When we got home from vacation last night, my new Chromecast was sitting waiting for me. I’ve been really psyched to try it out.
The out-of-the-box experience was clear and simple. My favorite thing about Chromecast is how small it is — it’s barely there; just a tiny little add-on to web-enable your TV.
The installation and setup were smooth, with one major exception: the first time through, my setup failed, citing a mysterious UPnP error, and a vaguely worded message to “check my router settings”. Being a geeky person, I (a) knew that that meant going to 192.168.1.1 to get to the router config, (b) was able to remember / figure out the username and password for my router and (c) hunted around for the Universal Plug and Play settings until I found what looked like the right one. My guess is that all of the above would be a deal breaker for 99.5% of consumers.
Once I got through that, I played around a bit with mirroring my computer screen to the TV (just like you can do with Airplay), and playing some web videos on the TV (including
When we got home from vacation last night, my new Chromecast was sitting waiting for me. I’ve been really psyched to try it out.
The out-of-the-box experience was clear and simple. My favorite thing about Chromecast is how small it is — it’s barely there; just a tiny little add-on to web-enable your TV.
The installation and setup were smooth, with one major exception: the first time through, my setup failed, citing a mysterious UPnP error, and a vaguely worded message to “check my router settings”. Being a geeky person, I (a) knew that that meant going to 192.168.1.1 to get to the router config, (b) was able to remember / figure out the username and password for my router and (c) hunted around for the Universal Plug and Play settings until I found what looked like the right one. My guess is that all of the above would be a deal breaker for 99.5% of consumers.
Once I got through that, I played around a bit with mirroring my computer screen to the TV (just like you can do with Airplay), and playing some web videos on the TV (including
, showing an AK-47 firing underwater at 27,000 frames per second, to illustrate the physics of it — the explanation of the pressure forces about 2 minutes in is stellar).
I’m excited about this — I’m pretty sure this is not **the** answer to bringing the internet to TVs, but it’s a nice step on the road. A few things come to mind as tough problems:
* getting past having to switch “inputs” on the TV. This is another super clunky step that I’m sure loses a ton of people (and certainly just makes this content feel “farther away” and just out of reach of my regular routine. It would be awesome if TVs provided an API to let apps / devices control the input. I have no idea how that works but I’m almost certain it’s not possible now.
* being able to queue content I see on the web to my TV for viewing later. That was my favorite feature of the old Boxee.
* the config steps (as mentioned above). Also: in my case, relying on my broadband / TV provider, Verizon, actually allowing me to access and change those settings. This kind of thing is disruptive to traditional TV and I could easily imagine combo broadband / tv providers clamping down to protect the legacy TV business.
Relatedly: I hung out with a friend last week who is a writer / producer at The Onion, and asked him how many of their video views came from people watching on TVs (vs computers or mobile devices). He had no idea and it sounds like it’s not something they track, or even think about very much. I guess it makes sense, given how early this all is, and given the relative clunkiness of the web / tv integrations thus far. But man, it seems clear to me that this is where we’re headed, and I think & hope it’ll be good for independent content outlets like the Onion and others.
Yesterday I gave a talk at this year’s Personal Democracy Forum. For those who don’t know it, PDF is a great event, and is now in its 10th year of bringing together the community of folks working at the intersection of tech, politics, and civics. You can see all the talks from yesterday (and today’s videos will be posted tomorrow) on PDF’s youtube channel. I was paired up with Robin Chase (co-founder of Zipcar and Buzzcar) to talk about the opportunity and challenges presented by the “peer economy”. Robin introduced the opportunity and I followed up with the challenges (and some ideas for addressing them). This is a topic I’ve been spending a lot of time on — with the team at USV, companies in the USV portfolio, and many other companies in the peer-to-peer sector. As is apparent to everyone following tech news, there has been a ton of activity, both positive and negative, in this space. It’s new, and it challenges many fundamental notions of professionalism, person-to-person relationships, and regulation. We’ve got a lot to figure out. Here is the video of my talk: And here are the slides. Kudos: many thanks to the folks at the Berkman Center who helped me find examples of our historical responses to new user-empowering technologies, to Arun Sundararajan for his consistently insightful work on these issues, and to the folks from Sidecar, RelayRides, Etsy and Airbnb for giving their input to the talk. Enjoy!
I am working on my presentation for this week’s Personal Democracy Forum, which is looking to be a great event.
My talk is entitled: “Powered by Us: Architecting Policy for a Connected World”, and I’m going to be talking about the policy implications of peer networks on the web. We can think of “the peer economy" or ”the indie web” or ”powered by us" platforms as a subset of the internet at large. It’s a sector that’s growing fast and running into allkinds of trouble along the way.
Part of what I will talk about is the historical phenomenon of incumbent industries (incorrectly) predicting doomsday as new technologies and business models emerge. One of the most famous examples here is when Jack Valenti, former head of the MPAA (movie industry lobby) declared in 1982 that the VCR would be the end of the movie industry. He said (seriously):
"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."
Of course, this turned out not to be the case. Home videos instead turned into a major new revenue stream for the movie business. But that didn’t stop the the issue from going all the way to the Supreme Court, which declared video copying for personal use legal. This decision, known as “the betamax case” laid a critical foundation for user-empowering technologies that followed.
I’m looking for a few more examples like this: times when a new technology — in particular one that grants individuals new and awesome powers — was greeted with (ultimately) false claims of impending doom. Here’s one list of now-silly tech predictions (not necessarily doomsday-related), and a few years ago Mike Masnick at techdirt wrote up this great list of historical overreactions to copyright issues.
I’d like to find more like this, but beyond copyright as a subject area. If anyone’s out there: what are your favorites?
, showing an AK-47 firing underwater at 27,000 frames per second, to illustrate the physics of it — the explanation of the pressure forces about 2 minutes in is stellar).
I’m excited about this — I’m pretty sure this is not **the** answer to bringing the internet to TVs, but it’s a nice step on the road. A few things come to mind as tough problems:
* getting past having to switch “inputs” on the TV. This is another super clunky step that I’m sure loses a ton of people (and certainly just makes this content feel “farther away” and just out of reach of my regular routine. It would be awesome if TVs provided an API to let apps / devices control the input. I have no idea how that works but I’m almost certain it’s not possible now.
* being able to queue content I see on the web to my TV for viewing later. That was my favorite feature of the old Boxee.
* the config steps (as mentioned above). Also: in my case, relying on my broadband / TV provider, Verizon, actually allowing me to access and change those settings. This kind of thing is disruptive to traditional TV and I could easily imagine combo broadband / tv providers clamping down to protect the legacy TV business.
Relatedly: I hung out with a friend last week who is a writer / producer at The Onion, and asked him how many of their video views came from people watching on TVs (vs computers or mobile devices). He had no idea and it sounds like it’s not something they track, or even think about very much. I guess it makes sense, given how early this all is, and given the relative clunkiness of the web / tv integrations thus far. But man, it seems clear to me that this is where we’re headed, and I think & hope it’ll be good for independent content outlets like the Onion and others.
Yesterday I gave a talk at this year’s Personal Democracy Forum. For those who don’t know it, PDF is a great event, and is now in its 10th year of bringing together the community of folks working at the intersection of tech, politics, and civics. You can see all the talks from yesterday (and today’s videos will be posted tomorrow) on PDF’s youtube channel. I was paired up with Robin Chase (co-founder of Zipcar and Buzzcar) to talk about the opportunity and challenges presented by the “peer economy”. Robin introduced the opportunity and I followed up with the challenges (and some ideas for addressing them). This is a topic I’ve been spending a lot of time on — with the team at USV, companies in the USV portfolio, and many other companies in the peer-to-peer sector. As is apparent to everyone following tech news, there has been a ton of activity, both positive and negative, in this space. It’s new, and it challenges many fundamental notions of professionalism, person-to-person relationships, and regulation. We’ve got a lot to figure out. Here is the video of my talk: And here are the slides. Kudos: many thanks to the folks at the Berkman Center who helped me find examples of our historical responses to new user-empowering technologies, to Arun Sundararajan for his consistently insightful work on these issues, and to the folks from Sidecar, RelayRides, Etsy and Airbnb for giving their input to the talk. Enjoy!
I am working on my presentation for this week’s Personal Democracy Forum, which is looking to be a great event.
My talk is entitled: “Powered by Us: Architecting Policy for a Connected World”, and I’m going to be talking about the policy implications of peer networks on the web. We can think of “the peer economy" or ”the indie web” or ”powered by us" platforms as a subset of the internet at large. It’s a sector that’s growing fast and running into allkinds of trouble along the way.
Part of what I will talk about is the historical phenomenon of incumbent industries (incorrectly) predicting doomsday as new technologies and business models emerge. One of the most famous examples here is when Jack Valenti, former head of the MPAA (movie industry lobby) declared in 1982 that the VCR would be the end of the movie industry. He said (seriously):
"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."
Of course, this turned out not to be the case. Home videos instead turned into a major new revenue stream for the movie business. But that didn’t stop the the issue from going all the way to the Supreme Court, which declared video copying for personal use legal. This decision, known as “the betamax case” laid a critical foundation for user-empowering technologies that followed.
I’m looking for a few more examples like this: times when a new technology — in particular one that grants individuals new and awesome powers — was greeted with (ultimately) false claims of impending doom. Here’s one list of now-silly tech predictions (not necessarily doomsday-related), and a few years ago Mike Masnick at techdirt wrote up this great list of historical overreactions to copyright issues.
I’d like to find more like this, but beyond copyright as a subject area. If anyone’s out there: what are your favorites?
