Disqus - Latest Comments for RakeshAgrawal

Re: Feature Friday: Voice Search For Your TV

RakeshAgrawal — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 07:14:47 -0000

Nothing could be worse than using a dpad to navigate an on-screen keyboard. If it's done well, I think it could be very intuitive. User interface on the TV needs to be disrupted -- smart TVs are being held back by traditional TV input devices. The traditional remote is inadequate. And a keyboard or mouse on the TV doesn't make sense either.

Re: VMS Goes Out of Business - PRNewser

RakeshAgrawal — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 11:02:06 -0000

As Rachel (she's the one behind "SnapStream TV Search" account) mentioned above, SnapStream is an alternative to a media monitoring service-- check us out if you do a lot of TV monitoring and clipping: http://www.snapstream.com/.

SnapStream is used by folks like the Daily Show, Colbert Report, the U.S. Senate, and a bunch of others.
----

Also, if you're curious to see VMS's bankruptcy filing, it's posted here on the O'Dwyer's website: http://www.odwyerpr.com/sit...

One interesting thing that caught my eye was the precipitous drop in revenue over the past 2 years-- from $50M+ to around $20M. A change like that could easily sink a company that doesn't watch their spending!

Re: Enough Already Arduino mutes TV's overexposed celebrities, frees you to live again (video)

RakeshAgrawal — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 17:47:21 -0000

Also known as a video ransom note-- we've used our TV search technology (www.snapstream.com) to do this. For example, see our Christmas card from last year:

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Re: Keen On… Anthony Wood: The Inventor of Personal Video Recorder on the Future of TV (TCTV)

RakeshAgrawal — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 18:15:37 -0000

I agree with whoever said the biggest competitive threat to Roku is Apple and a potential Apple TV app store.

But before any app store is going to take off, someone has to solve the input problem. Remote controls suck (though Roku does a much better job than most other living room remote controls) and the moment you have to enter a username and password on one of these Internet TVs, you know what I'm talking about.

So next step for Internet TV boxes is:

1. Better input device
2. App stores on TVs start to take off

So who solves #1 first? It can't just be a software version of the living room remote + a keyboard. It needs to be something more.

Re: I Will Check My Phone At Dinner And You Will Deal With It

RakeshAgrawal — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 08:07:06 -0000

I know I'm not the only one who's found themselves in a group of friends where everyone is staring down at their phones playing words with friends with one another. This is a genuine new social interaction-- one that can be enhanced by people being _face_to_face_ (MG, you talk about the opposite case, face to face being enhanced by tech). I think we'll see a lot of new social interactions like this that are both IRL and virtual. I hereby dub this phenomena the return of the poke! (idea being that poking, as a virtual gesture, will make a comeback but in a form that makes it a crossover between IRL and virtual).

Re: CES 2011: RealNetworks Steps Past Apple & Google to Offer Cloud-Based Music

RakeshAgrawal — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 11:26:00 -0000

I've been an mp3tunes user for a while and it's really useful and works. I have no doubt that this is the future of personal music collections.

Re: Altec Lansing's inMotion Air speaker system streams from just about anywhere

RakeshAgrawal — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 07:50:14 -0000

That fireplace in your room at CES is REALLY awesome.

Re: Netflix’ Next Destination: On Your Remote Control

RakeshAgrawal — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 10:38:30 -0000

The remote control is a dead man walking. So this is good short term news for Netflix but long-term it won't matter a bit.

Re: Hands-On With New $100 Apple TV

RakeshAgrawal — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:08:57 -0000

My main question is when will Apple release an app store for the Apple TV? And a web browser? They have enough in this thing to bootstrap it for now, but the thing that'll really cement this in people's living rooms is a way for people to build 3rd party software experiences for it.

Re: Hands-On With New $100 Apple TV

RakeshAgrawal — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:04:46 -0000

I'm guessing not.

Re: Active Users and Online Retailing

RakeshAgrawal — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 10:50:07 -0000

Case in point: Photojojo

Re: Changing the way we do news (Scripting News)

RakeshAgrawal — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 11:50:03 -0000

I'd be interested in attending this mini-conference whenever it comes together.

Re: Hurricane Ike Hits Snapstream

RakeshAgrawal — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:13:39 -0000

Brent, thanks for the thoughts. There was an update a couple of hours ago on http://status.snapstream.com/ -- all of our customer-facing services are back up and running. Tech support is running slow, but everything else is back up and running. Hopefully it stays that way. If you have a problem with one of our services, check the status page (http://status.snapstream.com/) or let me know (rakesh at snapstream dot com).

Re: Snapstream's Rakesh Agrawal Interviewed by Mike McGuff

RakeshAgrawal — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:08:20 -0000

P.S. I meant to include links to the Beyond TV API: http://code.snapstream.com/... and a link to the source code for the Beyond TV web interface: http://source.snapstream.com/ (the latter is great is you want to extend Beyond TV and want code samples of calls being made against the Beyond TV API).

Re: Snapstream's Rakesh Agrawal Interviewed by Mike McGuff

RakeshAgrawal — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:03:50 -0000

We have a pretty rich API that's freely available to 3rd parties who want to build Beyond TV plug-ins in other environments. Cinemar/MainLobby used our API for example to extend Beyond TV into their front-end. The API could probably do a better job of enabling these kinds of plug-ins, but it's there.

I'm not sure how good an analogy the cell phone is just because comparing the cell phone market to the PC DVR market is like comparing the audience for the Olympics to the audience for my niece's dance recital -- the scales are completely, completely different. How I wish that the PC DVR market was *anything* like the cell phone market. But even if it were a good analogy, I'm pretty sure plain jane cell phones are going to be around for a long time.

And I have a tremendous amount of respect for our customers, you guys aren't nut-jobs at all. We all like cool, shiny, new things (yes, me too... and I have a technology graveyard/museum at home to prove it) but not all of the companies that make those things survive. I'd just like to do something that has a lasting impact and we've tried to pick our strategy accordingly.

Re: Snapstream's Rakesh Agrawal Interviewed by Mike McGuff

RakeshAgrawal — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:50:55 -0000

Queonda, Thanks calling us out on that marketing on the beyond media page. After I read your comment, I reviewed all the Beyond Media pages (http://www.snapstream.com/p... and excised all the talk of seamless integration with Beyond TV. This was obviously inaccurate. If it makes you feel any better, we hardly sell any copies of Beyond Media -- people building HTPCs are pretty smart, as a group and do their research before they buy. A release notes page without any updates in >2 years.

Re: Snapstream's Rakesh Agrawal Interviewed by Mike McGuff

RakeshAgrawal — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:51:44 -0000

If you're interested in our thinking behind not adding photos, music, etc. I posted about our strategy on this in our forums two years ago here:
http://forums.snapstream.co...
http://forums.snapstream.co...

As Brent pointed out, we haven't abandoned our consumer product, but it also hasn't been our main focus. And true QAM support (vs. the HDHomeRun QAM support that's there right now) and support for the Hauppauge HD PVR are coming soon in the consumer product. If anyone wants to beta test these items today, sign-up for the beta program at beta.snapstream.com. The first public beta will go out in a week or two, but if you want to try the private beta before that, register and then e-mail matt at our domain name.

Re: Network Remote Control of TiVo (iPhone!)

RakeshAgrawal — Thu, 01 May 2008 23:24:58 -0000

Dave-- You know we've been doing a "soft remote" in Beyond TV for a while now... see this blog posting:
http://blogs.snapstream.com...

I need to throw together a short video showing it off, it's really cool.

The one kind of amusing thing about this when we built it was everyone was turning off each other's computers with it at first (since almost everyone at SnapStream runs Beyond TV on their PC). :-)

Re: Picasa Web Albums: A Big Hit?

RakeshAgrawal — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 10:59:05 -0000

I completely agree on the awkward site URL. But since I upload most of my albums as "unlisted" and Google sticks that hash at the end of URLs to "unlisted" albums, the only way for me to pass around URLs is through a copy/paste.

On a side note, I do prefer Picasa's method of albums being private versus Flickr's. Again, Picasa is much easier for novices here because it doesn't require the person you're sharing photos with to sign-up for an account.

Re: KFC & The Mosquito

RakeshAgrawal — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 21:27:02 -0000

Bummer. And here I was, beating my chest about my newly discovered youth because I could hear the tone in the YouTube video!