Xbox One: Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary for Video

Yesterday, Microsoft finally demo’d their new “game center,” The Xbox One. It comes complete with HDMI Pass-thru for cable and satellite; Blu-ray player for HD movies, a trending content section of videos your friends are watching; capacity to Skype while watching TV, movies, and videos; tons of memory to store all your movies, TV shows, and music; and slick voice/gesture controls to navigate through your movies and TV shows without the remote… All in all, an amazing way to experience all of your favorite… games, err… videos, movies, and TV.

That’s right, Microsoft recognized that people spend more total time watching video than playing games on their current box and designed Xbox One to cater directly to this habit. The result is a full on “entertainment center.” Sure, you can play games on it too, but that’s not the point. 

From its industrial design - shaped like a cable box - to its UX - the ability to “pin” favorite shows to your home screen - this is a big move by Microsoft to own the digital hearth of the modern home… that means, going beyond hard-core gamers and making the Xbox One all about TV and entertainment. 

Don’t believe me? Just watch the highlights of the keynote.

Clearly, Microsoft’s commander’s intent is to own the digital living room. As everyone in the space knows, it’s an all-out war for your TV between the likes of Samsung, Google, Amazon, Roku, Boxee, the cable operators, and oh yeah, that fruit company.

But this update by Microsoft isn’t as revolutionary as it seems. Yes, the tech itself is a step forward and the social integrations will be interesting, but it’s not that disruptive to the actual video industry. It still requires a cable subscription and the VOD experience just isn’t there. Really, it’s evolutionary… an upgrade to their tech with (classically) lots of features to fill out the tech specs on the back of the box.

The real win in this space will be a disruptive move for consumers on their cable subscription AND/OR a robust app ecosystem that allows smart, creative developers to build the next generation experiences for these amazing devices. Look no further than the iOS developer ecosystem to see what I mean.

At the end of the day, I’m still excited about the Xbox One. I’m not a gamer, but any move to make my TV more powerful, more alive, and (ironically) more human,** is a good one in my mind. While it’s still lacking the developer ecosystem I’d like to see, it’s another step in the right direction of making TV suck less.

That being said, I am still betting on Apple to open up an app ecosystem - whether it’s on their current device or on a giant 60 inch screen - and when they do, it’s going to be awesome. 

What do you think?

 

Links:

Wired: Xbox One Revealed

Xbox One

Videonuze: Pretty Face but No Fundamental TV Disruption

 

** Yes. Voice navigation > crappy remote control on scale of humanness and Skype integration will be interesting for sure.

#Sandy Coverage and Relief

To all of our Shelby viewers and fans

What a week it was in NYC. We hope you are safe and well. For those affected by the hurricane, we send you our best wishes towards a speedy recovery.

This past week, Shelby viewers shared some incredible video of the storm, the aftermath, and the inspiring relief efforts. It’s pretty eye-opening to see.

So, we created a Hashtag Roll of video for #Sandy. It aggregates all the videos about Sandy that have been shared by viewers this past week. It also offers an easy way to help - we include a link to donate to Red Cross disaster relief right within Shelby.

We’re donating and we hope you do, too. 

Sincerely, 

Team Shelby

Introducing NerdFitness.tv!

We’re so excited to be working with our friend Steve Kamb at Nerd Fitness to produce NerdFitness.tv!

Check out Steve’s post below for more details…

It’s an exciting time to be a Nerd Fitness Rebel!

Our goal at Nerd Fitness is to eliminate every potential excuse you might have for not getting healthy.  We’ve covered how to eat right, how to work out, how to be more productive, how to walk, run, and hike, how to do a push up, how to do your first pull up…but we still get one issue above all others:

“I just can’t seem to get motivated!”

I hear ya.  Some days, you just don’t want to get out of bed.  Other days you come home from work and that couch looks MIGHTY cozy.  Another round of Halo or Modern Warfare 3 sounds way more enjoyable than exercising.

Which is why we’ve created our own freaking TV channel!

NerdFitness.TV is born!

Nerd Fitness TV

A few weeks back while traveling through New York City with my boy James Clear, I had a chance to sit down with my friends Reece and Chris atShelby.TV

They’ve created an awesome video platform that lets people watch and curate their own channel of the best video they find all around the web (content from YouTube, Hulu, ESPN, Vimeo, etc.).  It also gets smart about content you like and don’t like, showing you the stuff you need to see and getting you back to the real world so you can keep kicking ass.

The SECOND I saw what they were building, a light bulb went off in my head: “We need to have a Nerd Fitness TV channel with an epic motivational videos playing ALL the time.”

The guys at Shelby agreed, and thus – Nerd Fitness TV was born :)

When you visit NerdFitness.TV, you’ll see my personally selected list of motivational videos that will make you want to run through walls, do a million push ups, walk to Mordor, and exercise around the world.

Anytime you are EVER in need of motivation – visit NerdFitness.TV, watch a video or two, and then go have the workout of your life.  It’s guaranteed to add ten pounds to your squat and make your Spartan war cry 15% more epic.

The Next Steps

This is just the beginning.  We’re fortunate to be one of the first sites to partner with Shelby, so there are a handful of features that they’re in the process of implementing.

Over the next few months, you’ll see NerdFitness.TV evolve  in a few different ways.  I can’t hint too much about what’s coming, but I promise it will be cool. 

If you’re interested in getting and curating your own channel on Shelby, you can request an invite at http://Shelby.tv or email nerdfitness@shelby.tv for an invite.

If you happen to struggle with motivation, today you no longer have any excuses.  NerdFitness.TV – you’re welcome, Rebellion!

Leave a comment with your personal favorite motivational video or any features you’d love to see added to NerdFitness.TV, and the NF team and I will select the best ones to add to the channel!

And don’t forget, we’re just getting started.  

Nerd Fitness TV is going to rule. Hard.

-Steve


Introducing Shelby Genius on iOS

Shelby Genius is available today in the iOS App Store! Download it here.

While in the midst of building the next generation of Shelby, we learned that YouTube would no longer be a core app in iOS6. We knew YouTube would inevitably fill that void with their own app, but we had an idea that was too fun to pass up, so our iOS dev Arthur hacked it together in a couple weeks. Using a piece of the Shelby platform that hasn’t yet seen the light of day, we’re pretty excited to announce Shelby Genius.

Shelby Genius is search + serendipity. On iOS, we built Genius to be a very simple app. It supports searches across YouTube, Vimeo and Dailymotion and returns a list of results that serendipitously includes results from Shelby’s video graph.  

We have to admit it’s pretty fun searching for random stuff (see our list above), and seeing what Genius thinks, but we’re even more excited about some of the tech under the hood. In particular, the Genius app supports background streaming to AirPlay and continuous playback of video.

What does this mean to the average user? Run a Genius search for your favorite band, start playing video and send it to your AppleTV via airplay. Now start using another app on your phone - you’ll notice that Genius video keeps playing on your TV in the background. When the video is done, the next video in the results will start playing.

Though it’s just the result of a quick hack, we’re excited to ship it and potentially use more of Genius in other places within Shelby.

You can download it here and let us know what Genius searches you love!

Rewarding Work

[original post by danspinosa here]

What makes you kick ass on a project?  I mean, really f*****g blow the doors off.  It’s motivation.  No tricks needed.  When you’re doing rewarding work and have intrinsic motivation, you will blow it out of the water.  Scott Adams wrote an interesting post on the subject…

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/rewarding_work/

…which I forwarded on to my team.

At Shelby, we’re not building the first personal computers or machines that can restart a human heart.  We work with video, a medium the average American spends > 33 hours/week watching.

But before video, printed word, or even spoken language we were a social species, sharing our collective knowledge around the fire.  As individuals with great technological capabilities, incredible quality of life, and so many freedoms, we owe a great deal to the rest of our species, particularly those who came before us.  Because we are social we have excelled.

The way our species tells stories is changing - for better or for worse - and we have an opportunity to lead that change.  There is no doubt that at Shelby, we can change the world.  Every single thing that each of us do will be a part of that legacy.  From an entire app, like [not yet released], to the finer features that users will only see once, like onboarding or choosing an avatar, our actions will imbue our products, our community, and our company with excellence and pride in craftsmanship.

Onward.

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