Gadgetory

hi I'm Paul Miller with the verge and i'm here with peter good all the product manager for a boon to TV thanks for coming either nice to be here so what is a bunch of TV so a bunch of TV is part of this strategy that we announced back in november at the ubuntu developer summit and it's effectively adapting ubuntu too many different form factors and a bunch of TV is the first thing to come out from that strategy it's actually a technology preview so it's something it's a very early stage product for us what we're demonstrating here at CES is effectively taking the ax bunch of user experience which classically has always been a very PC centric experience and showing that that adapts well to a TV experience is that the concept behind unity because I've played with unity on the desktop is that what you guys were hoping to set up with all these different screens though yeah but but it's important to note that what we don't want to do is take a pc interface and just put it on a bunch of different devices what we want to do is set up a common set of a set of common elements rather that will work well in different form factors so if you if you combine you see the the unity demo I think you guys have a video up online yeah you notice that there are some common elements there in sense of like you know you have your lenses on the left launchers for applications you can switch your views and things like that and it all looks familiar but it's not exactly the same as the PC because that just wouldn't work and we recognize that with a TV you're pretty much navigating with remote you need up down left right and that's it you don't have a mouse you don't have a keyboard shouldn't have to type excessively right so yeah we just want to make sure that that experience worked well in a TV and it's more than just the user experience so that's kind of where we started but then from there we want to actually create a product that people want on the TV there are a lot of TV products out there there's a lot you speak to that sure um so we realized you know when we looked at a lot of the products out there nobody's really gotten it right and many of the experiences that are out there today a lot of the devices are very separate right there a box that you hook into your TV and if you think about it there are a lot of boxes you get into your TV today just to do certain things right so you have a cable box that you hook into your TV and that allows you to watch just regular TV cable satellite terrestrial whatever then you have you may have some kind of online box that gets you to connect it content or and that's a completely separate thing then you have a blu-ray player and that may also have some internet media and then what if you take pictures on your phone you want to show those pictures to your family right in order to do that you have to copy it off your phone onto a USB key stick the USB key and some other device and it all becomes very very complicated so what we wanted to do really was combine all these different boxes into the same thing so bone to TV is effectively the OS for your TV that does many different things but it's not it's all kind of in front of you and presented in a simple manner so that it's not navigating through lots of menus we don't have hidden functionality it's all very you know on the surface right there for you you can still browse your channels just the way you did watch TV just that we did but now you can actually go and find anything you've recorded well you can buy and rent movies you can you know go through anything that's available for for purchase or stuff you've already purchased it actually seems a lot like Windows Media Center yeah I suppose in in some sense Windows Media Center still is very much well so it can run the set-top box it can run on the PC it is still a very separate experience now I think Microsoft's coming out with some new stuff I think they have some deals with cable and satellite things like that but the other thing about going with a solution with a bunch of TV is the canonical the parent company for Ubuntu is a very flexible partner and that's another thing we think we bring to this this table there are a lot of really large companies putting out products that have a similar experience not quite the same at the same time because they're large companies they tend to dominate certain aspects of the relationship and canonical can be that neutral party neutral partner that you can build products based on a bun to not just TVs but you know other devices and we'll see those throughout 2012 and at the same time we allow you to effectively have a bit more freedom and flexibility in the product for instance if a partner already has their own services that they want antegrade into that things like how do you make money after you actually sell the device manufactures these days don't make a lot on the hardware so they need to be able to make money post sale and we want to enable that as well so you guys when you say you you're talking about these manufacturers that you're working with presumably correct our customer is the manufacturer and we build products to help both them and their customers the end users we want to make sure that you know once they sell that product people like that product and it's something that they're going to keep and they'll wanna buy more products is that a different strategy than say the boon to desktop no not in a sense once your desktop we've actually working with PC manufacturers and and server manufactured for a long time and putting a bungie desktop on that TV is is just basically a different space right with the the pc market is just very different right it's classically people are using this for work they're using it for you know writing documents may be browsing the web things like that when you move to a TV it's just a very different very focused experience what you want to do is you want to watch TV you want to watch movies right relatively simple there the other thing is that it's becoming much more common these days that people when people buy a TV right they want to do more with it they may want to watch movies but then they always get the idea of you know I mentioned before watching a slide show or a movie they recently took they don't want to have to go out to the video store to rent the video they don't want to wait in the mail for something to show up for a DVD and so it's kind of about taking all these things this very focused experience and putting these things all together in a package so you guys are doing your own store I saw in the preview or whatever you have sort of sample videos but it looks like you can purchase or rent video yeah so the the demo that we have today is is very offline we're not we're not hooked up but what we have is canonical has an online service called up into one and if once you want as a number of things I mean it started off with just simple file sync but it's also effectively services identity and billing right and so that means that we have media partners like for instance today we have the above one music store right where you can purchase music and what we're working on is deals so that you can actually purchase other stuff like video right so you can purchase or rent those videos and then stream them to any above to one device so while we're putting this into a bunch you want sorry about your TV and make sure it works there you'll also be able to watch them from any other of them to connected devices okay so that's something you guys are working on just in general yes all right and it's it's kind of an overall strategy it's a we realize that for instance not everybody runs ubuntu and people have many devices in their in their own right they may have a tablet they may have a phone those today aren't necessary running ubuntu they may be running iOS they may be running android and a bunch of one already works on those platforms and so we want to be able to enable people to have the media if they want to get access to on all their devices yeah so what about you know you guys are supporting things like cable and satellite and cable card I mean is that is that just being realistic because a lot of the TV stuff happening here is about getting away from that industry distributing just purely online yeah but that's not necessarily reality I mean that today there's there's a lot of different providers cable and satellite providers you know large ones like Comcast and sky and they do provide a very valuable service to people right and people are already using these subscription services there any I have access to things like movies that are showing on TV or TV shows to be able to want to be able to watch and so well you can go to that video lens and you can find maybe a video you want to buy or rent at the same time you can also search quickly or filter quickly for a show you want to watch and then set up a recording and then it's also going to be in the same place again easy to find all your video content in the same place and as you guys work with you guys are kind of in between pit the hardcore open source completely you know linux linux guys and then the you know manufacturers just in it to make a buck you know evil you know like how is this being received by those people like but by your buyer i both linux by your linux you know core community i think so the longest community at their heart really wants to see linux proliferate right they want to see it used in many different places and the bunch of community in general is very happy with this extravagant stick about ubuntu they enjoy contributing to it and they enjoy seeing their work effectively out in the public people who are not necessarily the same as as them they're not hard core developers they're just average people or and seeing them using free software and using a blin to on the device i think is something that excited about so you guys are you guys built this kind of in house now you pushed it out and now your communities helping you build it yeah yeah and it's very much a collaboration with the community we've we've at this point we're we're setting a direction when we first announced the strategy for multi-screen and we talked about it 12 TV I think a buncha TV was the most popular an active discussion community we have internet chat rooms effectively right that we use quite a lot those were definitely vibrating discussions about how it should look how it should work or the technologies that we need to build into it or what are the things we need to consider we also have a mailing list which is also quite active and so it's been really good actually to see the community get really excited about this and we want to continue that so you know we worked in-house to take a technology we've built already unity which is the actual user experience basis for the user experience and then adapted that and now from here we want to continue building out like I was talking about for the back end it's more than just what people see is how things work in the back end right how do you share media across a network without making people think what protocol do I need or what access you know credentials do I need and things like that we want to make things much more simple and seamless and some of these things are things that have already been solved an open source and some of these things are things that if they were solved on open source they'd be helpful to all open source projects yes certainly so there are a lot of different products today that do a few of these things and they'll do them very well but at the same time they're often the back end works great but the front end is kind of it needs a bit of work right you want to make sure that a like I say you don't expose these are just so much technical detail they don't want to they don't want to worry about where does this content live they just want to see it right they don't want to know that the movie is necessarily in the cloud on amazon or on their machine they just want to know I want to watch that movie right or I want to see those pictures and how do I get to this so when should we expect this in the market we can't necessarily announced a time frame because right now we're actively engaging with device manufacturers and it all depends on when they're ready to go to market okay but I will say that this is a very early stage product right we've worked out the user experience we think we've got more to work on more specifics about things like you know recording videos and things like that and then we've got work to actually integrate it on a device and then you know integrating partner services so it'll be a little while before you see it but this would be the first of many technologies I think that you'll see coming out of canonical over the next year including and you guys are working phones and tablets yeah i mean that's that's part of our strategy right we want to make sure we work accurately toward that and hopefully you guys will see more of that throughout this year no no days no no no dates it's a it's exciting I mean I think it'll be great i I really i do want to see you know i think that a lot of people are sad to see me go go down and there hasn't been really an open-source alternative so yeah yeah I'm way we're excited to bringing a bunch of these different devices I think it's really important actually for the platform itself yeah we've done well in pcs and we've done well in servers were actually growing quite well there and cloud as well but at the same time we need to be able to go into these different devices that are completely separate from what we've done classically I think no all right well thank you so much better thank you let's go talking you too