Netflix Vs Lovefilm

The battle of the premium video streaming services has begun! Both Netflix and Lovefilm have now launched in the UK and both offered 30 day free trials. I signed up to both to see what they offer. There are other services out there, but I have been looking for a convenient way to stream to my Xbox 360 for a while now. I was looking for something over and above the content available on the TV services of 4od and BBC iPlayer (the latter which does not have an Xbox app yet). The price is low, costing £5.99 (Netflix) and £4.99 (Netflix) a month for streaming only services. Both also stream to, PC/Mac, and the iPad. Lovefilm also offer rental by post of DVD, BluRay and Games while Netflix do not offer this yet in the UK. However, since I only really need streaming to my console, I am comparing them from this point of view.

Netflix

Likes:
Great selection: The selection of content was rich when I signed up with lots of films, TV shows (fiction and non-fiction) to choose from. There is a lot of content I want to see.
Great Video Quality: The video quality is great and everything streams perfectly.
Good Navigation: I like the navigation. Netflix seems to have used the style of the old Xbox home interface, rather than the new tiles approach. The interface flows left / right though videos and up / down though categories. This makes browsing everything Netflix has relatively easy.
Good Structure: The videos are sorted into standard categories you would expect, but I like that they have also included “smart” lists based on what you have watched, what is popular and what you may like. These are a nice touch, if a bit hit and miss, and help find content quicker.
Finally, Another nice touch while watching TV shows is how it asks to play the next episode at the end of a show. No need to find it, just click once and it plays.

Dislikes:
Poor Search: If you don’t have a keyboard, search is terrible. There is a line of letters along to top which means you need to navigate across the whole linear alphabet. It takes so long to fill something in to the point that I dont bother using it. Many of the newer Xbox apps have moved away from the old standard on screen keyboard which displayed a standard qwerty layout. It was was fiddly but workable. I hope someone realises this doesn’t work and changes it.
Lack of content updates: The only other complaint is the lack of newer content and how often new content is added seems slow. The overall selection is big enough so that this isn’t a problem today, but it could become a bigger issue if new content isn’t added quicker.

Lovefilm

Likes:
Great Video Quality:  Stream quality is great and I had no problem streaming anything at any time.
Some Recent Films: There are a few (but not many) recent films could make the price worth it compared to other VOD services which charge per film.
Good Content updates: New content seems to be added more regularly, in small nuggets at a time.

Dislikes:
Poor collection: There seems to be a lack of content I actually want to watch. While there is a fair amount of choice, it seems to be a lot of mediocre films and TV shows I didn’t want to see. I get the feeling there is a lot of padding of content picked up cheaply. There is a lot of duplication of things which have been available for free on iPlayer and 4od, youtube and other free streaming sites.
Poor Navigation: They have followed the trend of moving to Microsofts’ new tiles approach. While this works for me on the phone, it does not feel right on the console.. This makes navigating though content difficult and you need to drill down though many different paths to see all the content.
The navigation can be glitchy and many times I have been navigating though a list, clicked back, and then had to scroll though a list again to get to where I was. This just adds to the frustration of the poor navigation.
Poor Search: The search is just as poor as Netflix’s search with the same layout and again I hope this is changed.

Overall
Comparing the two services has been interesting and has given me a lot of choice of content over a month. However I am not willing to keep both. There is some crossover in contant too which makes having both feel like a waste.

Neither service has enough recent content for my liking, and while Netflix has a lot of content, I would like to see more recently released films and TV shows. I would even pay more for this. Any service which gets this right will eventually win for me.

When deciding which one to keep, the difference has been the fact I often found myself opening Lovefilm and deciding not to watch anything, then going to Netflix as there is more than enough on that which I want to watch. A couple of times a new film has been added to Lovefilm that I wanted to watch, but the overall selection is not strong enough.

Either way, I would recommend giving both a try while they offer free trials so there is nothing to lose. However, between the two it is clear that Netflix wins for me, and for now its what I’m keeping.

Winner: Netflix!

Switching to Mac

I was a PC. Now i’m a Mac. I’ve switched!

It happened at work a couple of months ago. I got a a Mac. A MacBook Air (4, 2) to be exact. What was intended to be a temporary machine for IOS development, the decision to make it my primary machine took less time than it took my Windows laptop (Sony Viao VPCF12) to go cold.

Yes, it was that fast.

To put this into context, I have been a Windows guy for all of my computing life, from Win 3.1 to Windows 7 and all in between including the dark Vista days.
I had tried alternatives. I had experimented with various flavours of Linux, both server and desktop. I had even used other peoples Macs for minutes at a time. Windows, however had always been at the center of my digital life. Every time I tried something different, the urge of coming back to Windows was strong because everything I needed to do, I knew how to do it on Windows. That knowledge was comforting. I had learnt how to tame and configure it to my every computational need and I didn’t want to start over.

Until recently I didn’t know many people who used a Mac regularly, or any non Windows OS. That was until I started at my current job and found a lot of my colleagues on Macs. Working with them day after day, I started noticing something. The things I has taken for granted in Windows – Windows update failures, unexplainable blue screens, random freezes, problems connecting to network shares and printers, looking for settings buried in the registry etc etc dont happen on Mac that often. Actually, I would never hear these kind of complaints. Thats when I started to get curious and tempted.

As I said above, I was given the chance to try my hand at IOS development at work, and have MacBook to do it with. My intention was to carry on with my main laptop for everything else. However, 5/10 minutes after first use, I didn’t want anything else.

It took hardly any time to get set up and all of the day to day applications I needed installed and I was working again within minutes. No taming required! The fact a lot of my work is browser based helped but there are Mac versions of everything else I use everyday. Anything else I can still get to with remote desktop or virtualisation. Its now been a couple of months, and its incredible the things I have been missing. The simple yet powerful interface, the handy trackpad with multitouch gestures, desktop spaces, the magical spotlight search, unix based core and many more things which make my day much easier and more productive. All the things Mac users everywhere have probably taken for granted, I am now discovering for the first time. On top of that are all the benefits of the Air. Its super light and compact. The battery life is incredible. I havent looked back and I dont think I will be any time soon.

This isn’t first time Apple has done this to me. They have the gift for designing things the right way and make me want to use their products. They did it first with my music with the iPod, replacing a Creative Zen which broke down all the time), followed by an iPod Touch (which was a gift). They did it with my phone, which replaced a BB Bold 9700. I liked the BB, but with poor web browser and fewer apps, just nowhere near as much as the iPhone 4.

Now, they have done it to my PC, and yes. its Amazing…

Specs for comparison:
Sony Viao VPCF12 – 16.4″ display, Intel Core i7-740QM 1.73Ghz (quad), 6GB, 500 GB HDD, NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M, 3.1KG,   Windows 7
MacBook Air 4,2 –     13.3″ display, Intel Core i7-2677M 1.8 GHz (dual),   4GB, 256 GB SSD,    Intel HD Graphics 3000,      1.34KG, OSX Lion

An important choice to make: your browser…

Did your PC recently throw up a window with this message?

“An important choice to make: your browser”

Don’t worry; it’s not a virus, despite its strangely unbranded appearance. More specifically, it currently only affects users within the European Union. In case you haven’t heard, the European Union, through the European Commission, had decided that it didn’t quite like the dominance Microsoft has over the Web Browser market and has attempted to do something about it. Their problem stems from Microsoft having been bundling its own web browser into its perennially popular operating systems since Windows 95. As a result, the bundled “Internet Explorer” is the default choice for most users.

As a Web Developer, this matters to me both professionally and personally so I will be watching these developments closely, and it’s the reason I decided to write about this topic. Here is a little background on the current developments.

Around the early part of 2009, the EU announced its intention to investigate if the bundling of browsers was having a negative effect on competition. This coming on the back of the European Union’s ruling, which saw Microsoft forced to release versions of Windows in the EU stripped of Windows Media Player. Much has been written about that story elsewhere so I won’t go further here. Essentially, after much wrangling, legal threats, and mud slinging between the EU, Microsoft and the other Browser vendors, an agreement reached.

The “Browser Choice” is the method by which people, who have Microsoft Internet Explorer as their default browser, are able to pick from a host of alternatives. It was chosen and developed by Microsoft and “ratified” by the European Commission.

The choice is a list of 12. The big ones are there, of course, Microsoft Internet Explorer (naturally), Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera.  Making up the numbers are more browsers that I had either never heard of, or had never investigated with any real intent.

Now that the background info is out of the way, here are my thoughts. The first question in my mind was what would this actually means to Mr & Mrs Average. Is this a good thing? Most of the people who encounter the choice are more likely to have never even have heard of anything other than the big blue E on their desktop and start menus. Saying that, market share had rapidly been shifting toward Mozilla Firefox and gaining popularity in more than the IT guy crowd. Adding to that, the increasing popularity of the Apple Macs and the Safari browser along with the shear brand power of Google helping its newer Chrome browser gain some mildly impressive numbers. However the reality is, most people use Internet Explorer, for reasons ranging from corporate application compatibility, to blissful ignorance.

That blue “E” icon has been synonymous with the internet and the web to masses of people since the days it won the first “web browser war” when Netscape Navigator’s dominant market share was crushed by Microsoft and Internet Explorer. Until now, most users had no way or reason to choose anything different. The reasons people give “for” and “against” switching are abundant, and I will talk about these in later posts. However one point that I need to make is, you don’t have to pick just one! You can decide to install as many web browsers as you like! Some people may think they do not have a choice, with some business applications requiring Internet Explorer. However a lot of these users may also have their software decided by company policy. Myself, I flip between IE, Chrome and occasionally Firefox. I do this to take advantage of each browser’s strengths when I need them (and that’s set of stories which will come soon).

Getting back to the point, is this a good thing? More competition means greater innovation. I don’t think Microsoft put the required effort into Internet Explorer after version 6 until the competition started to make it look archaic with its proprietary extensions, rendering inconsistencies, lack of web standards observation and a security system with more holes than Swiss cheese.

However I also believe that there is a risk of ending up with a fragmented browser market. It’s unrealistic to expect every browser to act exactly the same. This has always made developing front ends for the web difficult when you have to think about how it will look on multiple platforms, and web browsers. As a web developer, I have to say, it is a pain developing cross browser interfaces when the browser can have remarkable differences. Throw more browsers in the mix and suddenly, the task become much more time consuming and the bottom line, more expensive.

Of course, it’s up to very individual company to decide, how far they take cross-browser compatibility. But, in bleak economy, I fear that corners will be cut and the losers could ultimately be the consumer who is left confused by the choices, or frustrated by broken web sites which don’t work with the choice Microsoft gave them. I said Microsoft, not to place blame, but to highlight the potentially ridiculous situation I can see happening. The unknowing consumer ringing Microsoft because the non IE browser they have doesn’t work on their new and expensive “laptop” / “netbook” / “whatever new name comes up”.

Finally, to summarize, I believe a change was needed to make the public aware of the choice and break the Internet Explorer stranglehold. However, I question if this the best way forward. I don’t think it was right for the both the user experience; and the mechanism for this process to have been left under Microsoft’s control.

I could go on about the pros and cons of the decision that has been made and I probably will as the effects become clearer as time goes on. However, I think I have said enough about what has happened. This is what I think should have happened. There should have been a joint effort between all the stakeholders including the EU, and the browser vendors, to offer some sort of web / application based (but not necessarily browser based). Also, while they were talking, it wouldn’t hurt to bring up the subject of standardising their rendering engines to make the development process easier and more stable for everyone, and make that a requirement for entry into the choices list. This solution could then be integrated as part of the system setup and / or automatic updates and also as and when the user wants to run it.

Finally the key point I will make is that this method could be deployed across any operating system, Windows, Mac, Linux, and whatever else, making it a fairer system. If Microsoft can’t bundle Internet Explorer, why should Apple be allowed to bundle Safari? But then who said the world was fair…

Welcome

Welcome to 2techincal, my new technology blog where I will talk about everything from the latest, greatest to the just plain weird products, services, and advances from all over the digital world.

Disclaimer Alert! So there is no confusion, I am no journalist, and so all of the opinions expressed in this blog are my own including those that look like facts, unless stated otherwise, along with corroborating sources or references. I stand corrected on anything I state and welcome helpful critique. Great, now that that’s out of the way…on with the show!