Weekly Rewind
Streaming sticks compared: This one’s another plug to my work over at TechHive. I reviewed Roku’s new $50 Streaming Stick–which is much faster and has a nicer remote than the previous model–and compared it to Amazon’s Fire TV Stick ($40) and Google’s Chromecast ($35).
The main takeaway? The Roku Streaming Stick is shockingly good for such a cheap media streamer, especially with recent improvements to Roku Feed, a feature that lets you track new TV episodes and movie arrivals across different apps. Meanwhile, Chromecast stands the test of time as a dirt-cheap streaming solution, and the Fire TV Stick is really showing its age. Read more on TechHive.
How to fix the cable box: Right now in Washington, the FCC and cable companies are battling over the future of cable boxes. Instead of the current system, in which you’re pretty much forced to use whatever box Comcast and Time Warner give you, the FCC envisions an open market that lets any company (including tech titans like Google) make their own boxes that carry a cable signal. Unsurprisingly, the cable companies–who make a tidy sum from set-top rental fees, and increasingly see the TV as the hub of future smart homes–have lots of objections.
The whole issue is immensely complicated, with lots of “he said, she said” coming from both sides. But there may be room for a quick-and-dirty compromise: Instead of reinventing the cable box, just require cable companies to make their TV channels available through an app on existing media streamers, such as Roku and Apple TV. Ars Technica has the rundown on how all this might work.
More Catch-Up
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