Gadgetory

so for the longest time in the living room we've wanted one set top box to rule them all something that would combine live TV on-demand streaming services and a cloud DVR well today a company called Manhattan says that they've cracked it about two years ago they released an iOS app that help you discover movies and TV shows across all different kinds of apps it turns out the whole time they were actually working on hardware a set-top box that would do all those things I just described more we came down to their offices in san mateo to see what they've been working on so around here we call it the the friday evening problem and so the friday evening problem is you know you come back home and sort of you want to watch a movie whether on your own or with your wife i'll go find out the whole family and there's a the session you're going to go through in terms of finding something to watch it's going to be one that's going to end up in frustration so we call this a friday evening product and as a company we've been focused on creating a entertainment experience that is one that's you know immersive and simple and joyful and we've done that on ipad where we launched an app an app that ties together all the different streaming services but when it came to the living room the issue was actually a lot a lot more pronounced because of you know the different remote controls we are dribbling with and so we decided to set up with our own hardware mostly because we realized that there was not a clear platform that was built and that scale in the living room already in which you could sort of run a service black time without touch remote you can literally flip the channel right now i'm watching a channel and i want to peek what's on the channel to the right so I'm going to sort of swab it in and you see with my set of grabbing in oh if that's a dentist shows okay maybe i'll see what's on the other side on the other side is okay american figures cool well i can click through a bunch of channel or do this right oh cool it's a movie i want to watch so so i can sit down and watch it if i want to browse through the the other channels i can bring up the overlay and here again i'm literally going to swipe through those as if it was a giant tablet and it becomes really natural to sort of check out either all the channels or here you go to full history of the channels you just watched and so it's kind of like think of it as a browser where I can go back and through all the sort of bread crumbs of channels that I've watched its kind of the simplest to kiedy experienced attorney you can have and also the the most fun one because I'm essentially using the remote to swipe through different channels it's very cool we still think that the logic of adding yet one more device you know and daisy chain it with the other devices and sort of overlaying one user interface on top of another and having sort of an infrared blaster coming back and trying to control the other device is really kludgy and in 2013 they ought to be a better solution so this was our ideas to create a device that really is the only one you need so that you can also have only one remote control to advance the experience I think it actually doesn't matter how big of a company you are on how many hundreds of people you have working on it in fact I think most of the kids are most of the time it's a question of focus so we build the software and now we build the hard way up to grow with a software so we can deliver something that security a really a compelling user experience that's fancy v it's coming out later this year there's still a lot of things you don't know about it how much it'll cost what cable companies that will be available on as of right now there is no version plan for course others you have to have the cable company music but if the hardware we've seen and the user interface that we play with or any indication is quickly just the kind of set top box that a lot of us have been looking for