Have you tried goggling Amazon Fire TV walled garden, closed garden. You won’t find just a few articles referencing that term. I don’t think Vudu doesn’t want to distribute their application… do you have a reason to believe that anymore than I believe Google doesn’t want Chrome on their tables. I believe it’s Amazon’s preference.
You can find articles referencing anything you want. The authors don’t know what they’re talking about, they are just mindlessly parroting buzzwords. If you can sideload your own apps, the ecosystem is open by definition.
That doesn’t mean Amazon can’t control what goes in their own appstore. And that doesn’t mean a whole heck of a lot for the vast majority of unsophisticated consumers who lack the knowhow to sideload their own apps. But it isn’t actually closed.
Amazon sells their devices at a discount with the intent of making that up through people buying their content and from their store. Just because they haven’t locked down the device enough to keep someone who really wants to side-load from side-loading does not mean they don’t intend to have a walled garden. They don’t even allow Gmail, Chrome or the Google Store on the platform. But again, I am not going to convince you of anything… i suspect most consumers are just going to use the devices as is, and they know that.
Vudu is owned by Walmart. I think you may be confused as to who is blocking who in this case.
Well, that’s one service I’ll now be avoiding.
It’s actually pretty good. They were light years ahead of Amazon for awhile. I take every digital service with a grain of salt, but Vudu is a very good app and service today. For example, Amazon did not participate in UV, UltraViolet. Vudu did.does.
That movie was objectively terrible despite Nick Chinlund.
I am still not sure why people would want DirectTV online.
I got this email from ATT today. All italicized text was originally at a level 6 or 8 font, while the rest ran on 12:
Did you know AT&T customers like you can get DIRECTV for $35/mo.(plus taxes for 12 months with 24-mo. agmt & after $5/mo. discount)? With DIRECTV you’ll get 99% worry-free signal reliability. Based on a nationwide study of representative cities. Plus you can also get a $200 AT&T Visa® Reward Card (redemption req’d) that you can use on virtually whatever you want!
The even finer print at the bottom says you only get the 5 bucks off if you sign up for auto pay and you cannot cancel the contract for the first year. They say the “regular” price is currently $76/mo (which I assume they hammer you with when the second year ends). The redemption card expires in 6 months.
This just seems so far and away from the other opportunities to see the same programming.
I love this formulation. That’s 1% more worry than I had before you said that. See also “99% fat-free” - in the same sense that my body is 30% water-free, sure.
When I cut the cord, I had the intention of getting an antenna and some type of HTPC to record live shows. Here in Toronto, the over-the-air selection really isn’t that bad. But I never bothered, and don’t think I will.
I got a HDhomerun and have been playing around with the Plex DVR. it works really well, recording from the HDhomerun–>ShieldTV–>NAS. It even snips out the commercials!
But I didn’t bother to actually schedule any recordings because I get all the network shows elsewhere. And I don’t care about live TV. It was more of a hobby thing, really.
OTA is still good for sports. If you plan to watch the Super Bowl, OTA is free and reliable.
Sure. But I personally don’t watch sports of any kind ever, including the super bowl and even the olympics. The closest I come is poker tournaments.
Android devices aren’t a “closed/walled garden”. It’s an open platform, blow it up and and install whatever you want.
You could say that the Amazon App Store is a walled garden, in that Amazon obviously controls what they will sell and distribute through their store, but that’s sort of a meaningless application of the phrase since that’s pretty much the case of all stores.
The walled garden metaphor really gained traction as a metaphor for iOS (which includes the Apple TV), where the hardware is completely locked down. Like any digital storefront, it only offers what Apple has vetted and approved, but unlike Android devices, that’s the only way to get stuff onto the device (except for the developer “workarounds” stusser mentioned, or jailbreaking in the past which has basically been completely eliminated).
Amazon devices use an altered version of Android, they’re based on Android but it’s pretty clear they don’t want you accessing anyone else’s content but theirs which is why they can sell you a tablet for 35 dollars.
They don’t have the standard Google ecosystem on them by default but you still have full access to sideload APKs, with just a menu tweak.
Amazon’s intent relative to competing android devices is a nuanced distinction, and I’m not saying that’s not a reasonable thing to have a discussion about or to bring up when comparing and contrasting the hardware, but you used the wrong metaphor to describe it when you called it a “closed garden” because that already means something different from what you’re saying.
Well maybe the term has evolved since you can’t go 2 or 3 articles looking at the relationship between Amazon and Google and not see the term. It’s not like I woke up and just came up with it myself. You can even get Underground from Google anymore, and you know what the articles said when that happened, leaving Google’s walled garden put end-users at risk because you have to open your device to unknown sources to get it.
I have no idea when the term was first used, but this isn’t isolated guys, we’re talking about every handful of days with tech sites using the term exactly as I am, and they’ve been using it for years.
If you’re gonna hold your ground on this, please cite these articles.
http://www.aftvnews.com/amazon-rejects-fire-tv-apps-that-peak-over-their-walled-garden/
Here’s a few, some of them reference both Apple and Amazon, but they are referencing both.
I am not saying there isn’t a different definition for this term that you guys are using, I am just telling you where I got mine from. It’s not something I just woke up and decided to use one day.