Media in the Stream

And then then she explained that she meant streaming media hardware, and specifically, she wanted to learn more about the various devices you can purchase to stream Internet content to a television, like a Roku or an Amazon fire stick, that kind of stuff. And you know, these days, there are tons of different options you could choose from if you wanted to do that. Plus there are plenty of televisions that have at least some of those capabilities built in to

them natively. But in this episode, we're going to do a rundown on the history of the trend and how those various devices work from kind of a high level. Plus, what if anything really differentiates one device from another? Well, to understand these devices it's actually a good idea for us to step back a bit and talk about streaming media in general. And that actually means that you guys got to step into the elevator with me. So come on in, let's playing room, guys, come on, just you know,

cramming here. Okay, Now that we're all in the elevator, we know a couple of things. First, that darn closed door button is just total garbage, is not connected to anything. But we also know that our ears will now be treated to some lovely instrumental music. Listen. Soothing, isn't it? And you've likely heard this symphonic masterpiece referred to as Musaic mu z a K. Well, that's a trademark name, and it's possible because of a guy named George Owen

Squire way back in the nineteen tents. See, Georgie was a heck of a guy. He attained the rank of major general in the U. S. Military. He had a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. So this dude was both super smart and he believed in serving his country, which, you know, Wow, hats off to you, Major General Squire anyway, not content with you know, just being a decorated soldier

and holding a PhD. He was also an inventor. In nineteen eleven, Squire was looking into a method of delivering audio, both in the form of music and in speech, over electrical wires, and he called it wired radio, meaning instead of broadcasting signals using an antenna, he could deliver audio

over physical electrical cables. Now, this was before the days of consumer radio, and very few people had the equipment or know how to use a radio at all, so Squire saw this as a way to deliver audio to the home without the need for all that equipment and knowledge. Now that brief explanation makes it sound a lot like the telephone, which had already been invented, but Squire made

some significant contributions to this technology. In nineteen eleven, he patented a way to transmit high frequency signals across wires that were intended for lower frequency transmission. The patent has

the name quote multiplex Telephony and Telegraphy end quote. Now what this meant in practical terms is that Squire had found a way to transmit quote a plurality of telephonic and telegraphic messages over a single telephone circuit end quote, So one circuit could serve as a conduit for multiple transmissions simultaneously, and this was done by encoding the audio

signals using different frequencies. So for signal one, you would have one band of frequencies, for signal two you would have a different band of frequencies, and because you had these different bands, you could easily differentiate between different signals. You would need an encoding device on one end and a decoding device on the other end in order to send and receive the proper signals, but the circuits wouldn't have to do anything special at all. The circuits would

just be the pathway. You didn't have to do anything special to them, so in many ways this wasn't that different from actual radio broadcasts. A receiver is capable of picking up a wide range of radio frequencies. Using a tuner, you can select one frequency, or in actuality, it's a narrow band of frequencies around a key frequency. Then you can pick up a single radio signal, and really it's more like you're tuning out all the signals that are

not the one you are interested in, right. It's like it's like making sure that you're ignoring all the noise so that you get the signal. So, to use an analogy, it's like if you went to a party where there are a lot of people talking all at once, but you're focusing on one specific person to hear what they're saying, and as a result, you're focusing on them and you're ignoring everyone else. Well, Squire did the same thing for transmissions across an electrical wire. He was just using it

with technology as opposed to your focus. Squire donated his patents to the American public because I mean, come on, this guy, folks, this guy anyway, by the nineteen twenties, he was looking to use his technology to send music to speakers directly. He was taken by the name Kodak. He thought that sounded really good and thought something similar would serve as a good name for this service that

would deliver music to customers, and thus he chose Muzak. Now, it took several years for the Musaic company to get to the point where it could actually deliver music to customers over electrical wires. Sadly, Major General Squire would pass

away before that day came. Meanwhile, radio had matured and companies like our Cia had created consumer radio sets, which meant there wasn't much point targeting the general public with this service because radio was already doing it, but it did still make sense to offer it to businesses and restaurants, you know, places that might not be able to pick up a radio signal easily, but these are places that still maybe wanted to make use of music to improve

the ambiance of the environment. And thus we got elevator music and an early concept in streaming media. Now we're gonna skip ahead to nineteen seventy two, so several dec

aids at this point. We can all get out of the elevator now, by the way, So in nineteen seventy two, there was a computer scientist an electrical engineer named Nasir Ahmed who invented a process called discrete cosign transform or d c T. Now that probably sounds really technical, and it is, but if we want to be super general about it to kind of understand what was going on, we can say that this is a method of representing something, representing an image, for example, or an audio file, and

you represent it as the sum of various waves that represent different magnitudes and frequencies, so you're mathematically describing something. Now that representation has the benefit of taking up much less data than the thing itself would if you were

to encode it directly. Now, if I were to use a very general analogy, I would say that we would imagine there's an artist who has created a painting on an a norm canvas, and it would be difficult, would be a hassle, and it would be expensive to ship this painted canvas because it's just big and bulky, and it would be delicate, so it'd be hard to do.

So Instead, a messenger of some artistic ability shows up and studies this painting and writes down a careful description of that painting, everything from what the painting is, of the types of materials used in the painting, the colors, everything. They bring that description then to a destination. At the destination, another artist takes that description to recreate the original painting, and it probably won't be a perfect representation of the original.

And in fact, compression technologies that rely on d c T tend to be lossy formats. That means you lose some data in the process of compression and decompression. So I think this tracks anyway. D c T was an important factor in finding a way to compress a file down to a more manageable size, and that's the underlying technology that would make streaming possible in the early days of the Internet. Okay, well skip ahead again another twenty

years or so. It's time to talk about a former Microsoft executive named Rob Glazer who formed a new company in nine called Progressive Networks. Glazier had made a fortune over at Microsoft. He was part of Microsoft as it experienced explosive growth, and he rose in the ranks while he was there, and he became a wealthy man because of it. He also possesses very strong liberal views. He grew up with a very strong liberal point of view.

So his original intent with Progressive Networks was to create a media company that could spread progressive messaging and advocate for progressive political policies. His team began developing technologies that would allow of this mission, and that included a downloadable media player that could act as a sort of plug in for a web browser. And as it turned out, when they would talk to investors, the investors were way more interested in the underlying technology of the company than

the message that Glasier was hoping to spread. Now, keep in mind that in n the web itself was a pretty new thing. The very first web page was created in August nine, so the Web had not been around for very long at all. The World Wide Web was growing, but it was extremely primitive compared to what we have today. It also wasn't able to support rich dynamic material natively. This is why a plug in would be needed, because

the HTTP protocol couldn't support streaming on its own. Those were the days when browsing the Internet meant you had to download half a dozen different plugins if you wanted to experience everything that was being created, and simultaneously, you would be opening up potential security vulnerabilities on your computer because you had to download all these other things to

make that connectivity possible and that that dynamic material possible. Anyway, back to streaming, Progressive Networks created a suite of technologies that collectively we're called real Audio all one word big are big A. This included a proprietary streaming format and a plug in player, and the concept was great because it would allow you to listen to an audio file while you were in the process of downloading that file, so you didn't have to wait for the full file

to download before you could start to listen. Sort of similar to how images used to load in browsers, because in the good old days, downloading an image meant you would watch as line by line of pixels appeared on your screen until you got the finished picture. Well, this was similar, except you were hearing audio that was recorded at a low bit rate, so it wasn't super high quality do that was a limitation of the technology at the time, and you could listen to it while that

audio file was downloading to your machine. It was sort of like laying down railroad tracks while there's a train slowly catching up to you from behind. Blazer's team recognized that this approach would let you do more than just listen to, say, a music file as you downloaded it. It would also let you stream audio from a broadcast source across the Internet so that people could listen in live. It was like a live radio broadcast, but using the

Internet to carry the signal rather than the airwaves. So really you could think of this as the next step after using those electrical wires to carry multiple audio signals like music did so. On September five, Progressive Networks partnered with ESPN Sports Zone and they transmitted a baseball game.

It was the Seattle Mariners versus the New York Yankees, and for the first time, anyone interested in the game who happened to be subscriber to ESPN Sports Zone and have a computer enabled with sound and an Internet connection, and this player could listen in on this audio transmission

on this real audio platform. It was a good game to the Mariners led six to one at the top of the sixth and then the Yankees managed to score four more runs, so the final game score was six five Mariners, which is not a bad debut for streaming audio, might have been a tough blow to Yankees fans. It was a big pr success for Glazier's company, not to mention for Glazier himself, since he was part owner of the Mariners. However, the actual reach of this broadcast was

pretty modest. Only a few hundred people had the ability to receive the streaming audio because they met all the criteria that were required in order to do so. But it marked the beginning of an era. That being said, it wasn't exactly off to the races for streaming media. Glazier's team had created the first platform capable of play being live streamed audio on the Internet, but there wasn't

exactly an overabundance of opportunities to use that capability. The Internet in general and the Web in particular, we're still pretty young, at least for the public use of those utilities. Moreover, connectivity speeds weren't exactly at broadband levels. The vast majority of Internet users in the United States were relying on dial up modems that had hefty limitations on download speeds, so it would take time for communications companies to develop

and roll out broadband connectivity. Heck, you know, we're still seeing pretty slow rollout in some communities in the United States, but that's a discussion for another day. Progressive Networks struck up a deal in with Microsoft, and this agreement meant that Microsoft would include a distribution of the Real Audio player with Internet Explorer, and that gave Progressive Networks a

huge boost in adoption. Meanwhile, the company was hard at work to create Real Video, which was essentially for streaming video what Real Audio was for streaming audio. Real Video would debut in around that same time. Bill Gates over at Microsoft was beginning to think he made an error

in helping out Progressive Networks. Gates saw that streaming media had the potential to be much bigger than it had been in it was mostly viewed as a curiosity then, and he felt that Microsoft really needed to own a piece of that business, or being Microsoft, he probably felt

that it needed to own all of it. Initially, Microsoft entered the industry by purchasing a competing streaming media company, but then Glazer met with Gates and the two hashed out a licensing deal that would embed real audio and real video technology in Microsoft's Windows Media Player platform. Progressive Networks would then change its name to Real Networks and it would continue to butt heads against Microsoft, but that's

outside the realm of our focus for this episode. Now, before I go on, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Hiring the right person takes time, time that you often don't have. Urgency can be your enemy when it comes to finding candidates that are truly meant for your business. That's why LinkedIn is the best place to post your job. With LinkedIn, you can find the right person quickly and easily. I like it because I want businesses and job candidates to get matched up efficiently.

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your first job post. Terms and conditions apply. All right, let's get back to streaming media. Back in the nineteen nineties, no one was really sure how the streaming media thing was going to play out. There was a real sense that there would be some big battles brewing between the entrenched old media, that being radio and television and this

upstart new media enabled by the Internet. There's a piece and Wired titled Real Revolution, which obviously is largely about progressive network slash real networks Rise, and it has a very prescient vision of what would eventually turn into reality in the form of sites like YouTube. Now I'm gonna quote Robert Ride's article because it's really interesting how on target he was, though it was about a decade early.

Ryan was talking about the possibilities that open up once technology allows for the transmission of video so that you can view it in a full sized window on a computer screen. And here's what he says him quote all this could wreak havoc with the competitive dynamics of the TV industry, opening millions of living rooms to any hyperactive kid with a video camera, a computer and a phone line,

which may soon mean most kids in America. Or it could give the likes of Murdoch and Ted Turner and eight Lane Highway into the heartland of the traditionally democratized, decentralized net or maybe do both end quote and you know what, bingo, he hit the nail on the head there, because that's exactly what we've seen. YouTube created the opportunity for regular folks to upload videos for the world to see and later to stream live video to the world

as well. Bigger media companies, the traditional ones, would also take advantage of tech to offer streaming services from established traditional media companies. And we've seen content made for cinemas and broadcast or cable television repackaged for the Internet. But we've also seen a lot of projects made specifically for those streaming services themselves. So yeah, that was a great prediction. Now let's shift gears a bit. So while real video

was launching in another company was just getting started. That company was Netflix, which when it started was all about renting out DVDs to customers who would pay a monthly fee to watch as many DVDs as they liked, or really as many as they could, depending on how much time it took to ship a new DVD to the customer and return old DVDs back to Netflix through the mail. By two thousand, Netflix founder Read Hastings saw the potential for streaming media to act as a new way to

deliver this type of service to customers. He was also in fierce competition with Blockbuster, which was still a thing back then. Initially, Hastings approached Blockbuster with the opportunity of a partnership in which Netflix would become the streaming component for the company Blockbuster, but that deal didn't go anywhere. And that makes sense because back in two thousand when Hastings was meeting with Blockbuster, broadband connectivity wasn't really a

thing yet. Most customers wouldn't be able to take advantage of a streaming service, or if they did, it would have to be at such a compression rate that the image and sound would be awful, or the size of a postage stamp, so it didn't make sense at the time.

It would be like watching everything on a super crappy bootleg VHS tape, and it would take several years for the technology to evolve to the point that it would work for the average customer, which is why Netflix wouldn't introduce its streaming service or even announce it until two thousand seven. I'll get to that in a little bit, But in the fall of two thousand six, Steve Jobs revealed at an Apple event that the company was making an Apple product that would bring content offered through the

Apple iTunes store to consumer televisions. The original concept was a box that would sink with an iTunes customers computer so that the customer could send content that they had rented or purchased on the iTunes store on their computer to this box via standard eight oh two eleven WiFi, So you would send it via WiFi to this box, and the box would then push this content to a television through an h d M I cable or through component video cables d IS remember component video, and then

it also supported both analog and digital audio outputs, so this box was sort of a middleman between a computer and the television, and Jobs called it i t V in the demo, but when it launched the following year, the company would simply call it Apple TV, and its initial form, the Apple TV required a networked computer to supply the content, so this was not a box that you could just hook up to the Internet at large and pull down video or music using a user interface

with the box itself. There was this intermediary step with the networked computer, but this was to try and solve a problem that a lot of people had, which was that for a lot of folks, they weren't sure how to connect their computers to their televisions so that they could watch Internet streaming content on their TVs. There were ways to do it, but it wasn't exactly easy for the average consumer. There involved a lot of different uh hardware, cables,

and different software packages that you needed to do. You have to worry about different resolutions. It ended up being something that the average person just wasn't comfortable handling. So

this was Apple's solution to that problem. But in addition to this intermediary step, the media services that Apple supported did not include stuff like Netflix or other online media, and most of the content on iTunes had been optimized for much smaller screens than your average television, so the resulting video in those early days of Apple TV wasn't

super high quality. Apple would make adjustments to how it approached the Apple TV over the following years, and it includes some online media connectivity and remove the requirement to sync with a networked computer, which made it more of a true streaming box over time. But in that early incarnation you probably wouldn't call it a streaming box. It was more like a sinking slash downloading box. Also in two thousand and six, Amazon announced a service called Amazon Unboxed. Now.

This was Amazon's digital video download service, and again This was all about downloading video content, not streaming it, but it would serve as the foothold for Amazon to evolve this service later and to what we now call Prime Video. I'll get back to that later in this episode. So while Netflix was emerging from struggling business into a successful competitor with Blockbuster, there was another guy named Anthony Wood who was the founder of a DVR company called Replay TV,

who created his sixth company. He named it Roku, which is Japanese for six. Roku was in the business of making streaming media products like digital radios and digital signage. He got into some early discussions with Read Hastings about developing a streaming video set top box for the company, but Hastings wasn't really sure about it. Eventually, Anthony would joined the Netflix team to head up their Internet TV

division while also still running things back at Roku. So we get close to when Netflix is getting ready to launch its streaming service, It's web based streaming service in two thousand seven, and originally Hastings was on board with actually making a piece of hardware, a set top box that would be like a VCR or a DVD player, or more recently a DVR, but this device would pull content down over the Internet and send it to the television, so Netflix would have a selection of its titles available

to stream to this box. Internally at Netflix, this device project was called Griffin. It was named after a character in the film The Player. Netflix launched a beta of its streaming service, which again that was just purely web based, so people were watching these streaming programs on their computers, and things were headed toward a manufacturing run of the hardware box that would bring that capability to the living

room television set. But then Hastings began to reconsider this strategy, and his fear was that if Netflix produced and shipped its own hardware, its own branded box, it would be seen as a competitive move against some of the company's Netflix was partnering with in licensing agreements. So in addition to the set top box, Woods team was creating a technology that could be used by other types of manufacturers,

including television manufacturers, video game console manufacturers, and more. The whole idea was get Netflix on everything, to add that Netflix connectivity to any device. Hastings reportedly said to someone in Netflix his worry was if he produced the hardware, then a company like Apple would never agree to include Netflix as an option on its own hardware are and one thing Hastings really wanted to make certain happen was that Netflix would be available pretty much on any platform

that had an Internet connection. I mean, you even find refrigerators that have Netflix apps on them. So after some debate, he scrapped this project. Now that was a big hard decision to make, because you have to remember that Netflix had spent a huge amount of money, not to mention time and effort to develop the technologies for this player.

The company had worked on video buffering techniques to help make sure that the end user could actually watch a video without too many interruptions or sudden dips and image and audio quality. Keeping in mind that even in two thousand and seven and two thousand and eight when this was launching, broadband internet speeds still were not you know, universal by any stretch of the imagination. They had also gone through all the different phases of design, prototyping, building

out various production early production models, and testing them. It really had gone pretty darn far. I mean they were almost at the stage where they could go into full on production when Hastings decided to pull the plug on the project, but that work would not go to waste. Instead, Hastings chose to spin off this development back to Woods company. Roku now would had been an integral part of developing

this technology, so this wasn't exactly a gift. He had played an important role in making it happen, so this was a savvy move to save all of that work and to leverage it in a different way. Netflix would be one of many services that the Roku player would be able to access. It gave Netflix a prominent way to be a part of a new type of hardware without the company appearing to horn in on hardware partners.

It also meant Netflix was free to license tech out to other hardware companies and not create a possible conflicked as would put it. Ad meant that the company wasn't faced with questions like should we make decisions based on what's best for licensing or what's best for our own hardware. The Roku player would launch in two thousand and eight. I'll talk about that more in just a second, but first let's take another quick break. All right back to

late two thousand seven. That's the same year that A O L Comcast MSN Yahoo, MySpace, remember when my Space was a thing and Facebook created a joint venture called Hulu dot Com. The rise of Netflix was making some media companies a little nervous. No One, and by no one, I mean none of these media companies really liked the idea of Netflix becoming the dominant provider of online streaming media, because then it would be able to dictate terms to

everyone else. Customers might love being able to get everything on one service, but for the media companies, that wasn't necessarily the most advantageous arrangement. So Fox and NBC quickly signed on with Hulu to provide content to the service. Hulu dot Com would launch on March twelve, two thousand eight. Back in two thousand and seven, again, there was a company that was called Voo Doo vu Du that released its own media player. The media player had the sexy

name of b X one hundred. Now, according to c net, it was the quote first real internet video on demand box worthy of the name end quote. Now. To use the box, you would purchase or rent video. Using the Voodoo service, you could order programs on screen, which differentiated it from the early Apple TV. Remember you had to have a sinc computer to send stuff to the first generation Apple TV, and it had to be on the

same network as the Apple TV was. The Voodoo b X one hundred sported a two hundred fifty gigabyte hard drive, which should be a dead giveaway that this was not a streaming box. Now, this was a device that was meant to store videos on an internal hard drive for you to watch later, so you were effectively downloading movies to the box. To watch, users would have to connect

an Ethernet cable to the Voodoo box. There was no built in WiFi support, though you could get an add on kit that would kind of create a WiFi bridge. The player had several options when it came to connecting to a television, though the preferred one was with an HDMI cable because that would serve as a conduit for both high definition video and digital audio signals. Still, while this wasn't early Internet TV box, it wasn't really for

streaming media in the strictest sense. In May two eight, Roku would launch its Media player, and at that point it was essentially a Netflix set top box. It retailed for nine and it had no monthly fee, so you didn't have to have a subscription to use the Roku.

So a Netflix customer could buy this box for one dollars, then they bring it home connected to their home network, connected to their television, and then after a brief set up process, they could link it with their existing Netflix account and as long as they maintained that Netflix subscription, the service would work. Netflix boasted a library of about one hundred thousand DVD titles at that time, but only

about ten of that library was available for streaming. That was due to the complicated licensing issues that media companies always have in place, but that early version of the Roku was essentially limited to just Netflix. Later updates to the service and to the hardware would open up compatibility with numerous services, including stuff like YouTube and Amazon Video, among others. Speaking of Amazon Video, two thousand eight was

when Amazon renamed Unboxed as Amazon Video on Demand. They would stick with that name until two thousand eleven, when they'd rename it again. This time they called it Amazon Instant Video. This would be about the time when they started to allow streaming, not just downloads. In two thousand fifteen, it would get renamed again and would become Amazon Video, and in two thousand eighteen, it would become Prime Video.

Amazon likes to thumb it's knows that the common wisdom that changing the name of a product too many times creates confusion. I guess now. It really wasn't until eleven, with the rebranding of Amazon Instant Video, that the company began to push streaming along with the concept of downloading videos, and eventually they moved away from downloading entirely. They focused solely on delivering digital video via streaming, so you had to have a persistent Internet connection to watch these movies.

Now there are a couple of ways you can still download a digital video, but you have to do it onto something like a fire tablet or an Android or

iOS device. The big streaming services now included Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, but lots of others would follow, like HBO now, CBS All Access, brit Box for British shows, ESPN Plus, Disney Plus which is just about the debut as I record this episode and will be live by the time this episode goes live, I believe YouTube tv also launched, and services for video game consoles like Xbox One and the PlayStation consoles also had online streaming options, but that's

just the services and we're really here to talk also about the hardware, like the Roku. So what are the options if you want to hook up a set top box to your television in order to watch online content, You've got a whole bunch of them. There are the video game consoles. That's a great option. The latest versions can support ultra high definition video content, which is great if you have a four K television. They also tend

to have support for just about all streaming services. Netflix led the way on that front because they made sure that they could be included on all types of hardware, and a lot of other services followed suit. It's not the universal truth, however. You might find that some services are only on one but not the other, particularly the

ones that were made specifically for that console. Obviously, you're not going to find the PlayStation View Network on the Xbox console, for example, But on top of the consoles, you've got lots of other options. For one thing, Most Blu ray players these days have at least some support for online streaming services. The very first Blu ray player launched in the United States did not do that. It

lacked internet connectivity. There was no Ethernet port, and there was no WiFi, but lots of the Blu ray players that followed could connect either via WiFi or Ethernet, and the original intent for that was to create the opportunity for media companies to enhance the features of a physical

disc with additional online content. So let's say you bought a Blu Ray version of Oh I don't know, um Berry Gordon's the Last Dragon, Well, you might discover that because of internet connectivity, you also have access to additional features that are not actually found on the disc itself.

But beyond this use case, a lot of companies began to include support for various online streaming services into Blu ray players, which turned the Blu ray players into more of a general media center, not just a disc player. Then there are the dedicated devices that you connect to your TV and are all about delivering streaming content. There's the various versions of Roku, like the Roku Express, the Roku Premier, plus the Roku Ultra devices. All of those

plug into support on a modern television. There's Google's Chrome Cast, which lets you stream from a network to computer to the television, very much like the Apple TV product did. There's the Video Shield TV with built in support for Google Assistant. Amazon has the Fire family of streaming devices, so these are the really big contenders in that space.

From a technological standpoint, they're fairly similar. Most of the options today can not only push out ultra high definition video, assuming you have an Internet connection that can accommodate that, most of them are also compatible with HDR, or high dynamic range that describes the range of color in a video feed. So that's both sharpness with the resolution and

color representation with HDR. The differences mostly boiled down to two really big things, how you interface with the underlying system so that you can get to the stuff you want to see, and which streaming services are supported on each device. But otherwise they're really not that different. There are proprietary elements to each one, but ultimately all of them are geared toward pulling data down from the Internet and feeding it to your television and a signal that

the TV quote unquote understands. Now, in my personal experience, the thing that matters the most to me is the UI for the device itself doesn't make sense. Can you find the stuff you want to look for if you have to type in a title? Is that easy to do? Is it responsive. Is there a delay between when I hit a command and when something actually happens, because if there is, I hate that. Delays make it really hard

to tell if a device has registered a command. I can't tell you how many times I've sent back to back commands to play and then pause because I didn't realize the device had already registered the play command, so I pushed it again and then everything just starts, stops, and jutters, and I hate it. It really gets my biscuits and burning. And of course, a lot of television manufacturers are build again a native capability to access these

sorts of services. Many of you out there probably have televisions that already supports some or all of the streaming services that I've mentioned on here. The television connects to your in home network, either hardlined by the net or through WiFi, and there's no need for any additional hardware to get access to stuff like Netflix or Amazon Video. You just have to link it to your existing account. You're dependent upon the UI designed for that particular television,

which sometimes can be a bit lacking. You might be surprised to hear that, despite the fact that I host a technology podcast, I do not have the most cutting edge versions of these technologies in my own home. For one thing, I don't own a four K television, so stuff like Ultra high definition and HDR support would be wasted on me because my television isn't capable of taking advantage of those features. So before I did that, I would need to go out and buy a brand new television,

and believe me, I'm tempted to do it. But at the same time, my current television still works just fine. It just can't support anything beyond good old ten A D resolution, so it's not the best TV, but it works. So it's hard for me to justify going out and buying a new one, especially since I'm married to a

woman who's extremely practical. Because trust me, there have been moments of weakness where I've almost ordered a new four K TV, but fear for my own personal safety has outweighed my desire to have the new shiny thing now. I have owned a Roku Player in the past. I very much liked it, though it was pretty bare bones on features and it was a little bit of a chore to navigate using the stubby little remote control that came with it. But finally I could watch online content

on my television without much trouble, which was awesome. Now these days, I have a Chrome Cast, but it's a first generation Chrome Cast, so it's the one that originally came out from Google and has just those features. I also have a first generation Xbox one and a first generation PlayStation four, so these are all capable of streaming media to my television, but they lack the more recent

capabilities of Ultra high definition and HDR. In fact, these days, it's the only way I do watch television is through these streaming services and these devices. I haven't turned on cable or even broadcast television in a couple of years now. Maybe in a future episode, I'll do a full rundown on the various streaming services that are out there, where they came from, and how they're competing with each other. I think there's also a very valuable conversation to have

about consumer frustration. One of the big attractive things about streaming was this idea of cutting the cord for cable companies. You'd be able to get what you wanted and you could ignore the rest of the junk. But we now have a very fractured online media landscape out there, with some shows and films that are exclusive to certain platforms, which means unless you subscribe to multiple services, you're probably

missing out on something you really want to see. The headaches of streaming are rapidly approaching the same levels of frustration that you had when you subscribe to an enormous cable package in which you might only care about a half dozen channels. But that's a topic for another time. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, send me a message the email addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line

on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is text Stuff hs W. Don't forget to visit our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You'll find a link to the archive of every tech stuff episode that has ever been recorded. You also find a link to our online store where you can make a purchase and it goes to help our show, and we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.

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