Slacy’s Blog

Okay, huge disclaimers here.  I used to work at TiVo, and specifically worked on several parts of the user interface framework, and I now work at Google, and have worked on the YouTube backend infrastructure.

One big struggle at TiVo was always what the “next generation” UI framework should be.  Straight C++? Java?  Networked remote display protocol (HME)?  JavaScript + HTML? XML-driven layout with C++ logic? Java + Comcast (take2)?  Flash?

So, now we know what actually shipped!   The new TiVo Premiere has been announced, and the most interesting point is that the UI claims to be implemented in Flash.  Yes, Adobe Flash.  I can sort of see the appeal, since that means your designers can do mocks using their favorite Adobe tools on a Macintosh and get pixel-accurate representation on the set-top.  That’s pretty cool, and hopefully will make TiVo a lot more agile when it comes to UI innovation. The delay cycle between UI design and implementation was usually 12+ months.  Maybe now it’ll be a little faster.

But, the use of Flash has some other possible ramifications that no one seems to be picking up on:

Can I connect my PC’s browser to my TiVo Premiere box and see the full Flash user interface on my desktop?

That’s a huge question!  Flash has the potential to deliver a remote-display experience that’s pixel-accurate from the set-top experience, and do it in a cross-platform way!   If desktop flash itself were upgraded to support ATSC-spec video formats (or if TiVo started transcoding their video), then I can foresee being able to browse to my TiVo and actually be able to play back the content, right in my browser.  Although transcoding might sound far fetched, there are hardware solutions provided by Broadcomm that could do exactly this:  Transcode HD broadcast format from disk to Flash-capable MP4, in real time.  I haven’t checked the specs of the Premiere’s internals to know if their hardware is capable of this or not.

Can I view flash-enabled websites on TiVo Premiere?

If this is a full, Adobe-certified flash implementation, then if TiVo integrates with WebKit or any other browser platform, then we can get full Web+Flash on our TVs.  The interesting thing here?  That brings access to thedailyshow.com, hulu.com, tv.com, vimeo.com, collegehumor.com, and all the other niche websites that are producing and/or delivering high quality content.  They’re currently only delivering that content to the desktop, because that’s the only place where “full Flash” has a foothold.  Existing TVs with (for example) YouTube support use a Google-provided API to access the metadata and content.  By putting Flash in the livingroom, we have the possibility for accessing all that content with our friendly peanut remotes.

What about HTML5?

Yeah, you wouldn’t think that TiVo would be getting itself twisted up in the HTML5 vs. Flash debates, but here we are.  For example, if YouTube were to move to HTML5 for their playback UI, then TiVo would need to make sure that their browser experience works with HTML5 as well, and the Flash would “fall by the wayside” for the external video sources mentioned above.  So, that would leave TiVo as an island of Flash support floating in an HTML5 sea.  Certainly it’ll take a long time for all the above mentioned sites to switch over, so I suspect that TiVo has a long time to react to this ongoing situation.  (But, they’re notoriously slow at reacting.  One could argue that this switch two flash should have happened 4+ years ago for them to “stay with the times”)

I bet the TiVo Premiere hardware is capable of nearly everything mentioned above.  The question is:  Can TiVo get their act together and ship more new innovative features for this platform? I don’t have a lot of faith, since they’ve had a really hard time innovating in feature-space in the past, but I’d love to see it happen!

Are you sure you really want to abandon your existing userbase, again?

First there was the Series1 to Series2 transition.  Not a huge deal, since there really weren’t that many Series1 boxes out there, but from an innovation standpoint, those users got orphaned.

Then, there was the Series2 to Series3 transition.  I’m not sure what the numbers were, but there were millions of Series2 customers that got left behind on this one.  This matters to TiVo if they’re trying to build a revenue stream with innovative software features.  If you’re dead-ending your existing customer base, then you can’t ship them new features that generate revenue.

Now, we have the Series3 to Series4 transition.  Is TiVo going to “bet the bank” on this new platform, or are we going to see the “Premiere” software stack ported back to S3 units?  Are they fast enough?  Do they have enough RAM?  Are there other fundamental changes to the Premiere software stack, like on-disk database formats, that make the upgrade impossible?

I’m nervous that TiVo is again”betting the bank” on a new platform with a zero-user install base.  Good luck to making that one work.

Paying royalties to Adobe cuts into TiVo’s bottom line.

I presume that TiVo is using an Adobe-provided Flash implementation, and that means they need to pay a licensing fee to Adobe for every unit shipped.  This means it cuts into TiVo’s bottom line revenue for every unit sold.  Is this really what they want to be doing?   They must expect that new revenue opportunities make the Premiere software platform more profitable than the existing software base.  Time will tell.

What about DirecTV?

If I remember right, a new TiVo + DirecTV box is due later this year.  Is this going to be based on the Series4 platform?  What other changes are we likely to see?  Was the move to Flash backed by DirecTV?

P.S.: Did you know that everySeries2 and beyond TiVo box is capable of Picture-In-Graphics, and that it’s just a “small matter of software” to make it work in the TiVo UI?

Just some quick notes before I forget them.

I’ve recently switched my primary desktop machine from Fedora Core 8 (very old, I know) x86_64 to Ubuntu 9.04 (latest and greatest) x86_64.  In general, things went well, but there were a couple gotchas that I had to work through, so I thought I’d list them here:

• The default Ubuntu 9.04 desktop installer won’t let you set up RAID by default.  So, you have to boot and run the “alternate” installer.
• If you use unetbootin to “burn” the Ubuntu alternate install disk to a USB stick and boot from that, then it will have errors during the install asking you to “insert your CD-ROM”.  Ugh.  The solution here is to select “Install” from the unetbootin boot menu instead of “default”.  This will run a network-based install instead of trying to install from the USB image that you just burned.  I know it’s silly, but at least it worked.
• Ubuntu, unlike Fedora, only allows x86_64 for it’s libraries in /lib, unlike Fedora which puts 32-bit libraries in /lib and 64-bit ones in /lib64.  Ubuntu has an option (ia32-apt-get and ia32-libs-tools) to put some 32-bit libraries in /lib32, but I found that this led to some serious apt-get dependency issues, and I quickly gave up and uninstalled these packages (and removed the damage they caused).
• There are a couple of critical things that are 32-bit only:
  • The amazon mp3 downloader application.  There are some tutorials around about how to use a program called “getlibs” to make it work right, and there are some pkgbuild and wacky .deb creation scripts to make this seem to work.  It’s my understanding that both methods pollute /lib with 32-bit libraries, so I haven’t tried it yet.  I have an e-mail out to the amazonmp3 downloader maintainer, and we’ll see if that pans out.
  • Adobe Flash.  Thankfully, Ubuntu seems to have worked this one out, and if you “sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer” it just works, although it uses ndispluginwrapper, which is sort of a giant hack, but at least it works until Adobe gives full support for 64-bit flash on Ubuntu.
• Although the Ubuntu 9.04 fonts looked pretty good out of the box, I found that my installing some alternate font packages, that I could really improve the look of many web pages.  The packages that I installed were: msttcorefonts, ttf-bitstream-vera, ttf-dejavu-core, ttf-droid, ttf-liberation, ttf-xfree86-nonfree.  I think that’s a fairly good list, and was surprised that they weren’t installed by default.

So, that about sums it up so far.  I’m running ext4, on an md RAID5 array, and things seem to be reasonably stable thus far.

Please note that I did not install Ubuntu on top of Fedora.  I’m not sure what would happen if one were to do this.  I did a clean install on fresh disks, and then copied my data back from a backup.

I was having horrible crashing issues with the 32-bit version of Firefox 3.5.1 on my Fedora Core x86_64 system, especially while using Flash, but also while doing simple tasks like printing.  Fedora Core (unlike Ubuntu) can run both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries on the same setup, due to /lib being 32-bit, and /lib64 being 64-bit.

I finally realized that maybe the issue was some bizarre and missing 32-bit library that the .tar.gz distribution of Firefox was relying on, and not giving me a reasonable error message about a missing dependency.

So, I did a:

sudo yum install firefox.i386

which indeed pulled in a bunch of dependencies that I think had been cleaned up by some other process that looked for orphaned dependencies.

Although I’m not using the Fedora-provided version of Firefox 2.0, my personal install of 32-bit Firefox 3.5.1 (with Adobe flash, 32-bit) is now back to its prior “reasonably stable” point.

I’m still planning on doing a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.04 when my new hard drives come in.

Just a quick note for another item that will be the death of flash: Netbooks.

As the computer market continues to move down in CPU power, price and size, the ability of a standard netbook to run sites like hulu.com has become questionable. The little Atom 1.6GHz processor just doesn’t have enough oomph to play large-format videos. (Youtube.com works great, its just the other sites that are pushing larger resolutions and larger bitrates and more sophisticated codecs).

Additionally, flash is just something that sits there on web pages using up your CPU, and that means that it’s using up your battery, which is bad. So, I’ve disabled flash altogether (via FlashBlock) on my netbook’s configuration, and I’m tempted to do so on my desktop machines as well. FlashBlock gives a nice “click to play” experience that I really prefer over the default of many sites which is to just start playing flash videos & sound as soon as you enter the page.

Maybe the netbook processors are going to improve, and maybe that means that in another year or so flash won’t be such a big deal, but in the interm, I think Adobe is in a pretty bad situation, especially due to the mobile factors I mentioned in my last post…

I’ve been curiously watching the developments (or lack thereof) surrounding Adobe and the use of Flash on mobile platforms like the iPhone and Android handsets. Here’s my summarization of the situation as it stands today:

• No browser (mobile or otherwise) has Flash built in.  All browsers require a “plugin” provided by Adobe to play back Flash content.
• Mobile browsers are behind the times when it comes to plugin support, but even though, Adobe isn’t providing mobile phone manufacturers any sort of mobile flash experience. (FlashLight excepted, but this isn’t on major mobile platforms)
• Adobe got the short end of the stick when it comes to Flash.  Their playback platform powers the worlds largest sites (youtube.com) but they don’t see a dime of revenue from it’s popularity, because most users consume flash content but don’t produce it, and flash producers are who Adobe has previously marketed their products to.
• In all likelihood, Adobe wants to be paid for porting Flash to platforms like the iPhone and Android.  I don’t think that either Apple or Google would have any part in paying Adobe for such a “right” to use flash.  As proof of this, I present the YouTube non-flash applications on iPhone and Android, which offer a rich non-flash experience that could easily make it’s way back to the desktop browser.

Assuming that Adobe stands fast, and Flash never becomes an integrated part of the mobile browser platform, and, as the mobile platform base grows, sites that rely on Flash for their user interface will be locking out the mobile browsing platform.  So, these sites will realize that they would reach a larger audience if they offered a non-flash mobile-friendly experience.  Thus, they’ll port their flash user interface to AJAX, which works on both desktop and mobile browsers.   Flash usage will begin to decline.  As Adobe gets more anxious to squeeze the dollars from Flash, then the free mobile-supported alternatives will arise.  Greater use of SVG graphics, more AJAX, and possibly even some open-source flash-like technology that will be free and usable for mobile browser developers.

Did I mention HTML5’s <video> element?

Did I mention ViXimo?  This is just the beginning of mobile-enabled flash alternatives, and proof that the above is coming true already.

This time its called Chain Factor. Read the brief instructions on the right before starting. It’ll take a game or 2 before you get the hang of it…. then, you’re addicted, like me.

Normally, these sorts of amusements aren’t worth mentioning, but this version of ‘launchball’ is really fantastic implementation of games in the ‘rube goldberg machine building’ genre. The twist here is that it uses real ’scientific’ principles like heat, magnetism, steam, solar, and wind power. I really enjoyed it.