alexa, start Y on the TV in the living room"
> If I'm in an App and search, I expect my search to be localized to that App.
If you're using a fullscreen app on macOS and activate spotlight, do you expect it to only search that app, or do you expect it to behave like Spotlight always behaves and search the entire system?
Put another way, this depends entirely on how the OS and UI is set up.
On Roku, voice search (using the voice search button on the remote) is always global. Google wants an exception for youtube. No one else gets this exception.
Regardless of what you think is a better user experience, Roku has made a design decision and are sticking to it and aren't giving Google special treatment, so Google is threatening to take their ball and leave if they don't get what they want.
> If you're using a fullscreen app on macOS and activate spotlight, do you expect it to only search that app, or do you expect it to behave like Spotlight always behaves and search the entire system?
To make another analogy: Maybe Roku should ask Google to make the Chrome address/search bar only show Roku.com results if you’re already on their site.
Joking aside, it might actually be a nice feature if you could use the search bar of your browser to search into the single site specifically, just like you can have different search engines already.
Hot take: the Apple TV is easily the best device of its kind on the market and I’m continually confused at why it doesn’t seem to be anywhere close to the most popular option.
Every other steaming device I’ve ever tried is riddled with ads, dark patterns, and slow slow SLOW performance.
I can understand the aversion to a $200 device just to watch some Internet TV but then I watch people making six figures pretend like a $50 Fire/Roku Stick is the best way to watch movies on their $2,000 LG OLED.
If I were buying a steaming device today I’d probably be evaluating the Apple TV against the Nvidia Shield.
1. I assume by “not welcoming” you mean “unable to buy/rent movies from Vudu/Amazon Prime on the box” and that’s a fair criticism. Someone wanting to buy/rent through third party services will find opening a separate browser to be annoying, but that leads me to...
2. iTunes is part of Movies Anywhere just like all its competitors. Being “required” to purchase/rent movies through iTunes isn’t really ecosystem lock-in.
3. “Taking away your movies with no recourse” is not unique to Apple’s iTunes Movies service. This is a standard movie industry practice that can affect you regardless of provider. Using an iTunes competitor does not remove this flaw.
Apple offers a way to back up purchases. They never promised perpetual re-download ability. From their support site: “The only way to back up your purchased media is to download your purchases to your computer.”
I would guess that no other content store can promise anything better than that. Apple didn’t make the rules here, WB/Disney/Universal/Sony did.
Does anyone here happen to know what happens if I get a movie from store X (Apple, Amazon Prime Video, etc) that works with Movies Anywhere, and so that movie shows up in my library at all other Movies Anywhere supported stores that I have accounts on, and then I do something that gets my account with store X banned?
I know I lose access on X, but how about on the other stores?
Also, how the heck does Movies Anywhere actually work? Say I buy a movie on iTunes, but then via Movies Anywhere watch it using the Fandango app on my TV.
Who pays for the bandwidth for that stream? Does Fandango just eat it, or behind the scenes does each company keep track of how much of their bandwidth was used for movies bought at each other company, and they periodically settle up for any imbalances?
> 2. iTunes is part of Movies Anywhere just like all its competitors. Being “required” to purchase/rent movies through iTunes isn’t really ecosystem lock-in.
Movies Anywhere doesn't exist outside of the US fwiw.
Personally I flat out don't trust Apple on content censorship, as I think the Apple TV UI is not very good.
> Unless you are fully in the Apple ecosystem already, it's not very welcoming.
This is an answer to the question I was about to ask. Except for a MacBook Air that I used to run Linux on (but is now gathering dust) and a Mac Mini that I currently run Linux on, I own no Apple devices. I hear great things about the Apple TV, but don't really care to buy into that overall ecosystem to the degree that I assume is necessary to get full use out of the ATV. It's bad enough that Google has its fingerprints on so much of what I have, and I'm actively trying to reduce that, not replace it with another corporate overlord.
Last I used one, the Apple tv remote control sucks in comparison to Roku. No tactile directional buttons, I couldn't get used to the trackpad thing. No mute button. No "lost remote" button on the console to make the remote beep.
Also, I know many will disagree, but...no headphone jack. I don't like bluetooth earphones.
I’m not sure if you’re aware, but Apple just last week updated the remote to address those criticisms. The new remote is compatible with old Apple TV hardware.
There are directional buttons, trackpad swipes, and a classic iPod-like fast forward and rewind touch gesture. Mute button and TV power buttons now included.
The new chromecast is pretty good and $50, and until very recently the ATV was pretty out of date and overpriced. The chromecast stutters sometimes in the main screen, but actually playing videos is just fine.
You can also side load unofficial youtube apps, which are much better than the actual youtube app on the chromecast.
The LG OLED tv os was missing some services, like HBO, but it stutters less.
The only thing missing from all of these devices is a backlit remote. I don't know why they're against the concept.
> The new chromecast is pretty good and $50, and until very recently the ATV was pretty out of date and overpriced. The chromecast stutters sometimes in the main screen, but actually playing videos is just fine.
I can understand "overpriced", but on the other hand, the apparently-not-out-of-date chromecast stutters? WTF.
It's $200. Also the remote sucks, although maybe the new one is decent.
I sold my Apple TV 4K and bought a Fire TV 4K and pocketed the difference. The Fire TV does have slightly more stupid ads on the home screen for shit like McDonald's but the Apple TV would gladly advertise me shit to buy on iTunes. Slightly more relevant ads maybe but still ads. Otherwise it does everything I did with the Apple TV plus works better with my Echos plus has Firefox for watching random vids on the web. Also the Fire TV doesn't suffer from the maddening Netflix bug that made the interface slow to a crawl if browsing for 5 minutes.
That’s what air tags are for! Shocked they didn’t put that tech into the remote.
I think that must be how you configure it? The too banner does not show that for me - it grabs the shows I e been watching from infuse tv and. Puts them there
Apple TV app banners (ads) are easily adjusted. Just put different apps on the top row. I mostly have folders up there and it rotates through the app banners when you have the folder selected.
> That being said, f*k Roku and their voice remote. They've been pushing that crap hard. Showing prompts on screen for upwards of 30 seconds to push the Mic button. I don't want my remote to have a microphone or be able to listen to me.
This is kind of thread drift, but I really agree with this. I wish products would stop trying to get me to use some particular feature. First, they cram it onto every screen in the application. Then, they make it easy to accidentally invoke when you didn't want to. Then, they spam you with notifications saying "PLEASE DON'T YOU WANT THIS FEATURE?" Then, they silently enable it and make it opt-out. Product Managers, please just stop this madness. I don't want your feature. I don't care that your bonus is tied to its use. I already bought your product, so you already have my money. But if you keep trying to cram your feature down my throat, I'm not going to buy your company's next product. Give it a rest!
Or whenever you open an application. If I want to check my email, then I want to check my email. I have something in mind, and I am trying to figure out what somebody said to me. That is exactly the wrong time to pop up and ask if I want to learn about a new feature that was just added, because of course I don't. That's something for downtime, not when I'm actively working toward a goal.
I mean, sure, but how is the app to know your intent when you have yet to connect your brain interface device?
Does this happen to you after the first launch of the app after an update? I find it terribly annoying as well. I would rather see a "New Feature Tips" or something similar as an icon notification that I can choose to review or not. The forced balloons stealing focus absolutely needs to die in a fire.
And then they aggressively complain at you, when you turn off their spam notifications for their spam features.
Google itself is the worst offender in this. Turn off the Meet advertisement in Gmail for Android, and they literally pop open a giant comment box saying, "In 1000 words or less, please type in an excuse for why you disabled the giant Google Meet advertisement we plastered all over your Gmail accounts?"
I love voice search on Roku. Typing things in with a d-pad and on-screen keyboard is horrendous. I think it's very fast, and I like that it shows me all the ways what I'm searching for is available.
Thats interesting, when i got my first roku with voice control, the remote had the voice control button where the play button used to be so i cut it off the remote with a knife because it was annoying the shit out of me.
> That being said, f*k Roku and their voice remote. They've been pushing that crap hard. Showing prompts on screen for upwards of 30 seconds to push the Mic button. I don't want my remote to have a microphone or be able to listen to me.
It sounds like they have been pushing too hard, but discovery of voice commands is hard. Pushing them is probably useful for some set of customers.
For example, I have an ATV. While watching something you can click the voice button and say something like 'what did he just say' and it will go back 30 seconds or so, turn on captions, replay the bit you missed, then turn captions back off. As a user how would one discover this amazingly useful feature? I didn't even know it existed until I happened to hear about it on a podcast.
A user's manual comes to mind. A website with all of the hidden UX tips/tricks released by the vendor seems only natural. It reminds me of "that" burger joint with its famous unprinted menu. You have to "hear" about it from someone else rather than "we took the time to develop this feature, so here's the details on how to use it" vs "we did this super cool thing for our friends, but you have to be cool to know about it".
Voice search is basically like Apple Spotlight. It's system wide.
I only expect it to be localized within the app I'm in when I'm in the search box for that app, in which case I'm not using voice search, I'm using voice recognition to fill in the contents of the search bar.
Outside the context of voice recognition for an input, to me clicking the voice button on my apple TV is opening Siri, just like "Ok Google" or "Hey Alexa"
On the one hand, like you I don't really care for voice commands in a remote. In the other, I really liked (and miss now that I have an Amazon firestick device) the built in CEC control of TV volume, and also the headphone jack. I also liked that it had a bit more weight to it. It was easier to find in the covers/sheets of my bed when I would occasionally lose track of it.
The latest Roku remotes have CEC control for power and volume. When my last Roku remote started flaking out, that was what prompted me to upgrade it despite the built in microphone.
Yep, that's the remote I had that I miss. I updated an old Roku I had with that remote (which we bought separately after the dogs chewed the prior remote up) to an Amazon device, and I miss those features.
I generally like the Roku experience better (a friend and I wrote some apps for it in the distant past), but we already had two Amazon sticks in the house, and we happened to go into an Amazon store recently to see what it was like, and the fire stick was cheap enough to be an impulse buy to replace the aging Roku in my bedroom. Not having HBO Max on Roku at the time played into that. I wonder how much that cost Roku.
The harder they push a feature, the more valuable the data they're stealing from you.
Google as an example. They push their "sensor fusion" location service EXTREMELY hard on Android. It will ask you to turn it on every time an app requests location and GPS hasn't locked. It's hard to not turn it on by accident. And once you hit yes, you never see another notification.
Well it turns out this "location service" provides some of the most valuable data Google ever receives. It's tied to their maps live traffic, "how busy is this place" features, location based advertising, wifi based mapping, accuracy of their IP->location maps.
It's creepy data core to their business and if too many people turned it off, it would seriously degrade their mass data collection.
Oh, and it's often given to law enforcement for dubiously legal "area" warrants where they simply say "give me all devices in this radius at this time". Where the radius can be hundreds of meters and the time can be hours.
Have things changed? Last time I checked, on stock Android you couldn't use the GPS without uploading your location to Google, and the whole shebang was wrapped up under the name "location services".
More than anything else, this particular piece of strong-arming makes me completely distrust stock Android handsets. It's shocking to me how casually the boundary of location privacy was violated, and it doesn't inspire confidence in any of the other privacy boundaries.
Clearly, users differ on this matter, so vendors should be able to choose their approach and let users vote with their wallets, not have everyone’s hand forced by Google.
> No, it's not. Most YouTube users have a different primary music app.
Exactly. If I setup my music profile to be Spotify, and I have a Spotify premium account, I expect my device to play music on Spotify. Why should it play on Youtube?
So it boils down to the fact that `YouTube Music != YouTube`. In that case you could be right about the user's expectation.
I for one don't use YT Music, but to use YT. Then again I don't use Pandora or Spotify as well, but do listen to music on YouTube (non-music). In my case, I'd expect the search to be executed in the context of YT, but that's what the defaults are there for. I'd choose YT (non-music) as default, if that's possible, or YT Music if i'd care.
Yes, somehow it does make sense that it selects the app which is set as a default, even if I would expect it to perform the query in the opened app.
Can it act upon "Open Song/Performer in Pandora/Spotify"? What's so hard about it? It all doesn't make sense to me.
I'd expect it not to query in YT Music but in the app which is currently open, which is simple YouTube. No, it feels like Google shouldn't have the right to expect YT Music to get launched if it is not set as the default app.
I'll take your pitchfork and brandish it at least ...
>>This could simply mean Google is requiring chips with hardware VP9 support
Shouldn't we expect reasonable backward-compatibility?
Your second point seems valid.
To be honest though ... youtube is the weak link in most of my set ups. Can't access ad-based youtube via Sonos (and no, I won't pay for premium because of how I feel about Google right now), scrapes here with Roku, etc.
Agree on the second one, but why tf should Google force them to support vp9? If they want to save some money there to stay competitive it's none of Google's business.
How? They have bargaining power with a monopoly share. But it really saves bandwidth and avoids patent fees to unrelated companies. What part is the abuse? Should they have to support mpeg1 too if someone wants to use an old chip at enormous bandwidth costs?
If it is about their DRM and not their freely licensed VP9 then I could see where it get into abuse if competitors can't use it. And I see where standing up the music service using youtube and messing up the system voice search is abusive.
It's good to see such optimism. But it's not necessarily true, see for example the Apple MFi program that requires custom chips provided only by Apple as way to tax & lock devices. In the TV/broadcast business Roku is in, it is unfortunately pretty common for content providers to mandate DRM X or Y, which is embedded deep into the main SoC, so you'd have only one or two possible sources.
If I'm watching a video on youtube and ask to play music, no I do NOT want at all youtube to handle that.
Youtube music is crap. Google has proven many times that they are totally unable to manage music. They should stop to try, because it is utterly embarrassing.
It's good enough for a lot of people. I pay for YouTube Premium, so I get YouTube music (formerly Google Play Music) included, and it works well enough that I'm not going to pay for a separate music app.
YouTube Premium is the only reason I stick with YouTube Music. I was a Google Play Music user, and that was fine. Getting both was a boon. I would say though that YouTube Music has been an overall downgrade.
Youtube music was better until several months ago, when they made some changes that ruined it for me. I haven't used Youtube for an extended session of watching music videos since those changes happened. Overall I have watched many fewer music videos since the change. This is on Youtube as implemented on Android TV.
I definitely prefer music videos over plain audio streams.
Google: Look, you can buy a device with less storage, and store all your MP3s in the cloud!
Me: This sounds terrible… but ok, let’s give it a go.
Google: Now that you have all your music in the cloud, wouldn’t it be nice if you paid us monthly for access to a lot more music?
Me: No.
Google: I see you switched to another app while watching a YouTube video. If you paid us extra, you could keep playing that in the background!
Me: First, why would I ever want that? It’s bad enough YouTube now keeps playing videos in a little thumbnail when I try to exit them. Second, why are you charging a monthly fee for a feature that ought to just come with your app?
Google: Hey, how about a free trial of our subscription service?
Me: No.
Google: Hey, how about we ask you every day if you want a free trial to our subscription service?
Me: Still no.
Google: Ok, I tell you what. How about we shut down Google Play Music, literally the only built in MP3 player, and then if you want to keep listening to music on your phone, you pay us monthly?
> Me: First, why would I ever want that? It’s bad enough YouTube now keeps playing videos in a little thumbnail when I try to exit them. Second, why are you charging a monthly fee for a feature that ought to just come with your app?
It makes sense - Google can't run YouTube without ads. Ad buyers, which have ads in video form, don't want to run ads when the user isn't looking at the content nor able to easily click on their link to convert them to a paying customer (plus google never gets paid as the user probably won't switch to the app just to click the ad). They either do this or ask advertisers to make ads specifically for audio-only streams (which still makes it hard to drive conversions), but then they'd have to charge advertisers for impressions which Google has very rarely done.
I can listen to YouTube on my PC with the YouTube window in the background. I can listen to YouTube on my phone without looking at my phone. Why would you pay extra to listen to YouTube with your screen off? It might not make sense from YouTube’s business perspective, but sadly that doesn’t mean charging for this “feature” makes sense either.
Doing something that makes sense from a business perspective, even if it doesn’t make sense from the consumer’s perspective, is the entire reason things are done at companies.
I think the message is, if a user clicks the mic button in the YouTube app, does it end up to the YouTube search or the system-wide Roku search? I'm sure Roku is exaggerating by specifically calling it a grab for music listener marketshare.
Roku does not support multitasking. I would not expect a voice search to close the app I'm using. If I want to switch apps to listen to music, I could hit the home button, then voice search and let music preferences launch the appropriate app.
> YouTube music is a different product from YouTube itself.
Sorta not really. On Roku, Google is deprecating all of the other means of playing content (e.g. Google Play Video) and funneling everyone to the Youtube App now for everything.
So if your default search engine in firefox is duckduckgo, but you're currently on google.com/maps reading reviews of a car service, firefox should use google for your next search request?
This is a bad comparison. There's only ever one voice search button on the remote, but there are multiple easy-to-click search bars when you're viewing maps.
IMO, even if I had Spotify on a Roku, I would be fine with this change. It's not difficult at all to press the home button and then the search button to signal you want to search outside of YouTube. A big chunk of YouTube's utility is that it has music videos.
Shouldn't it be up to Roku, not Google, to decide how their product experience works?
LGs TVs have a prominent omni search button. If you’re in the YT app and use the omnisearch it searches across all content services you have connected. It’s an amazingly useful feature and makes the TV experience actually feel integrated. First time I’ve been happy with a “smart” TV experience.
It would be up to Roku if Roku were willing to support Google with resources for developing their YT/YT TV apps.
They literally have no power beyond acting as a gatekeeper for their users. Their omnisearch (which was awful, at least the last time I used it) is a major part of their strategy to try and guide users towards content they profit from.
Given that it's Google's job to guard the UX of their Roku apps, I think it's 100% reasonable for them to tell Roku to add HW support for new features and not gimp search inside the YT app.
I could see this argument if a search for music would lead to a search for (say) a music video. But the idea, as I understand it, is that a request for music to be played would instead be routed through YouTube Music. Even if I'm in the YouTube app, I'm not going to want my music search to go through YouTube Music -- I'm not a subscriber.
I'm not sure exactly what qualifies a music search as a music search and not a search for a music video. The entire point of YT Music on a smart TV is that it's virtually indistinguishable from the default YT app.
it's more like asking "if I press ctrl+L in google.com/maps, should it focus the browser's search or the app's search" - in which applications currently can override ctrl+L to focus their own search bar.
I agree, it does seem to make sense... and this isn't just with YT, it also affects YT TV. On my Smart TV, with a Roku remote, I don't want to switch out of the current app (YTTV in my case).
> This is both what many users would expect (if I have an app open, voice search works within that app), and a pretty reasonable ask for any business (don't show competitor's offering when searching within my app).
Only if I search using the in-app search feature do I expect it to be restricted to only that app.
If I'm watching a YouTube video and ask my device to play music, I expect Spotify to open as that's what I use and pay for.
The platform should prioritize the user, not the app developers.
No. If I'm in YouTube I want Tidal to play music, not their janky YTM setup that can't give me quality audio even if I pick the video myself. At least make it a toggle for users to manage themselves vs hard coding it into the app.
Even if it is what most users would expect (I don't agree it is), that is a product decision that should be entirely under Roku's control. Google's threat to pull YouTube from their device is an anti-competitive move.
If customers do want either behavior, they should be advocating to Roku for it. Google has no place setting a requirement here.
I don't understand why Google, who is apparently competing with Roku with Chromecast, would try to "help" Roku fix a worse user experience? My Spidey sense tells me there's more to it than just trying to fix the Roku UX.
If they're talking YouTube TV specifically (the terminology doesn't make much distinction between YouTube and YTTV, although the headline makes it seem like 'YouTube' always means YTTV in this case) they also might be requiring a new DRM chip for level 1 widevine.
> This could simply mean Google is requiring chips with hardware VP9 support
Almost definitely what they want but that isn't benign. There's very little user benefit here (lower bandwidth costs IF you're on a metered connection which is a tiny % of people) and lots of benefit to google/youtube (lower bandwidth!) and lots of extra cost to roku (these chips will cost more, at least in the short term). So google is basically forcing Roku to spend money to save google money.
That said, VP9 isn't just a good idea for Google. It's a good idea for everyone doing video delivery. Google and everyone else shouldn't be strong-arming Roku into deploying VP9-capable hardware they should be finding ways to help. Buy a billion dollars worth of VP9-capable chips for the next Chromecast on the condition that they cost no more than 10% more than H264-chips and the manufacturer agrees to sell to anyone at that price... or... something.
> Roku alleges Google has asked it to favor YouTube music results from voice commands made on the Roku remote while the YouTube app is open, even if the user's music preference is set to default to another music app, like Pandora
This is what my Amazon Echo Show is doing when Youtube is open on it, and I find it rather logical and convenient. That lets me search on youtube with my voice.
It's probably not the best idea to be commenting on antitrust allegations against your employer unless you want your comment to be read out loud in a deposition.
This is exactly what the cable co's want. F em. I'll either pay for the services or pirate the content. I will never let the cable co's "win". They are terrible, horrible, corrupt, money grubbing soulless corporations who have screwed over the masses for long enough.
Hawks have great eyesight, and are effective predators. It's not a good metaphor for the people who punish anticompetitive behavior. Maybe anti-trust sloths?
> Roku alleges Google has asked it to favor YouTube music results from voice commands made on the Roku remote while the YouTube app is open, even if the user's music preference is set to default to another music app, like Pandora.
This seems reasonable to me - it would be super frustrating if I'm in YouTube, hit search, and Pandora pops up. Like what's the point of that?
I'm just about sick of YouTube and YouTube TV not playing well with whatever device I've decided on. First it was YouTube and the Firestick, now it's YouTube TV and Roku.
Frankly, how did Google end up with a good TV service? I'd rather not be relying on Google for TV streaming.
First, you can play YouTube without any problem on Firestick, they made the change 2 years ago. Second, you should give the new Chromecast device a try, it's far much better than Roku. Third, Google is asking Roku to support VP9, which is a much superior video coding format, I don't see any issue with this ask.
- Google and consumers, who can enjoy better compression and lower bandwidth
- Consumers, who can enjoy a much more mainstream video encoding format in not just YT but pretty much every app.
Google doesn't want to write off 45% of the set-top market right away, but at the same time it's 100% in the right to demand Roku support modern royalty-free codecs going forward.
Roku fights pretty much everybody nowadays and as someone who's been dealing with full-screen ads and missing apps on my $1000 TV, I have no sympathy for Roku whining about needing to support a modern codec.
A goat farmer in rural Afghanistan browsing YouTube on his 2003 XP box has a legitimate excuse - Roku does not, especially going forward.
There is a balance between keeping the burden of backwards compatibility forever and making efforts to keep things accessible to those without new hardware.
Google has invested a decent amount of money in developing its Roku app. Roku is now trying to hold users hostage so that Google continues to pour resources into supporting inferior technologies.
We will see how this ends - I think if Google blocked YT/YT TV on Roku, it would annihilate Roku and barely scratch Google.
No thanks. I'll stick with a computer running a web browser connected to the TV and a wireless keyboard because I'm sick of having to give a shit which devices are supported by which services.
> Frankly, how did Google end up with a good TV service?
Just peeling off this part of your comment. It seems like it would have been the natural course of events after they had to develop IPTV services for Google Fiber customers.
I have always used a Roku for TV streaming, but things like this are making it more difficult.
Something similar happened with Amazon and the Twitch app for Roku. Amazon obviously wants you to use a Fire product to access Twitch, and they completely removed support for the Twitch app for Roku. Even the unofficial Twitch app shut down shortly after this, leaving no reasonable way to access Twitch content from a Roku.
If the Youtube app and available alternatives get removed as well, I'll basically be forced into another device since Twitch and Youtube offer a large percentage of the content I watch.
I can only hope that some future legislation or anti-trust lawsuit makes it more difficult for these companies to force you into buying their specific hardware to access these services, but I am not hopeful.
Twitch on Roku is really frustrating. The unofficial app worked perfectly for me and then the dev faced legal action from Amazon. One thing I have found is that using the "Roku Stream Tester" dev tool you can push a twitch stream to your TV to play it.
This is a giant pain in the ass obviously but it does work if you just want to use it occasionally. The Stream Tester works through a REST API so theoretically someone could write a browser plugin or app to automate all of this.
edit: a fun side affect of this is that the stream plays better than it ever did in the official twitch app or even on my Non-4k fire TV. 60fps is really smooth whereas on the FireTV or the Twitch app for Roku it would hitch and stutter occasionally
Roku is not a completely innocent content portal. Roku notably sells buttons on its remotes tied to services you may not even use. A consumer friendly remote would have configurable buttons, so they’re not against favoriting certain apps over others. Within Roku itself you’ll get sidebar ads for certain video services. Roku is happy to prioritize your app but only if you pay for it.
Interestingly, there are 3rd-party remotes that contain different "suggested" channels. I've got one with six of those buttons, which is actually kinda nice because 5/6 are channels I use.
I wouldn't be surprised if there exist programmable remotes that allow custom launchers, at least for the set of all channels Roku has ever had on their own buttons (they must be giving each app they put on there a unique, or at least rarely-recycled, code, since remotes with different promoted channels on them do work as expected on Rokus other than the one they came with). Though, yes, it would be nice if Roku let the user program those buttons on stock remotes.
If this is true, could you imagine if Google tried to pull this on Apple? Making YouTube music show up when using the siri remote. These allegations are serious, and if Roku isn't lying it's straight up crazy.
Apple would laugh and tell Google to fuck off, right before removing every app for iOS that even contacts any Google service. They're about the only company out there with the clout and cash to give Google the finger without having to go to the courts (legal and/or public opinion) to do it.
Apple does no such thing in case of search in Safari, so why are you making this stuff up?
Not too mention Apple puts the same kind of requirements on developers and apps on their own tvOS platform - including UX behaviours and format support.
I guess this is a good a place as any to say that the video quality on youtubeTV is atrocious. I was shocked when I watch a live NFL game on the Roku amazon prime app. Also ytTV has just about double in price in less than 3 years.
Roku has some issues too. Namely, it autodownloads a new random app about once a week so Im constant deleting apps from my home page.
Lastly, this sounds a lot like, "Comcast Cale users might lose the ESPN Chanel ...". I'm pretty sick of all these xorporations.
The quality is really bad. Terrible compression with blocky artifacts and poor black levels. My pirate IPTV service has significantly better image quality.
> Roku has some issues too. Namely, it autodownloads a new random app about once a week so Im constant deleting apps from my home page.
WTF? New random apps about once a week? I've never seen this. Have multiple Roku boxes and a couple TVs with integrated Roku. Using them for years. Maybe there's some kind of "suggest new channels to me" checkbox you've got checked in account preferences?
I am in no way on Google's side on this but I am taking this with a grain of salt since I am sure that Roku is quite aware of the leverage this allegation could bring against Google with the on going anti-trust suite that is being brought against them.
What percentage does Roku take? I wasn't aware that they were in the same rent-seeking game as the other app stores. They do talk about their "Platform Revenue," but it seems that's mostly generated from ads.
I've never used Roku voice commands. Is it unambiguous that a command is for music? Or "Stevie Wonder interview" and "Stevie Wonder Superstition" be interchangeable, with the first going to a Youtube vid and the second playing in Pandora?
Two advertising companies fighting over peanuts. I don't support either party here. Roku is becoming more useless over time and that has nothing to do with Google.
It'd be nice if you mentioned why when you downvote. This really is 2 advertisers fighting over which one gets your search and where it goes - and both claim they are right and doing it for their users. Roku has made it pretty clear that they want to advertise to you but they could care less to make something that works and does more than spy on you and deliver ads. My next device won't be from Roku or Google.
Welp, I specifically bought a Roku device a few months ago just to use YouTube.
I ran into major issues using Fire TV's YouTube app. The app would fail to get past the initial loading screen and hang forever. It would typically require 2-3 device restarts to work again, and even then it would only work temporarily. I tried completely resetting my Fire TV, relogging in, etc but never managed to get it to work properly). YouTube is the only app I've had issues with on Fire TV.
Google also discontinued YouTube's great web browser experience, which was almost identical to the app, that you could load in Fire TV's web browser.
I did the same thing, youtube recently dropped support for the older AppleTV and I had no interest in shelling out extra money for 4k or the option to play games i'm never going to play.
This TV set-top box arms race is so stupid. The smart TV apps stopped working so I got an AppleTV. That stopped working so I got a Roku. When that stops working I guess i'll just go the full PC route with a NUC and a nice interface like Kodi.
> Welp, I specifically bought a Roku device a few months ago just to use YouTube.
We have Rokus (a 4K Ultra in the living room and a TCL Roku TV in the bedroom), as well as a 4K Chromecast, and until we got the Roku Ultra we had a Nvidia Shield TV. We keep more than one type of device specifically because it is inevitable that a provider (Roku, Amazon, Google) will drop a service we enjoy. This actually happened with the Shield which is why we replaced it with a Roku; it was no longer working with Emby at all, and it was flaking out on certain other services. It could have been just a case of bad hardware but it was flawless for two years straight until one by one services stopped working on it.
This is also why I have a Mac, a couple of Windows PCs, a Linux workstation, and a BSD laptop. When one of the above can't do something, one of the others can.
Mine was the first gen Shield, and I never could figure out why it stopped working properly with my (self hosted, local network) Emby server. Even after a factory reset and trying a different Google account it never worked right. No issues whatsoever with the various Roku devices in our house and at my mom's and SIL's houses.
> Roku alleges Google has asked it to favor YouTube music results from voice commands made on the Roku remote while the YouTube app is open, even if the user's music preference is set to default to another music app, like Pandora.
How else do you use voice search for a music video on Youtube? If I open youtube and do a voice search. I'm expecting the search to be constrained to the app.
It sounds to me like they want the YouTube Music app to open when you search for a song on the YouTube app. Those are two entirely different apps, with different content, experiences, etc. It just so happens that Google named them the same, probably so they could more easily force integrations like this.
As said in the sibling comment, Google has combined all of their TV apps besides YTTV into the YouTube app. Music/Movies/Regular videos are all via that app. OP is saying "if i'm in an app, I want voice search to focus that app's search bar".
This sounds like the user is in Youtube, then says 'Play some Beyonce'. In this scenario, I'd expect some Lemonade from my default music app, not Youtube...
Either the journalist has interpreted Roku's claims incorrectly, or Roku is spreading falsehoods.
It's a very common practice for streaming services to make crazy demands about the devices they're on.
Roku[1], Google TV[2] and Firesticks[3] all have Netflix buttons on the remote not because they wanted them there, but because Netflix forces them to with the threat that they will blacklist their device.
And inevitably, all devices comply because they know they won't be able to sell the product without Netflix support.
I agree that everybody involved is evil but we're still allowed to have opinions about that. Roku's evil and Google's evil don't necessarily cancel out.
If it was “you must have a Netflix button and no others” I could see the argument but the demand for a particular user experience isn’t anticompetitive automatically.
Company with leverage others might not have using that leverage isn’t something we vilify in general.
If you're willfully ignorant of the situation, then sure. Otherwise, using leverage to favor your own product over competitors despite user preference is textbook anti-competitive behavior, almost comically so: Not only does it unfairly disadvantage competitors, but it also robs consumers of choice (by ignoring their preferences).
I would love to see one of the meetings that lead to absurdly unethical and borderline/outright illegal decisions like this; did anyone bother to bring it up? Did the person that brought it up get the silent treatment? Were they no longer invited to lunch? Does everyone just understand that those topics are off limits? Or do these people seriously not care because they know they can get away with it?
No, it really isn't. Look, I agree with you -- a company throwing their weight around feels super shitty. But leveraging your advantages is basically just business.
Netflix paying Roku to add their button on remotes wouldn't be anti-competitive in the same way that buying exclusive ad space isn't. And therefore Netflix realizing that they bring so much value to the Roku ecosystem that they can get their button without actually having to pay is good business. Like I hate it. But it's true.
It's like Microsoft sponsoring the NFL and so they have to use Surface tablets. That means they don't have Apple, Samsung, Lenovo, and other competitors tablets. Is that anti-competitive? If so, then every business out there must be anti-competitive. Buying ads to get yourself on a higher position in search results, buying ads on TV during primetime slots, and any behavior that makes you look better than your competitors would also be anti-competitive.
How so? It is the same thing as advertising. Roku is benefiting greatly from Netflix being on their platform as well. Netflix could ditch Roku and say they only support X other devices. But they both need each other and so they agree to something that makes sense for both parties.
Anyway it is pointless, because Roku actually charges companies to put a button on their remote[1]. They supposedly charge $1 for the button per customer.
> It's like Microsoft sponsoring the NFL and so they have to use Surface tablets. That means they don't have Apple, Samsung, Lenovo, and other competitors tablets. Is that anti-competitive?
That's not the same thing at all. Microsoft paid money to the NFL so they use the tablets, presumably more than the other bidders. That's what competition looks like.
A better example would be if Microsoft forced the NFL to use their tablets by threatening to invalidate all of the Windows and Office licenses in their organization. Would you say that's "leverage" or anti-competitive behavior?
Imagine if Samsung offered $400m to the NFL so they use Samsung computers. Microsoft's "leverage" could prevent the NFL from taking that offer, and there's nothing Samsung can do about it. That's anti-competitive behavior: one company unfairly disadvantaging competitors to the detriment of the customer (NFL in this case, which wouldn't get the $400m)
You can't because you're a boring person. If you were famous or had a large following on, say, social media, then Microsoft might consider reaching out and paying you for a sponsorship.
That's not a reasonable example at all. Netflix doesn't sell Roku another product like in your example with Microsoft, there's only one product at play here. Netflix and Roku both benefit from this relationship. Roku benefits from selling more Roku's, and Netflix benefits from people having a place to watch their content. Netflix in this case has leverage because they know their content is more important to people than other content so maybe they can turn that into a button. Netflix's user base is also something that they get to negotiate with since more users = more money for Roku, so it really isn't any different from being the highest bidder.
As for the Samsung example, I completely disagree. If it was a situation like that Microsoft would have paid enough money to be an exclusive provider. You can't count that $400 million as lost without counting how much Microsoft paid them for the exclusivity. If the NFL was just using a bunch of different products then the value of the advertising to Microsoft is reduced, and so they would pay less for it or not participate at all, which they have every right to do.
Most importantly, Roku doesn't have a single button on their remote, they have multiple. Roku's charges companies to put a button on their remote, it's estimated to be $1 per customer. Netflix is likely paying to be on the remote. But even if Netflix wasn't paying or was paying less it's clearly leverage and not anti-competitive behavior because Netflix isn't forcing Roku to only have Netflix on their remote or refuse to do business with them.
The thing is that you can always come up with an example for something being anti-competitive. Any company that advertises is inherently anti-competitive because they can throw around their money to force out their competition. As a company I could have a more expensive and inferior product but because I have so much money I can outbid my competitors to get the advertising slot and will outsell my competitors. This isn't anti-competitive behavior in the common understanding of it, and certainly not in the legal sense.
> This isn't anti-competitive behavior in the common understanding of it, and certainly not in the legal sense
That's the same thing I'm saying, that advertising is not anti-competitive. You brought up the NFL example, and I replied by saying that's a bad example because it's just advertising, and advertising is not anti-competitive behavior.
> As for the Samsung example, I completely disagree. If it was a situation like that Microsoft would have paid enough money to be an exclusive provider. You can't count that $400 million as lost without counting how much Microsoft paid them for the exclusivity. If the NFL was just using a bunch of different products then the value of the advertising to Microsoft is reduced, and so they would pay less for it or not participate at all, which they have every right to do.
There I think you may have misread/misinterpreted the last sentence in my comment. I was saying that Microsoft forcing the NFL to use Surface tablets by threatening to cut off their access to Windows/Office if they don't is anti-competitive, because it means Microsoft does not have to get into a bidding war with the competition (like Samsung), and at the same time it means Samsung was unfairly robbed of a business opportunity by a competitor.
I never said that the actual Surface deal Microsoft struck with the NFL (in real life, not in analogy land) was anti-competitive.
Also, I don't see what the Roku/Netflix button thing has to do with this thread, because the OP is about Google threatening to pull Youtube TV from Roku unless Roku gives them preferential treatment in their software (among other demands).
I think the difference here is that Netflix does not make the devices themselves, so they are an equal outside force on the market of smart tv devices. Google on the other hand is using it's YouTube product to influence things on the device side, where they have Chromecast as direct competitor.
Thing is Google are so internally disfuntional it seems unlikely that that's the actual aim here.
Thi is the same Google that still can't get their own gaming streaming service working on their own TV OS. And you think YouTube are trying to attack other manufacturers to boost sales of a $50 dongle with no margin?
Tbh I think it's more likely that nobody on the Chromecast team has ever met anyone from the YouTube team. Many things at Google would work better if they did.
Might the difference here be that Netflix doesn't have a competing product?
Google could be incentivized to put onerous requirements on Roku which result in a worse user experience, price increases, or additional development time. That would benefit Chromecast.
> And inevitably, all devices comply because they know they won't be able to sell the product without Netflix support.
That sounds pretty anti-competitive to me. So that would not be a "falsehood". Just because lots of companies are making anti-competitive demands, does not invalidate the point.
This isn't that big of a deal to me because I could still use the YouTube TV app from my iPhone and then just "cast" it to the Roku which is acting as a "cast client".
And even then, that's only at my friend's house where their TV is too old to have built in "smart TV / cast to me" functionality.
Roku is dope but this might not be as big of a deal as it seems.
Nothing of value loss, the youtube app on Roku is very glitchy and the entire ecosystem of Roku is very ad supported and user hostile. I would expect voice commands within the youtube app to stay within youtube.
I am 50/50 on youtube music/youtube, but youtube app includes music so it's a general hard to decipher request but genereally if I want to voice search while I'm in youtube, I want it to stay in youtube.
Roku makes insane demands of its video providers. So does every large platform company. Google is awful too, but this is like the pot calling the kettle black.
They make all their money as being a service provider. That’s why they require content providers to use their platform and to rev share subscription and purchases made on the Roku platform. They aren’t a hardware company.
This kind of tactic works. I have 3 rokus in a box collecting dust and two brand new Fire sticks that replaced them. I didn't want to do this but 85% of my streaming time is spent on Twitch.tv and I wasn't able to use my Roku's to stream it anymore.
It depends on how you define interesting content of course. For me that is "Tactical or strategic games with a significant enough RNG component to be classified as 'Controlling the Chaos' (think Poker, not Chess) and which have a lively leaderboard. I enjoy watching the competition for Rank #1 and I enjoy competing to see how high I can get. My current favorite game is Team Fight Tactics (Riot Games the maker of league of legends auto battler). You can find the leaderboards here:
https://lolchess.gg/leaderboards?hl=en-US
And my all time highest rank achieved was #540/1,250,000 in North America (not bad at all for an executive and father of a toddler). Pretty much all of the guys competing for rank #1 will also be streamers so finding content is as easy as googling their name from the leaderboard + twitch.
If thats not your cup of tea, probably the best way would be to choose twitch's browse option and just watch the most popular streamers in each game for a few minutes to see if you are into their content. Some are informative, some are looking to appeal to 13 year olds, some are chasing some goal, etc.
I currently have YouTube TV I access via my Apple TV. The nice thing about internet cable is how quickly you can switch providers. If Google or Apple get into a tiff or whatever then I can switch to Fubo and not miss a beat. Many people have mentioned Fubo as an alternative and frankly it looks pretty good. The biggest reason I watch TV is for sports. Fubo and YouTube TV seem similarly matched in that regard. As consumers we should all be glad we have choices.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] thread> Roku says Google has threatened to require Roku to use certain chip sets or memory cards that would force Roku to increase the price of its hardware product, which competes directly with Google's Chromecast.
That's just straight evil - overriding user preferences to favor your own products... Some growth PM and/or business head is trying way too hard to hit their OKRs. I'd be surprised if Google could defend this in court.
That's the behavior I would expect from a full screen app. ie, if I issue a command in a full screen app for the command to be interpreted in the context of that app.
"When searching within an app, favor results from that app" vs "When searching within an app always favor my default"
vs
>"When searching within an app, favor results from a related app"
There is a big difference between these two things. "Youtube" is not the same as "Youtube Music" in the same way that "Xbox" is not the same as "Xbox Live".
As p49k explained it - if you were trying to send an email from YouTube would you expect Gmail to come up or your preferred email app? What if Gmail was renamed to "Youtube Mail"? Would that change your expected behavior?
Sending an email is an explicit intent - open whatever app I use to send emails.
Searching is an open query - find the most relevant results. What results are most relevant is subjective, hence why you would give the user a choice for what results to favor.
The separation between Youtube and Youtube Music is a technical minutia, they're both Youtube just different apps. If you want a technical solution, Roku should probably implement a search API such that doing a voice search would let the Roku query whatever app is currently running for results. Then any app can provide more relevant, context aware results.
Going from watching videos to playing music is a different interaction than doing voice search.
>Sending an email is an explicit intent - open whatever app I use to send emails.
Using a global voice commands (not search) has explicit behavior - use whatever app I have set to default for the functionality I am requesting. "Play Stairway to Heaven" should use my default music app. Note that "voice commands" is different from "voice search" in this context and is the alleged problem.
>Searching is an open query - find the most relevant results.
If I use Spotify as my default music app it is because I trust their music search more than YouTube Music. Otherwise YouTube Music would be my default music app.
There is also a massive contextual difference between a global Voice Search (using the Voice search icon on the Roku remote: it searches Roku) and using the Speech to Text option that may appear when already searching within a search field (which uses the search field of the app itself, in this case: Youtube)
>The separation between Youtube and Youtube Music is a technical minutia, they're both Youtube just different apps.
Google deciding there is a difference between the two means that there is a difference between the two for both a marketing perspective and whatever minor technical differences there are. If there were no differences there would not be a YouTube Music app and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous.
Do I want the current app I'm using to influence the result of a voice command or not.
Unfortunately the line between voice commands and voice search is often fuzzy. Lines like this: > Roku alleges Google has asked it to favor YouTube music results from voice commands made on the Roku remote while the YouTube app is open make it unclear if it's talking about a search or a command.
Ideally Roku would implement a more fine grained API where a user can set permissions/preferences on an app by app basis, similar to Android and iOS permissions APIs and especially how notifications are handled.
Either way if Roku's allegations definitely don't paint Google in a good light here. It just seems like there could be more to this story.
If their app is open and full screen, search within the app first.
Similarly, if you’re watching a video on YouTube and want to search for a cat video, sure, the voice command should search in YouTube. But if you want to listen to music and have Spotify set as your default music app, it shouldn’t send the request to YouTube Music just because YouTube is open.
What the person above you originally said.
Thank you so much!
I think this behavior is what I would expect (search within open app first) and when it’s not present, it’s frustrating.
Annoying. It relates to the lack of discoverability in voice interfaces, there may be an incantation to get the behaviouyr I want but there's no way within the interface that such methods is revealed.
Talk about corporate-imposed audism.
> Roku says Google has threatened to require Roku to use certain chip sets or memory cards that would force Roku to increase the price of its hardware product, which competes directly with Google's Chromecast.
This could simply mean Google is requiring chips with hardware VP9 support
> Roku alleges Google has asked it to favor YouTube music results from voice commands made on the Roku remote while the YouTube app is open, even if the user's music preference is set to default to another music app, like Pandora.
This is both what many users would expect (if I have an app open, voice search works within that app), and a pretty reasonable ask for any business (don't show competitor's offering when searching within my app).
"[...] favor YouTube music results from voice commands made on the Roku remote while the YouTube app is open"
Key word is "favor"
Q. "Play Diamonds by Rihanna"
A1. "Playing Diamonds by Rihanna from Youtube Music"
A2. "Playing Diamonds by Rihanna from Spotify"
Either A1 or A2 will happen, but not both. There can be only one.
But even if you say play, it could still ask you where from and/or confirm it got the right thing. Roku != Amazon Echo.
No, it's not. Most YouTube users have a different primary music app.
Google is trying to artificially force a marriage of YouTube and YouTube Music because they have utterly failed to do it in the product experience and user base themselves.
If I'm watching a random YouTube video and then want to switch to music, I expect my music app to come up, not YouTube Music.
That being said, f*k Roku and their voice remote. They've been pushing that crap hard. Showing prompts on screen for upwards of 30 seconds to push the Mic button. I don't want my remote to have a microphone or be able to listen to me.
I replaced my Roku remote last month because the one I had started having connectivity issues and missing clicks all of the sudden. The first thing I did with the new remote was pop it open and rip the microphone off the PCB with a pair of pliers.
I really don't want an Android TV or Fire TV, and I'm not really keen on Apple TV either but Roku is making it really difficult to stick with them.
Monopolists can often have batter products as well as charging monopolistic pricing.
I guess the question is, who is the developer in this case? The Youtube App is running on the Roku Platform accessing the Google Platform. Both Roku and Google are acting in both roles.
The Roku Voice Search is weird, it's surfaced via a button alongside local media controls which are contextual but Roku appears to want their Search to be analogous to Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant as a platform level tool. The volume, and mute keys are the only other buttons that behave at a platform level. The Roku Home button is contextual.
As a user of a STB, if I search (voice or otherwise) I expect it to be contextualized. If I'm in an App then the search should be localized, if I'm at the home screen then I expect it to be global.
Which begs the question: who, is _the_ developer? I think the argument can be convincingly made that both Roku and Google are “the” developer. It seems to be the fundamental disagreement underlying every modern accusation of antitrust.
Trying to think of analogies for this “dual developer” framework from the analog world and it’s difficult to come up with one that isn’t in a heavily regulated industry. Airplane & engine manufacturers maybe? Certainly no one would say Rolls Royce is the “manufacturer” of a plane but I would expect they still exercise some degree of control over what plane manufacturers can change and do to the engine. If planes with Rolls Royce engines started falling out of the sky it would be bad for business regardless of whether it was Boeing or Airbus’s doing. But the same can also be said for Boeing and Airbus. Probably more so.
Regardless, I worry the most recent claims of antitrust violation aren’t about consumer protection (as antitrust was intended) so much as they’re about consumer control.
Your airplane engine analogy doesn't really work; Roku doesn't want to modify the YouTube app; this is purely Roku's own global search feature. Yes, it will aggregate results from the YT app, but Roku doesn't want to modify that data source. Further, the Rolls->Boeing/Airbus relationship is more like a vendor->purchaser arrangement, which is nothing like the Roku->Google relationship here.
What is naturally intuitive to me is to go to an app and anywhere in that app have a voice search specific for that app, as Google is requesting of Roku.
And after all this research, voice control is still primitive and limited, and its capabilities are impossible for a user to discover. If I want to search my E-mail for a message from a colleague about Project Abc, can I do this through voice control, or do I need to type into a search box? I could try voice control, and when it fails because it doesn't know what I want it to do (or it punts me to a generic web search), now I just wasted my time and feel silly for talking to a computer that doesn't understand me.
One that understands "Google, set a timer for 5 minutes" as well as "Siri, remind me to call X tomorrow" and "Alexa, start Y on the TV in the living room"
If you're using a fullscreen app on macOS and activate spotlight, do you expect it to only search that app, or do you expect it to behave like Spotlight always behaves and search the entire system?
Put another way, this depends entirely on how the OS and UI is set up.
Regardless of what you think is a better user experience, Roku has made a design decision and are sticking to it and aren't giving Google special treatment, so Google is threatening to take their ball and leave if they don't get what they want.
To make another analogy: Maybe Roku should ask Google to make the Chrome address/search bar only show Roku.com results if you’re already on their site.
Every other steaming device I’ve ever tried is riddled with ads, dark patterns, and slow slow SLOW performance.
I can understand the aversion to a $200 device just to watch some Internet TV but then I watch people making six figures pretend like a $50 Fire/Roku Stick is the best way to watch movies on their $2,000 LG OLED.
If I were buying a steaming device today I’d probably be evaluating the Apple TV against the Nvidia Shield.
Price being one thing but with how Apple recently demonstrated they can just take away all your movies with no recourse, I will pass
2. iTunes is part of Movies Anywhere just like all its competitors. Being “required” to purchase/rent movies through iTunes isn’t really ecosystem lock-in.
3. “Taking away your movies with no recourse” is not unique to Apple’s iTunes Movies service. This is a standard movie industry practice that can affect you regardless of provider. Using an iTunes competitor does not remove this flaw.
Apple offers a way to back up purchases. They never promised perpetual re-download ability. From their support site: “The only way to back up your purchased media is to download your purchases to your computer.”
I would guess that no other content store can promise anything better than that. Apple didn’t make the rules here, WB/Disney/Universal/Sony did.
I know I lose access on X, but how about on the other stores?
Also, how the heck does Movies Anywhere actually work? Say I buy a movie on iTunes, but then via Movies Anywhere watch it using the Fandango app on my TV.
Who pays for the bandwidth for that stream? Does Fandango just eat it, or behind the scenes does each company keep track of how much of their bandwidth was used for movies bought at each other company, and they periodically settle up for any imbalances?
Movies Anywhere doesn't exist outside of the US fwiw.
Personally I flat out don't trust Apple on content censorship, as I think the Apple TV UI is not very good.
This is an answer to the question I was about to ask. Except for a MacBook Air that I used to run Linux on (but is now gathering dust) and a Mac Mini that I currently run Linux on, I own no Apple devices. I hear great things about the Apple TV, but don't really care to buy into that overall ecosystem to the degree that I assume is necessary to get full use out of the ATV. It's bad enough that Google has its fingerprints on so much of what I have, and I'm actively trying to reduce that, not replace it with another corporate overlord.
Also, I know many will disagree, but...no headphone jack. I don't like bluetooth earphones.
There are directional buttons, trackpad swipes, and a classic iPod-like fast forward and rewind touch gesture. Mute button and TV power buttons now included.
You can also side load unofficial youtube apps, which are much better than the actual youtube app on the chromecast.
The LG OLED tv os was missing some services, like HBO, but it stutters less.
The only thing missing from all of these devices is a backlit remote. I don't know why they're against the concept.
I can understand "overpriced", but on the other hand, the apparently-not-out-of-date chromecast stutters? WTF.
I sold my Apple TV 4K and bought a Fire TV 4K and pocketed the difference. The Fire TV does have slightly more stupid ads on the home screen for shit like McDonald's but the Apple TV would gladly advertise me shit to buy on iTunes. Slightly more relevant ads maybe but still ads. Otherwise it does everything I did with the Apple TV plus works better with my Echos plus has Firefox for watching random vids on the web. Also the Fire TV doesn't suffer from the maddening Netflix bug that made the interface slow to a crawl if browsing for 5 minutes.
The new Apple TV just announced has a much better looking remote
The new remote looks alright. Knowing Apple it's probably still too thin and easily slipped through couch cushions.
I think that must be how you configure it? The too banner does not show that for me - it grabs the shows I e been watching from infuse tv and. Puts them there
This is kind of thread drift, but I really agree with this. I wish products would stop trying to get me to use some particular feature. First, they cram it onto every screen in the application. Then, they make it easy to accidentally invoke when you didn't want to. Then, they spam you with notifications saying "PLEASE DON'T YOU WANT THIS FEATURE?" Then, they silently enable it and make it opt-out. Product Managers, please just stop this madness. I don't want your feature. I don't care that your bonus is tied to its use. I already bought your product, so you already have my money. But if you keep trying to cram your feature down my throat, I'm not going to buy your company's next product. Give it a rest!
Does this happen to you after the first launch of the app after an update? I find it terribly annoying as well. I would rather see a "New Feature Tips" or something similar as an icon notification that I can choose to review or not. The forced balloons stealing focus absolutely needs to die in a fire.
Google itself is the worst offender in this. Turn off the Meet advertisement in Gmail for Android, and they literally pop open a giant comment box saying, "In 1000 words or less, please type in an excuse for why you disabled the giant Google Meet advertisement we plastered all over your Gmail accounts?"
I love voice search on Roku. Typing things in with a d-pad and on-screen keyboard is horrendous. I think it's very fast, and I like that it shows me all the ways what I'm searching for is available.
It sounds like they have been pushing too hard, but discovery of voice commands is hard. Pushing them is probably useful for some set of customers.
For example, I have an ATV. While watching something you can click the voice button and say something like 'what did he just say' and it will go back 30 seconds or so, turn on captions, replay the bit you missed, then turn captions back off. As a user how would one discover this amazingly useful feature? I didn't even know it existed until I happened to hear about it on a podcast.
I only expect it to be localized within the app I'm in when I'm in the search box for that app, in which case I'm not using voice search, I'm using voice recognition to fill in the contents of the search bar.
Outside the context of voice recognition for an input, to me clicking the voice button on my apple TV is opening Siri, just like "Ok Google" or "Hey Alexa"
In some not too distant Black Mirror future, that would cause the remote to no longer function.
I generally like the Roku experience better (a friend and I wrote some apps for it in the distant past), but we already had two Amazon sticks in the house, and we happened to go into an Amazon store recently to see what it was like, and the fire stick was cheap enough to be an impulse buy to replace the aging Roku in my bedroom. Not having HBO Max on Roku at the time played into that. I wonder how much that cost Roku.
Google as an example. They push their "sensor fusion" location service EXTREMELY hard on Android. It will ask you to turn it on every time an app requests location and GPS hasn't locked. It's hard to not turn it on by accident. And once you hit yes, you never see another notification.
Well it turns out this "location service" provides some of the most valuable data Google ever receives. It's tied to their maps live traffic, "how busy is this place" features, location based advertising, wifi based mapping, accuracy of their IP->location maps.
It's creepy data core to their business and if too many people turned it off, it would seriously degrade their mass data collection.
Oh, and it's often given to law enforcement for dubiously legal "area" warrants where they simply say "give me all devices in this radius at this time". Where the radius can be hundreds of meters and the time can be hours.
More than anything else, this particular piece of strong-arming makes me completely distrust stock Android handsets. It's shocking to me how casually the boundary of location privacy was violated, and it doesn't inspire confidence in any of the other privacy boundaries.
After warranty ends I flash Lineage and run location spoofing.
Users voted with their wallet and bought a Roku, then explicitly defined their preference in the settings.
Google then says fuck you, no.
Umm what? Why is it google's responsibility to ensure their youtube music video is linked to spotify's audio song listing?
Exactly. If I setup my music profile to be Spotify, and I have a Spotify premium account, I expect my device to play music on Spotify. Why should it play on Youtube?
I for one don't use YT Music, but to use YT. Then again I don't use Pandora or Spotify as well, but do listen to music on YouTube (non-music). In my case, I'd expect the search to be executed in the context of YT, but that's what the defaults are there for. I'd choose YT (non-music) as default, if that's possible, or YT Music if i'd care.
Yes, somehow it does make sense that it selects the app which is set as a default, even if I would expect it to perform the query in the opened app.
Can it act upon "Open Song/Performer in Pandora/Spotify"? What's so hard about it? It all doesn't make sense to me.
I'd expect it not to query in YT Music but in the app which is currently open, which is simple YouTube. No, it feels like Google shouldn't have the right to expect YT Music to get launched if it is not set as the default app.
>>This could simply mean Google is requiring chips with hardware VP9 support
Shouldn't we expect reasonable backward-compatibility?
Your second point seems valid.
To be honest though ... youtube is the weak link in most of my set ups. Can't access ad-based youtube via Sonos (and no, I won't pay for premium because of how I feel about Google right now), scrapes here with Roku, etc.
Google is slowly becoming obsolete in my house.
n=1
If it is about their DRM and not their freely licensed VP9 then I could see where it get into abuse if competitors can't use it. And I see where standing up the music service using youtube and messing up the system voice search is abusive.
Not when it’s not the current behavior, nor behavior present in any other application.
If I'm watching a video on youtube and ask to play music, no I do NOT want at all youtube to handle that.
Youtube music is crap. Google has proven many times that they are totally unable to manage music. They should stop to try, because it is utterly embarrassing.
It's good enough for a lot of people. I pay for YouTube Premium, so I get YouTube music (formerly Google Play Music) included, and it works well enough that I'm not going to pay for a separate music app.
I definitely prefer music videos over plain audio streams.
Me: This sounds terrible… but ok, let’s give it a go.
Google: Now that you have all your music in the cloud, wouldn’t it be nice if you paid us monthly for access to a lot more music?
Me: No.
Google: I see you switched to another app while watching a YouTube video. If you paid us extra, you could keep playing that in the background!
Me: First, why would I ever want that? It’s bad enough YouTube now keeps playing videos in a little thumbnail when I try to exit them. Second, why are you charging a monthly fee for a feature that ought to just come with your app?
Google: Hey, how about a free trial of our subscription service?
Me: No.
Google: Hey, how about we ask you every day if you want a free trial to our subscription service?
Me: Still no.
Google: Ok, I tell you what. How about we shut down Google Play Music, literally the only built in MP3 player, and then if you want to keep listening to music on your phone, you pay us monthly?
Me: Buys an iPhone.
It makes sense - Google can't run YouTube without ads. Ad buyers, which have ads in video form, don't want to run ads when the user isn't looking at the content nor able to easily click on their link to convert them to a paying customer (plus google never gets paid as the user probably won't switch to the app just to click the ad). They either do this or ask advertisers to make ads specifically for audio-only streams (which still makes it hard to drive conversions), but then they'd have to charge advertisers for impressions which Google has very rarely done.
This is not how Siri or the Google Assistant works on iOS, Android, or Apple TV.
If I said "search wikipedia for thing"
I'd expect to get wikipedia results back, not YouTube videos about wikipedia and thing
Sorta not really. On Roku, Google is deprecating all of the other means of playing content (e.g. Google Play Video) and funneling everyone to the Youtube App now for everything.
So if your default search engine in firefox is duckduckgo, but you're currently on google.com/maps reading reviews of a car service, firefox should use google for your next search request?
IMO, even if I had Spotify on a Roku, I would be fine with this change. It's not difficult at all to press the home button and then the search button to signal you want to search outside of YouTube. A big chunk of YouTube's utility is that it has music videos.
LGs TVs have a prominent omni search button. If you’re in the YT app and use the omnisearch it searches across all content services you have connected. It’s an amazingly useful feature and makes the TV experience actually feel integrated. First time I’ve been happy with a “smart” TV experience.
I’d say it’s a fair comparison.
They literally have no power beyond acting as a gatekeeper for their users. Their omnisearch (which was awful, at least the last time I used it) is a major part of their strategy to try and guide users towards content they profit from.
Given that it's Google's job to guard the UX of their Roku apps, I think it's 100% reasonable for them to tell Roku to add HW support for new features and not gimp search inside the YT app.
I could see this argument if a search for music would lead to a search for (say) a music video. But the idea, as I understand it, is that a request for music to be played would instead be routed through YouTube Music. Even if I'm in the YouTube app, I'm not going to want my music search to go through YouTube Music -- I'm not a subscriber.
Only if I search using the in-app search feature do I expect it to be restricted to only that app.
If I'm watching a YouTube video and ask my device to play music, I expect Spotify to open as that's what I use and pay for.
The platform should prioritize the user, not the app developers.
seems abusive coming from someone with an extremely dominant market position in one area.
> user preference set to another music app.
Entirely irrelevant.
Youtube Music is not Youtube. Its a rebranded music streaming service build to compete with Spotify and apple after the failure of google play.
Also is the Roku's device search. Which mean it can functionally search anywhere which is the entire point.
If I want or search across all apps, I should be able to go to the Roku home screen and search there .
If customers do want either behavior, they should be advocating to Roku for it. Google has no place setting a requirement here.
Almost definitely what they want but that isn't benign. There's very little user benefit here (lower bandwidth costs IF you're on a metered connection which is a tiny % of people) and lots of benefit to google/youtube (lower bandwidth!) and lots of extra cost to roku (these chips will cost more, at least in the short term). So google is basically forcing Roku to spend money to save google money.
That said, VP9 isn't just a good idea for Google. It's a good idea for everyone doing video delivery. Google and everyone else shouldn't be strong-arming Roku into deploying VP9-capable hardware they should be finding ways to help. Buy a billion dollars worth of VP9-capable chips for the next Chromecast on the condition that they cost no more than 10% more than H264-chips and the manufacturer agrees to sell to anyone at that price... or... something.
This is what my Amazon Echo Show is doing when Youtube is open on it, and I find it rather logical and convenient. That lets me search on youtube with my voice.
disc: Google employee
It's probably not the best idea to be commenting on antitrust allegations against your employer unless you want your comment to be read out loud in a deposition.
Apple also demands certain format support for their video streams to work (not to mention a browser).
Is Apple dropping support for older iMacs / MacBooks / iPhones also a threat to all the companies using them?
Seems like you get a lot of additional headaches after the initial joy of cord cutting wears off.
This seems reasonable to me - it would be super frustrating if I'm in YouTube, hit search, and Pandora pops up. Like what's the point of that?
Frankly, how did Google end up with a good TV service? I'd rather not be relying on Google for TV streaming.
What's the point of singling them out?
- Google, who doesn't have to pay royalties
- Google and consumers, who can enjoy better compression and lower bandwidth
- Consumers, who can enjoy a much more mainstream video encoding format in not just YT but pretty much every app.
Google doesn't want to write off 45% of the set-top market right away, but at the same time it's 100% in the right to demand Roku support modern royalty-free codecs going forward.
Roku fights pretty much everybody nowadays and as someone who's been dealing with full-screen ads and missing apps on my $1000 TV, I have no sympathy for Roku whining about needing to support a modern codec.
There is a balance between keeping the burden of backwards compatibility forever and making efforts to keep things accessible to those without new hardware.
Google has invested a decent amount of money in developing its Roku app. Roku is now trying to hold users hostage so that Google continues to pour resources into supporting inferior technologies.
We will see how this ends - I think if Google blocked YT/YT TV on Roku, it would annihilate Roku and barely scratch Google.
Just peeling off this part of your comment. It seems like it would have been the natural course of events after they had to develop IPTV services for Google Fiber customers.
The whole spat started because Amazon removed Chromecast devices from their retail platform.
Something similar happened with Amazon and the Twitch app for Roku. Amazon obviously wants you to use a Fire product to access Twitch, and they completely removed support for the Twitch app for Roku. Even the unofficial Twitch app shut down shortly after this, leaving no reasonable way to access Twitch content from a Roku.
If the Youtube app and available alternatives get removed as well, I'll basically be forced into another device since Twitch and Youtube offer a large percentage of the content I watch.
I can only hope that some future legislation or anti-trust lawsuit makes it more difficult for these companies to force you into buying their specific hardware to access these services, but I am not hopeful.
You can use this site to get the .m3u8 URL for the stream at whatever res you want: https://pwn.sh/tools/getstream.html
Then use this tool with your Roku in dev mode: http://devtools.web.roku.com/stream_tester/html/
This is a giant pain in the ass obviously but it does work if you just want to use it occasionally. The Stream Tester works through a REST API so theoretically someone could write a browser plugin or app to automate all of this.
edit: a fun side affect of this is that the stream plays better than it ever did in the official twitch app or even on my Non-4k fire TV. 60fps is really smooth whereas on the FireTV or the Twitch app for Roku it would hitch and stutter occasionally
But it does seem to be a baseless claim, we have no idea actually what was asked. I think it's a little too early to jump onboard any side.
I wouldn't be surprised if there exist programmable remotes that allow custom launchers, at least for the set of all channels Roku has ever had on their own buttons (they must be giving each app they put on there a unique, or at least rarely-recycled, code, since remotes with different promoted channels on them do work as expected on Rokus other than the one they came with). Though, yes, it would be nice if Roku let the user program those buttons on stock remotes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/technology/apple-google-s...
Only reason Google can't bully Apple is because Apple is too big.
Not too mention Apple puts the same kind of requirements on developers and apps on their own tvOS platform - including UX behaviours and format support.
They know Google needs Apple as much as Apple needs Google, and of course the opposite statement is the same.
Apple showed their teeth when Google tried these tricks with their Maps app. Google isn’t really in a position to make tough demands.
(But this article seems to have a lot more details)
Roku has some issues too. Namely, it autodownloads a new random app about once a week so Im constant deleting apps from my home page.
Lastly, this sounds a lot like, "Comcast Cale users might lose the ESPN Chanel ...". I'm pretty sick of all these xorporations.
WTF? New random apps about once a week? I've never seen this. Have multiple Roku boxes and a couple TVs with integrated Roku. Using them for years. Maybe there's some kind of "suggest new channels to me" checkbox you've got checked in account preferences?
Private tv channels are constantly under attack.
Get rid of the youtube app. It's low quality videos with ads when I use roku I use it for a better experience.
I ran into major issues using Fire TV's YouTube app. The app would fail to get past the initial loading screen and hang forever. It would typically require 2-3 device restarts to work again, and even then it would only work temporarily. I tried completely resetting my Fire TV, relogging in, etc but never managed to get it to work properly). YouTube is the only app I've had issues with on Fire TV.
Google also discontinued YouTube's great web browser experience, which was almost identical to the app, that you could load in Fire TV's web browser.
This TV set-top box arms race is so stupid. The smart TV apps stopped working so I got an AppleTV. That stopped working so I got a Roku. When that stops working I guess i'll just go the full PC route with a NUC and a nice interface like Kodi.
We have Rokus (a 4K Ultra in the living room and a TCL Roku TV in the bedroom), as well as a 4K Chromecast, and until we got the Roku Ultra we had a Nvidia Shield TV. We keep more than one type of device specifically because it is inevitable that a provider (Roku, Amazon, Google) will drop a service we enjoy. This actually happened with the Shield which is why we replaced it with a Roku; it was no longer working with Emby at all, and it was flaking out on certain other services. It could have been just a case of bad hardware but it was flawless for two years straight until one by one services stopped working on it.
This is also why I have a Mac, a couple of Windows PCs, a Linux workstation, and a BSD laptop. When one of the above can't do something, one of the others can.
How else do you use voice search for a music video on Youtube? If I open youtube and do a voice search. I'm expecting the search to be constrained to the app.
It's a very common practice for streaming services to make crazy demands about the devices they're on.
Roku[1], Google TV[2] and Firesticks[3] all have Netflix buttons on the remote not because they wanted them there, but because Netflix forces them to with the threat that they will blacklist their device.
And inevitably, all devices comply because they know they won't be able to sell the product without Netflix support.
[1] https://cigars.roku.com/v1/http%3A%2F%2Fimage.roku.com%2Fw%2...
[2] https://external-preview.redd.it/9itjeCYci2NPP7Vxr9onH_DFv7E...
[3] https://i.gadgets360cdn.com/large/amazon_fire_tv_stick_alexa...
That doesn't make it any less anti-competitive
Company with leverage others might not have using that leverage isn’t something we vilify in general.
I would love to see one of the meetings that lead to absurdly unethical and borderline/outright illegal decisions like this; did anyone bother to bring it up? Did the person that brought it up get the silent treatment? Were they no longer invited to lunch? Does everyone just understand that those topics are off limits? Or do these people seriously not care because they know they can get away with it?
Netflix paying Roku to add their button on remotes wouldn't be anti-competitive in the same way that buying exclusive ad space isn't. And therefore Netflix realizing that they bring so much value to the Roku ecosystem that they can get their button without actually having to pay is good business. Like I hate it. But it's true.
Anyway it is pointless, because Roku actually charges companies to put a button on their remote[1]. They supposedly charge $1 for the button per customer.
https://mashable.com/article/roku-button-home-screen-adverti...
Yes.
A better example would be if Microsoft forced the NFL to use their tablets by threatening to invalidate all of the Windows and Office licenses in their organization. Would you say that's "leverage" or anti-competitive behavior?
Imagine if Samsung offered $400m to the NFL so they use Samsung computers. Microsoft's "leverage" could prevent the NFL from taking that offer, and there's nothing Samsung can do about it. That's anti-competitive behavior: one company unfairly disadvantaging competitors to the detriment of the customer (NFL in this case, which wouldn't get the $400m)
How do I, as another consumer of Microsoft products, get in on this "get paid to use Microsoft products" deal?
Oh right, I can't. Because it's not a competition. It's an anti competition.
Although in reality they probably wouldn't do that, to avoid an embarrassing Alicia Keys type situation https://www.cnet.com/news/blackberrys-alicia-keys-tweets-fro...
As for the Samsung example, I completely disagree. If it was a situation like that Microsoft would have paid enough money to be an exclusive provider. You can't count that $400 million as lost without counting how much Microsoft paid them for the exclusivity. If the NFL was just using a bunch of different products then the value of the advertising to Microsoft is reduced, and so they would pay less for it or not participate at all, which they have every right to do.
Most importantly, Roku doesn't have a single button on their remote, they have multiple. Roku's charges companies to put a button on their remote, it's estimated to be $1 per customer. Netflix is likely paying to be on the remote. But even if Netflix wasn't paying or was paying less it's clearly leverage and not anti-competitive behavior because Netflix isn't forcing Roku to only have Netflix on their remote or refuse to do business with them.
The thing is that you can always come up with an example for something being anti-competitive. Any company that advertises is inherently anti-competitive because they can throw around their money to force out their competition. As a company I could have a more expensive and inferior product but because I have so much money I can outbid my competitors to get the advertising slot and will outsell my competitors. This isn't anti-competitive behavior in the common understanding of it, and certainly not in the legal sense.
> This isn't anti-competitive behavior in the common understanding of it, and certainly not in the legal sense
That's the same thing I'm saying, that advertising is not anti-competitive. You brought up the NFL example, and I replied by saying that's a bad example because it's just advertising, and advertising is not anti-competitive behavior.
> As for the Samsung example, I completely disagree. If it was a situation like that Microsoft would have paid enough money to be an exclusive provider. You can't count that $400 million as lost without counting how much Microsoft paid them for the exclusivity. If the NFL was just using a bunch of different products then the value of the advertising to Microsoft is reduced, and so they would pay less for it or not participate at all, which they have every right to do.
There I think you may have misread/misinterpreted the last sentence in my comment. I was saying that Microsoft forcing the NFL to use Surface tablets by threatening to cut off their access to Windows/Office if they don't is anti-competitive, because it means Microsoft does not have to get into a bidding war with the competition (like Samsung), and at the same time it means Samsung was unfairly robbed of a business opportunity by a competitor.
I never said that the actual Surface deal Microsoft struck with the NFL (in real life, not in analogy land) was anti-competitive.
Also, I don't see what the Roku/Netflix button thing has to do with this thread, because the OP is about Google threatening to pull Youtube TV from Roku unless Roku gives them preferential treatment in their software (among other demands).
Thi is the same Google that still can't get their own gaming streaming service working on their own TV OS. And you think YouTube are trying to attack other manufacturers to boost sales of a $50 dongle with no margin?
Tbh I think it's more likely that nobody on the Chromecast team has ever met anyone from the YouTube team. Many things at Google would work better if they did.
Google could be incentivized to put onerous requirements on Roku which result in a worse user experience, price increases, or additional development time. That would benefit Chromecast.
That sounds pretty anti-competitive to me. So that would not be a "falsehood". Just because lots of companies are making anti-competitive demands, does not invalidate the point.
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And even then, that's only at my friend's house where their TV is too old to have built in "smart TV / cast to me" functionality.
Roku is dope but this might not be as big of a deal as it seems.
I am 50/50 on youtube music/youtube, but youtube app includes music so it's a general hard to decipher request but genereally if I want to voice search while I'm in youtube, I want it to stay in youtube.
I don't understand why people flock to it/use it.
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It depends on how you define interesting content of course. For me that is "Tactical or strategic games with a significant enough RNG component to be classified as 'Controlling the Chaos' (think Poker, not Chess) and which have a lively leaderboard. I enjoy watching the competition for Rank #1 and I enjoy competing to see how high I can get. My current favorite game is Team Fight Tactics (Riot Games the maker of league of legends auto battler). You can find the leaderboards here: https://lolchess.gg/leaderboards?hl=en-US And my all time highest rank achieved was #540/1,250,000 in North America (not bad at all for an executive and father of a toddler). Pretty much all of the guys competing for rank #1 will also be streamers so finding content is as easy as googling their name from the leaderboard + twitch.
If thats not your cup of tea, probably the best way would be to choose twitch's browse option and just watch the most popular streamers in each game for a few minutes to see if you are into their content. Some are informative, some are looking to appeal to 13 year olds, some are chasing some goal, etc.