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Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro)
PC Pro has a brief
report on the "Ubuntu TV" offering revealed by Canonical at the Consumer
Electronics Show. "[Jane] Silber told us Canonical was in
discussions with a number of television manufacturers, but couldn't confirm
any signed deals. It will face stiff competition from Google - which only
last week added LG to its roster of Google TV manufacturers - and Apple,
which is widely tipped to be working on an internet television after making
little impact with successive generations of its Apple TV hardware."
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Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 9, 2012 15:16 UTC (Mon) by oliwarner (subscriber, #81320) [Link]
It looks /fairly/ good but it all comes down the money.
- Google makes money from the deployments of Android through media/app purchases so I wouldn't be surprised if they can't pay fabs to push Android onto Smart TVs.
- By comparison Canonical has a tiny app store, aimed exclusively at the x86 market (surely the TV will be ARM7+) and no video streaming/rental money.
I can't see how they're going to compete unless they can make the software and overall experience and convenience so much better. That's going to take more than a pretty EPG and film listing.
Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 9, 2012 15:23 UTC (Mon) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link]
Or if they are just cheaper by not getting sued by Apple, MS and Oracle or paying protection money to those Mafia-like operations.
Anyways, where is the code? Is this another Ubuntu-labeled closed source product?
Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 9, 2012 15:49 UTC (Mon) by job (guest, #670) [Link] It's all all open source, accessible through their Launchpad service. Looks promising, metadata scan with XBMC, GUI with the Qt-based Unity. I hope they find some solid hardware partners on this.
Ubuntu TV demo source code Posted Jan 9, 2012 17:03 UTC (Mon) by sladen (subscriber, #27402) [Link] See you over on Freenode#ubuntu-tv and have fun with the demo code! It's a fair point that the announcement and news pickups could have highlighted free software/open source/openness to a greater degree—this has been raised by other people too and very useful feedback. I think on this occasion people were working hard to make the deadline:
Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 13, 2012 1:33 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Apple and MS I can see getting annoyed: they sell stuff to consumers, and Apple has directly competing hardware... but why the fritz would a database company selling only to corporations care about a glorified TV?
Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 9, 2012 16:08 UTC (Mon) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link] Neither Google nor Apple have made much progress in this market, despite already having large ecosystems backing them (plus the name recognition). Canonical has zero consumer name recognition (at least in most of the world, especially the US).Unless Canonical came someone really persuade the manufacturers to just throw it on a large number of their TVs, I don't see this ever going near the mainstream. Even if they don't charge anything for software, it will cost manufacturers money to actually design a TV with the necessary hardware and do the development, plus those TVs will be more expensive due to the extra hardware. This seems like a major flop in the making. I'd be quite surprised if we see more than a couple expensive, small TVs from a very limited number of manufacturers running this (with zero retail availability and little coverage even by the tech press). Never know, Canonical might have some really good software for this thing (the Google TV experience leaves very much to be desired, with the sluggish and poorly thought out interface), and might just be in the right place at the right time.
Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 9, 2012 16:11 UTC (Mon) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link] Whoops! Should have proofread that before hitting submit!s/came someone/can somehow/
Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 9, 2012 17:29 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
I suspect that with Android Google has actually make quite a bit of progress. It's just that they are not going to call it 'Android TV' or anything like that. It's just TVs that run Android. :)
It would be hilarious though if XBMC did manage to get OEM support.
It's actually called "Google TV" and looks like Google finally does the right thing... Posted Jan 9, 2012 18:02 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] It's just that they are not going to call it 'Android TV' or anything like that. It's just TVs that run Android. :) It'll be called Google TV, like before. But perhaps now, with support from #1, #2 and without burden of Intel Atom and separate box it'll be accepted by market. I'm not sure what exactly Canonical plans to do...
Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 9, 2012 19:19 UTC (Mon) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]
i expect that if this gets marketed at all, it will be as a white-labelled effort by a manufacturer that will buy the proper codec support etc.
this seems like an easy experiment for ubuntu, i can't imagine it required a major investment
Codec (patent) licensing Posted Jan 9, 2012 21:22 UTC (Mon) by sladen (subscriber, #27402) [Link] "Canonical has agreements in place with third parties and industry organisations to include codecs for common media formats."
Codec (patent) licensing Posted Jan 10, 2012 19:55 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Which, more or less likely means they paid the MPEG-LA license fees and are able to use ffmpeg and related libs legally for this purpose.
Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 9, 2012 17:30 UTC (Mon) by arjan (subscriber, #36785) [Link]
surprisingly most TV's run on a MIPS cpu....
Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 13, 2012 18:40 UTC (Fri) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
At the moment, but more and more ARM-based TVs are likely headed your way.
Debian builds for MIPS so Ubuntu could too if they wanted (but I don't think they do).
Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 9, 2012 23:56 UTC (Mon) by andreasb (subscriber, #80258) [Link]
> (surely the TV will be ARM7+)
I assume you mean ARMv7 which is the current ARM architecture specification. ARMvx denote architecture specifications, ARMy denote actual implementations with x and y not being related. Also, current implementations (by ARM Holdings themselves) are named Cortex instead of ARM.
Actual ARM7 cores (introduced in 1994) are mostly ARMv4, some implement ARMv3 and some ARMv5. They are still common in the ARM microcontroller world where they are currently being superseded by Cortex-M cores (implementations of ARMv7-M).
Alright alright, I'll stop lecturing now.
Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 9, 2012 23:58 UTC (Mon) by oliwarner (subscriber, #81320) [Link]
Yes, yes, yes and yes. I'm an idiot. Thanks for pointing it out. :)
Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 10, 2012 0:27 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I'll note that with the raspberry pi using the ARMv6 cores, there are likely to be at least a couple of different cores in common use for quite a while.
Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 10, 2012 1:21 UTC (Tue) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]
> Alright alright, I'll stop lecturing now.
No, no, go ahead, this is very interesting.
Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 10, 2012 8:16 UTC (Tue) by AlexHudson (subscriber, #41828) [Link]
Is Canonical the most hubristic Linux company? To think you can barge into a market where you have no track record, disrupt major players and make good money is somewhere on the bravado spectrum, but they do it time and again with no apparent success. Waiting for Canonical to break even is becoming Duke Nukem-esque.
If this were a serious effort, they would be at CES, where all the big players are showing off their products. This 'we have a repo' sideshow is sad. There's no novelty, no innovation, just a dream that they can succeed where others have failed.
This isn't hating on Canonical, this is just disappointment. The community needs them to succeed, but I worry how long they can be bankrolled at this burn rate....
Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 10, 2012 8:25 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
it succeed at least once, after all, when they started Linux == RedHat in many people's view (and even for everyone else, the thought that a new distro could get any significant market share against Debian, SuSE, and RedHat was obviously silly.
besides, are you sure they have no presence at CES?
Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 10, 2012 8:43 UTC (Tue) by AlexHudson (subscriber, #41828) [Link]
They have launched at CES, but everyone else has actual products where they have a "vision' - in terms of production they're 6 months behind the competition at best.
In terms of server Linux: sure, they have a recognised name. They haven't made it profitable yet though, which is what I would call a success.
Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 10, 2012 11:27 UTC (Tue) by tpo (subscriber, #25713) [Link]
> If this were a serious effort, they would be at CES,
> where all the big players are showing off their products
For what it's worth I note that the NZZ, one of the biggest, most trustworthy and serious Swiss newspapers is mentioning Canonical's TV offering at the CES:
http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/digital/consumer_electronic...
-> Slide 6/13
*t
Ubuntu TV unveiled (PC Pro) Posted Jan 12, 2012 17:23 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
On the other side of the spectrum, "20 minutos" is a free (as in gratis) nontechnical newspaper distributed in Spain. It's one of the most read newspapers here. They covered Ubuntu TV in their printed version. You can see the on-line version here: http://www.20minutos.es/noticia/1271470/0/ubuntu-tv/linux... (in Spanish).
Not like the level of coverage that would (will?) have an Apple TV, but it's quite remarkable for a free OS.
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