Google has more data about you than anybody, and I don’t mean to say that in a way that freaks you out. But it’s awesome, it has potential, and it represents the type of feature that only Google can do successfully because at their core, they are a data company. Some are good, and some aren’t like I said, it’s clearly a beta-level feature. You sign-in, pick from a selection of genres you like, add some shows to your watchlist and voila: recommendations happen. Now, in true Google form, the feature is half-baked. I’ve personally used Roku (I still have a couple of these), Amazon Fire TV, Xbox One, and even my own cobbled-together home theater PC running various different streaming operating systems (more on that later). I’ve owned an Nvidia Shield TV for years, but not before sampling from the buffet of options. There are some key differences from device to device, but they mostly are not relevant to the scope of this article. (Seriously, I think I will write one, because it’s weird and frustrating that they are so incredibly bad at it.) For simplicity’s sake, let’s just call Google TV the “experience” that lives on the latest Chromecast, as well as the most popular models of Android TV (Nvidia Shield, Walmart’s ONN TV). So, are we talking about Google TV, the newest Chromecast dongle? Or the UI skin on Android TV? Look, I could do a whole article about the confusion Google creates with how it names things. But there’s one company doing it better than the others, and in my opinion, it’s not even close: Google. They are all trying to find the signal within the noise of our current content deluge and present the viewer with an experience tailored to their tastes and preferences. Whatever their form factors, these platforms are not just content delivery systems. There are dongles, boxes, sticks, and most recently the tech is being built right into the television itself. But if you are looking for an all-inclusive experience that matches the content to the customer and folds in all of the services, then that job has currently been off-loaded to the humble streaming box.Ī close cousin to the cable box, the streaming box is the device that powers our new app-centered TV universe. HBO Max needs to put their algorithms back in the oven and let ‘em bake a little longer. Netflix is arguably the best, having made viewer data analytics their primary focus for the last 15 years. Individual services curate their own content with varying levels of success. This is not just a matter of finding the shows you are already aware of it’s also about content discovery. How does the average streaming subscriber locate the content they will enjoy, not just within the various streaming services, but across all of them? Unless you’re a true enthusiast, the job of content curation has now become the problem. Content is still king, but the sheer volume of quality content that currently exists is staggering. Fun and yet frustrating all at the same time.Īll of this sounds as if we have arrived at the gates of entertainment nirvana, right? Well, almost. Binge watching shows was literally not possible unless the network saw fit to run a marathon, airing a proverbial firehose of random episodes of your favorite show for hours at a time on a single day. Shows aired when they aired, and if you missed your favorite program, well there were always Christmas break and summer re-runs (oh, the cruelty of forcing a child to wait till the summer to see a missed episode of Knight Rider). It’s a far cry from the tortuous days of my childhood when there were only three measly network channels, a handful of locals airing syndicated content, and PBS. The term ‘Peak TV’ has been used to describe the content of the last decade, as studios fill their customers’ plates with a steady diet of mysteries, sci-fi, horror, police procedurals, comedies and superhero shows. If the wildly-productive state of TV in 2022 is any gauge, the phrase is accurate. At least, that’s how the saying goes in the entertainment industry.
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