[KingPrad]

Art software startups are a tough proposition. Google invests heavily in art and offers it on Chromecast as a screensaver. Amazon does the same on Fire Stick. Neither is customizable nor allows any interaction and discovery, but it's just good enough as free to make it tough to do anything unique at the consumer end. Art is low on the list of things most people want to access regularly, let alone pay for.

I had a startup that was working on easy art access. Essentially A Spotify for Art with both public domain and contemporary art. Decided the market just isn't there. But may do a Kickstarter of the device or run a simplified version of the software people could access for free or very cheap and see if any interest develops.

To elaborate on a tough situation, Google does show some contemporary art in its Chromecast rotations but the artist is not reimbursed for it. It's all done in name of publicity. Companies working in this area have a market on one side of artists who have little money, so you are a cost to them even to digitize their works. And on payer side you have numerous free art resources from museums. And Google who uses it as a culture talking point and just-good-enough feature in their products.

I think there are several markets in art delivery but it will take connections, money, and luck to prise it open.

[noir-york]

> I think there are several markets in art delivery but it will take connections, money, and luck to prise it open.

Curious about this. I love art and visit musuems regularly.

The first time I saw a van Gogh at d'Orsay I got goose pimples. A flat 2D image on my laptop or a TV does not come anywhere close to the experience of seeing the painting itself.

Aren't musuems the best 'art delivery' mechanism there is?

[KingPrad]

It's true, TVs don't have the same experience the painting. However, they enable a lot of other abilities that let you experience art in a very different way.

With a 4K screen (even the super-cheap one I bought 3 years ago) and sufficient scanning resolution you can zoom in and see the paint clinging to individual fibers of canvas. You can achieve closeness and magnification far beyond what you can at an art museum. You'll never get that close to a real van Gogh, breathing on it and with a magnifying glass!

My thinking is education and exploration. There's a to be said for volume in art viewing too. With the TV+software experience, you can construct progressions of an artist's work, quickly build visual trees showing change and relationship of art genres. You can visualize the _genre_ and _time_ in a way few can at an art museum.

Also think about AR and VR experiences. In the light form, imagine watching curator talks when they can serve up high-resolution images and zoom in to specific features, or highlight and "pull out" sections side by side. Or superimpose their hands to visually guide your eye as it's discussed.

That's where I see the future of art in digital form: bringing it into the home and school, and augmenting the experience within the museum. TV brings vast scale and new presentation abilities, which I think will complement the power and complexity of individual static works.

Then, there is also the ability to deliver art that is not static, which I think will develop soon. Where the image itself slowly changes either by artistic effort (strictly dictated change) and algorithmic. I imagine a Kandinsky-like work that changes subtly over minutes, hours, or weeks.

I'm actually not a big art enthusiast myself. But it turns out I'm extremely passionate about art presentation and how access and exploration can be magnified.

Dang, now I want to pick this up again. I'd be interested in talking more, if you are. I love the subject.

[vosper]

What I'd like to see is 4K images from my favourite photographers on Instagram, displayed from a small device that I can plug into a spare port on a TV (or a smart TV app, I suppose). I'd pay a subscription for that (of course, I might be the only one :))

[KingPrad]

That's essentially the idea of what we were building. Ran out of time due to moving and job change, but I had that working great on Chromecast. Chromecast at least then was awfully clunky though.

For some demos I used cheap Android-powered dongles (like the Amazon Fire Stick, but wide-open rootable Android) to make a plug-and-play display device. With some small work it would be a fun Kickstarter.