Mozilla Partners With Panasonic To Bring Firefox OS To the TV 55
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by
samzenpus
from the tune-in dept.
from the tune-in dept.
An anonymous reader writes "At CES 2014 in Las Vegas today, Mozilla announced its plans for Firefox OS this year. Having launched Firefox OS for smartphones in 2013, the company has now partnered with Panasonic to bring its operating system to TVs, and also detailed the progress that has been made around the tablet and desktop versions."
2014 - WebTV returns (Score:1)
Chromecast was the opening salvo in a battle that will rage all year.
Anything will be an improvement (Score:5, Insightful)
The current generation of "smart" TV's with every brand having their own interface is getting a bit tedious. Give me Android, give me Firefox OS, even give me iOS if you have to.
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Cut cable/satellite, buy Apple TV, get Netflix. Even a regular, not-overpriced computer monitor will do. Why pay for a stupid built-in tuner and a crappy OS interface in 2014?
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Yep, not to mention security updates and maintenance to said OSes. I have my as dumb as possible TV hooked to a desktop with cordless mouse and keyboard and it does the job fine.
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The thing is that, while you are absolutely right on all of your points, the main factor is image quality for intended usage - viewed from typical angular distance of 30-90 degrees or similar, TV of 30-55" size, first of all you will hardly find a computer monitor with sufficient luminosity/image brightness AND sufficiently little color distortion. Not to mention finding a computer monitor above 30" of size. Face it - not all of us watch movies from our working desk :-)
The truth is, TV makers have gone a lo
The finals are only on pay TV (Score:2)
Cut cable/satellite
How should the sports fan in your household watch televised sports without a cable or satellite subscription? For the past few years and for the next few years, the "bowl games" (championships of NCAA Football Bowl Division) have been and will be on ESPN. And in NHL, some games of the Stanley Cup were shown on cable's NBC Sports Network during the past couple years. Not everybody is willing to eat at Buffalo Wild Wings that often.
Re:Anything will be an improvement (Score:5, Funny)
My smart TV is running windows.
It runs every browser and most of my favorite apps, flash, video, and it even runs productivity software, games, and non-latin websites.
Just don't mind the little box behind the flat screen.
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Are you getting regular web upgrades to your fleshlight?
My wife isn't getting updates anymore, I have to keep running the old bugs. Should I consider switching over?
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The problem is, even if they are based on Android, they still will probably each have their own interface. For some reason, every company seems to think they understand UI design better than whoever designs the standard Android interface, and unfortunately, more often than not, they're wrong. :-)
And if you're really unlucky, you en
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The current generation of "smart" TV's with every brand having their own interface is getting a bit tedious. Give me Android, give me Firefox OS, even give me iOS if you have to.
I prefer it to be just a display, I can plug a cable box or a PC or a gaming console or a Chromecast or an AppleTV into it or whatever, I can choose what device, capabilities and interface I prefer and change it whenever I like. A TV just has to support as many connection options as possible.
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The current generation of "smart" TV's with every brand having their own interface is getting a bit tedious.
These companies are trying to differentiate their products via software. The problem is that it is embedded software. If they were able to think ahead by more than one product cycle they would put all the "smarts" on a tiny little HDMI stick like google has with their chromecast.
That would let them get all the benefits of a "customized experience" or whatever the marketing aholes are calling it this year, but it would be easily upgradeable in the field after the manufacturer has stopped giving a shit abou
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Historically hardware manufacturers make terrible software. It's just a throw away to get you to buy the plastic in the box.
Digital Camera software.
Scanner Software.
Printer Drivers with Photo Editing software.
Harddrive "drivers" and software.
Wifi cards.
Once you buy it you're on your own.
When these functions get absorbed by the OS it's usually a pretty good basic experience for everyone with the rare actually useful optional download from the maker for more knobs to turn.
So iOS, Windows, Linux or Android...
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I'd probably care more if I didn't keep the same TV for 7 or 8 years at a time.
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I'm not disagreeing with this.
But there is little difference between a TV and flat panel monitor these days, I can hook an XBox up to either of them as an example.
All they need to do is standardize plugging a smart phone into a TV or monitor and make a wireless keyboard or game controller work and all of these issues about "som
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Differences:
1. Available sizes - far less choice of monitors above say 30", which is considered "small" for a TV
2. Different usage - TVs are meant to convey motion at the expense of still pictures (they usually do the latter adequately if not real well, however), while a monitor is basically for working, which puts ergonomy (read maximum brightness etc) at the top of priority list.
Besides, you don't get the market economy into account - we don't get the technology we geeks think is best - average users get
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Forgot #3:
3. Brightness per unit of distance - TVs give out far more brightness per square meter of illuminated area than a monitor. The dimmest plasma TV rivals the brightest monitors out there, and the newest and brightest LED LCDs that are sold in droves to the consumers today will burn your eyes out were you attempt to use them as monitor :-)
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"Open Source TV set? All well and good, I suppose, until it comes out with a locked bootloader. Is this a TiVo situation all over again?"
More or less yes. And that's why there's a GPLv3 too.
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Chaos for the Masses (Score:5, Funny)
So now everyday TV watchers can experience the frequent random silly UI "upgrades" just like the rest of us. If you think losing the remote inside the couch is frustrating, imagine the buttons scrambling themselves randomly at 3am, and with "explanations" such as, "we are just gradually preparing for the future Flux Capacitor interface kit by mixing the old and new styles, whether they gel or not."
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The LG TV I turned on at my parens in law's place did exactly that - a dialogue in the lower right corner of the screen telling me that it needs/will upgrade itself promptly. I don't remember what I did then, but I remember being pissed about it!
Smart-TV concept is a ingenious strategy from TV makers to sell features to consumer when innovation doesn't sell or is lacking and when consumers are drowned in choice between TVs they can not differentiate between (except for the logo). I hate the concept, my pare
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In the US we enjoy the freedom to be screwed over by vendors.
Android not sufficiently open? (Score:2)
That is interesting, because I thought a bunch of handset makers are using Android while giving nothing at all back to google.
Differentiation (Score:2)
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That is interesting, because I thought a bunch of handset makers are using Android while giving nothing at all back to google.
They are, but they are restricted. They can't create any incompatibilities and the key element to being part of the Android ecosystem is the proprietary Google Play Services and all the proprietary Google apps. Sure they could take the stock AOSP project and maintain, upgrade and develop it themselves but they aren't really in the business of doing that.
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http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/ [arstechnica.com]
+5 informative (Score:2)
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/ [arstechnica.com]
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It's more a move to counter LG - who are building TVs around the entrails of Palm's webOS. Both platforms are built around HTML5, so any 'apps' running on LG TVs might easily be ported to Panasonic's.
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...a smart TV would come out with a quad HD tuner, an ADSL modem with VOIP handset, wireless base station, 4 ethernet port switch, decent CPU/GPU/Storage, SteamOS running MythTV, LAMP stack, personal cloud services for email etc.. Then I could replace the half dozens devices cluttering up my living room.
What, like a QNAP box of some sort?
Who? (Score:2)
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They announce it now so you know where to go once those doors open.
You need the 'cool channel' (Score:3)
time to stop buying Panasonic TV's I guess. (Score:1)
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History repeats itself (Score:1)
I liked it when televisions were simple beasts which showed programmes as they were being broadcasted. There was no bloat, no lag and they started up instantly. Any other services such as DVDs could be added by the user. Now they are a sluggish mess.
Kind of like Firefox
Who needs TV? (Score:2)
I don't even watch TV! I am too sophisticated for that. Indeed, I don't even know what "Duck Dynasty" is. I just have a dumb terminal connected to a Dreamcast.