from the GlobeandMail.com:
People have long been able to watch YouTube videos on their televisions through media centre PCs, Apple TV, and the web browsers of certain game consoles, but the experience is less than ideal. YouTube was designed for the 18-inch viewing experience of someone sitting at a desk; its text and video thumbnails are just too small and unwieldy for the couch-bound.
Hence YouTube for Television, a new interface for the popular video sharing site designed specifically for the ten-foot living room viewing experience and optimized for web browsers available for the Wii and PlayStation 3 (plans are in place to roll it out for browser-equipped set-top boxes in the future).
I powered up my Wii this morning and headed over to www.youtube.com/tv to try it out. After spending almost a minute waiting for the site to load, I found myself on a simplified version of the YouTube home page that consisted of three tabs across the top allowing users to search, sort videos, and access their YouTube accounts, and four large video thumbnails below that showed the most viewed, top rated, currently featured, and most recent YouTube clips. The few words present were giant and easy to read.
As far as browsing content goes, YouTube’s new TV interface is just as powerful as its PC counterpart. Searching for videos was a snap, and all of the standard tools—including favourites, playlists, and subscriptions—were just a couple of clicks away. Plus, you can set video playback to auto-play, which starts up a new video the moment the current video stops playing, simulating to a degree the experience of watching one program after another on television.
However, there are a few missing features for which some avid YouTubers might pine, such as user comments and the ability to upload videos. It seems Google’s goal in developing the TV interface was to facilitate a better viewing experience, even if it came at the expense of community and contribution.
On the topic of viewing experience, the videos don’t appear to be of any higher resolution than what you’d find on your PC, which means when they’re blown up on a TV several times the size of a computer monitor they look grainy and splotchy. I was sitting about two metres back from my 42-inch set and I found many of the videos difficult to watch. The image quality was a bit more palatable when I moved back an additional metre, but I’m not about to move my couch just so I can better appreciate YouTube videos.
And that’s the crux of the streaming-web-video-on-television issue. It doesn’t matter how smart or simple the interface; until YouTube video resolution gets bumped up a few notches I won’t want to watch the site’s clips on my high-definition set.
Still, I’m happy I took the time to check out YouTube for Television, if for no other reason than that I stumbled across the video below—a machinima dance-off between a group of Halo Spartans and characters from Unreal Tournament. Bless nerds with time on their hands.
CARLSBAD, Calif., April 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — NTN Buzztime, Inc., a multi-point social interactive entertainment company, today announced the launch of two new interactive trivia games — “True, Half-True … or a Total Lie” and “Odd Couples.”
These games are now available in bars and restaurants across North America on the Buzztime® Network.
In “True, Half-True … or a Total Lie,” players are challenged to sniff out the correct answer and decide whether each of the statements in each category is (as one might guess) true, half true or a total lie. For example:
Question:
Queen Elizabeth II once misplaced the Koh-i-noor Diamond, the second largest diamond in the world. Luckily, a chambermaid found it in a bathtub.
Answer:
It is half-true! The Koh-i-noor Diamond is part of the royal crown jewels, but the Queen never misplaced it.
Next up is “Odd Couples.” The show challenges players to match seemingly unlikely couples to figure out if they have anything in common by guessing one of them, both of them or neither of them. For example:
Questions:
1. Dropped out of school: Paris Hilton or Bill Gates?
2. Had a tattoo on his bicep — Mr. Clean or Mr. Rogers?
Answers:
1. Both! Paris Hilton and Bill Gates are school dropouts.
2. Neither! Mr. Rogers and Mr. Clean never sported arm ink.
“These games are the next installments in an aggressive slate of new Buzztime programming planned for 2008. “Odd Couples” and “True, Half-True … or a Total Lie” are irreverent, funny and unique, and we hope our players have as much fun playing them as we had creating them,” said Jake Tauber, Buzztime’s Executive Vice President of Content and Marketing.
Played on televisions in each Buzztime subscriber location, the Buzztime network features original programming including predictive sports games, multiple genres of trivia games and casino-style card games. Like all Buzztime games, “True, Half True … or a Total Lie” and “Odd Couples” are free to play. They will air on Thursday nights beginning April 24, with encore presentations throughout the week.
About NTN Buzztime, Inc.
NTN Buzztime, Inc., a leader in multi-point social interactive entertainment for more than 20 years, is based in Carlsbad, CA. Buzztime is distributed in-home and out-of-home across broadband platforms including online, cable TV, satellite TV, and in approximately 3,800 restaurants, sports bars and pubs throughout North America and the United Kingdom. Buzztime entertainment is also available on electronic games and books. For more information, please visit http://www.buzztime.com.
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