Did you know there's been an android gaming console since 2015? Neither did anybody else!
Did you know that Sony has had a streaming gaming service since 2014? Neither did anybody else!
Google is a textbook case of how monopolization kills innovation. I have Google Music on a Google Pixel in a car with Android Auto. Google literally has my entire music collection. And while Google has lately decided that it won't let me play the music I was just listening to while in the car, instead preferring I dig through five or six keypresses to get to "recently played" (it locks the display out after seven), it's really good at suggesting "radio stations" based on artists.
So okay, Google. I'll listen to "Enigma radio." After all, you have 230GB worth of MP3s of mine, and know that I've chosen "enigma-like" as a genre. So sure. Play me my music in random order I have no control over, seeded in whatever order suits you, and then give me ads -
You have my entire music collection. You can target me better than anyone in the history of advertising. So why on earth would you think I would want to listen to this
When you suggested I should listen to this?
Yep. That's how to sell me on Youtube Music right there. The personalization.
Oh god Ouya. I had forgotten that dumpster fire. I had also forgotten that Yves Behar had jizzed all over it - if ever there's a kiss of death for a company, it's getting Yves Behar to push it into an envelope it'll never fit. I guess we're calling it the Stadia, by the way. When you watch this video, it's important to keep in mind we're describing a new service where 12-year-olds can teabag you in Fortnite.
We have an nVidia shield in our flat, slowly using them to replace our FireTV setups in our bedrooms/lounge - mine is next to be replaced but we've barely scratched the gaming side of it. But as you've mentioned elsewhere here, 35GB per second. Our internet is fucking fast for New Zealand - https://www.odt.co.nz/business/dunedin%E2%80%99s-net-speed-not-reflected-data-use but even so...
I almost bought it as a Plex box a few times but Plex never fails to disappoint. They're not launching in NZ. They're launching in the US... where you can pay $80/mo for 50MB. And maybe they've got magic to make it work but if you're playing it in a browser your magic suffers from heavy constraint.
- it transcodes like shit on PS3 (better on PS4) - Chromecast works sometimes - Files are stored in proprietary formats so you can't sync with plex and play with something else - playback sucks (flat out skips, pops and distorts on Android - how the fuck can you not play MP3 files) - Has promised working with tuners for four fucking years - Has maintained that it works with tuners for two fucking years when it doesn't - Has had no answers about the tuners for two fucking years
Ah well, probably for the best then. Honestly, we've got our laptops, a switch, PS4, and two Retropies so at least in our household we're set for a bit of casual fun. Shit I remember tinkering with Plex - I don't think I ever really understood how it was meant to operate and gave up pretty quickly. I'm using a FireTV with that Kodi addon but the device is about 4 years old now. Shield it shall be, soon.
You missed the elephant in the room - they're promising to run an 8k, 60hz video game on their hardware... and then stream it to you (with no lag!) through your ISP. And yeah. They're making magic hand-wavey sounds about VPNs and nodes and mandatory bullshit like that but at the end of the day, 7680 pixels by 4320 pixels by 60 frames per second is two billion pixels per second. Wanna run 16-bit color? You're at 35GB per second. You don't get to front-load it at all. That video needs to reflect you playing the game. That makes it tough to compress. And sure - you're going to compress it. Let's say you compress it a thousand to one. Now you're at 35MB. Oh right but you weren't really going to run it at 8 you were gonna run it at 4. You're down to 27. And you're compressing a thousand to one. Which you can't actually do.
Well sure. But now you're parsing a file structure using arrow keys in a moving vehicle. The whole point of in-car is you've got a big screen and simplified navigation that allows you to flip between music and calls and navigation without endangering the lives of everyone around you. I can hit my files on my phone seven or eight different ways - DoubleTwist, Plex, Bluetooth, USB, whatever. But if you're going to put an interface in the car it should be better than kludging some bullshit MacMini-Winamp horror from the early 2000s.
And before it started to suck, Google Play Music gave you artist/album/genre/grouping/playlist whatever you wanted. Where it falls down is (A) it won't let you touch the screen more than six times before returning you to main (sometimes four - it's a dick) which means you can't even open up the album and return to the beginning - you have to rewind a song at a time and (B) it no longer lets you say "Okay Google, play Skinny Puppy" because it decided to lock that functionality out to paying customers. So now you have to reach for your phone, browse to Skinny Puppy, find an album and hit play. Because Google can't even lock you out right. I've bitched about the UI before. It's terrible. That wasn't my point, though - my point is that one of the world's most valuable companies, an organization that makes 95% of its revenue from advertising, which has my entire music collection as metadata, which has the world's entire music collection as metadata, which knows enough to know that Enigma and Lesiem and Balligomingo and Adiemus are related... ...thinks that what's going to convince me to pay for their service is interrupting me with L'il Jon.