Dangerous precedent? Like owning the steel and the rail?
Read this (http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/corporate-monopolies/development_rrmon.html) and replace railroad with ISP.
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Apple to Open Up Apple TV's Universal Search to Additional Apps via New API
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Dangerous precedent? Like owning the steel and the rail?
Read this (http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/corporate-monopolies/development_rrmon.html) and replace railroad with ISP.
Such heavy handed regulation limits the potential for cable and ISPs. And limiting potential that heavily deincentivizes businesses from doing pro-consumer things on their own.
smooth as butter, eh? that keynote demo certainly looked good but past experience shows that it's hardly representative of how well and how fast ATV 4 siri search will work in practice when it doesn't sit on a superfast and supershort pipeline to the Apple servers. and you may have some wrong ideas about how siri works. iphone Siri needs internet to work only because it does voice recognition and analysis in the cloud. that's it. the rest of searching is done locally if it only involves local data. of course if you need to search the itunes store then it will search online but, for example, it will certainly happily search the music on your iphone even if you don't have itunes match or Apple Music and didn't buy your music on itunes.
milliseconds? as I said, the chances of it being that fast are somewhere between slim and none. and I will certainly settle for seconds. do you actually have an ATV and have you ever had to search for anything on it? it does have music search for locally connected itunes libraries and it searches by the itunes metadata. the search itself is quite quick but entering the search query using onscreen keyboard is a HUGE PITA. it's beyond awful. there is no technical reason why siri can't help with that part and the improvement over the current situation would be tremendous even if the whole process takes longer than millisecond.
That goes double for searching local itunes for videos as that can't be done from ATV at all right now. there is no technical reason for this. AFAIK, itunes gets the metadata for its media from 3 different places: spotlight index, itunes database file and metadata sitting in the resource forks of media files themselves. the first two are fast to search because they are preindexed. the last is not preindexed but it can still be accessed quickly. when I scroll through the movie list in my local library on ATV it pulls that data (things like movie description and cast) pretty much instantaneously.
I'll take mediocre experience over absolutely horrendous one any day of the week. I would think that the most likely reason why the new ATV search might not work on local libraries is not because the result will be subpar user experience but because Apple doesn't view providing this functionality as a priority.
and I hope you are joking about suggesting Airplay as an acceptable alternative.
You have a point too, in that additional content that you don't own is likely to be tagged with all the relevant metadata. I guess to me, it would still be no different than using Siri to search for your music on your iPhone- I think you can do that right? (regardless of whether it is iTunes purchased, mp3, etc.)
There is no way that Home Sharing is on shaky legal ground, it's no different than any number of ways of playing multimedia files.
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Ah, that's right- you can search for music this way. There should be no technical reason why you can't also search movies.
Siri would still require an internet connection for the voice recognition, but after that it's not really different than typing in a search right now on the old ATV. Just much faster and easier, even if the response time was slow.
Well, that was OBVIOUS, wasn't it? Try reading we=community. And if I (me myself) add anything to my library it can fetch all the metadata in the world in a couple of seconds, and apple ain't got nothing on that. So my point still stands.
Then again, if you are still on that "Me more than apple thing isn't true", i could theoretically host mirrors of all those databases so I would definitely have more metadata than apple
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Home Sharing's legality has been questioned many times. It's not hard to Google that. More importantly, users' ways of using Home Sharing has been a concern for some time which is why Apple makes a point to highlight the 'home' part of Home Sharing. As for Siri, Siri can only play the song if Siri can recognize the metadata, which is the entire problem in question.
Not really up to Apple. And Amazon's already said they are going to opt out of ATV and Chromecast. You basically need to use a Fire Stick to get Prime on your TV, as far as Amazon is concerned.
Apple's API won't change how Siri universal search fundamentally works. Siri accepts user input and runs a query against a cloud-hosted index. Apple keeps a cloud-hosted index of their iTunes content. So do companies like HBO, Netflix, Hulu, and any other content providers who may wish to participate.
This won't work with locally stored content because neither Apple nor Plex nor anyone else maintains a cloud-hosted index of that content. Doing so would raise technical, legal, and privacy concerns. Even if someone did keep such a cloud-hosted index, they would then have to figure out how to let Siri search only for that specific user's content each time, which may not even be technically feasible.
What Apple should have done was to create a hook for Siri to query the user's local content (using their Spotlight index) at the same time it queries the cloud. This would have provided the true universal search feature everyone actually wants without the need for a cloud-hosted record of everyone's locally stored media.
As it stands, I don't think anyone is going to be able to offer Siri/universal search for local content. And for the sake of argument, anyone who did would likely face scrutiny over the privacy implications, particularly in light of the imminent passage of CISA. Apple dropped the ball on this, perhaps intentionally as a way to persuade more people to buy/rent/store media online instead of hosting ripped or pirated content locally.
Personally, I will not spend a dime on DRM-locked content. My latest lesson learned was the realization that the first season of The Newsroom I purchased on iTunes a few years ago does not work on Plex because of its DRM protection. So as usual, the paying customer is punished while the pirate is rewarded.
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Thanks for the explanation. This is what I was afraid of. However, I am not sure you are correct that Siri can only do cloud based searches. I admit I don't know how it works under the hood but I am quite sure it can do local spotlight search on my device, at least for some type of content. For example, it can search my music library (even if I don't have itunes match or Apple Music) or open a particular app. I believe this happens locally, using Spotlight and it only accesses the cloud for voice analysis functionality. isn't this right? How else would it do it? and if so Siri already does have some hooks to search local content. It's certainly limited but I am hoping Apple would expand it for ATV 4 search. as I mentioned in another post, even on ATV 3 I can search music in locally connected itunes libraries. the UI is terrible but the ability is there. just let universal search hook into that and allow the same for videos.
Is this ever going to happen? I bought an Apple TV a week ago and I'm seriously considering returning it. Already have last gen and two rokun boxes. TiVo romio. Xbox one. Ps4. The only reason I got the Apple TV was searching. Without it open to all apps it's a pointless device IMO. Especially packing Amazon prim!e streaming without air playing it. It's amshasme. There's a lot of potential but it's going nowhere