[stefan_]

I love how industry came up with ever crazier schemes to stream content from phones and laptops to TVs. There must have been three different attempts involving WiFi alone, but this phased array mmWave 60 GHz million bucks basic research abomination surely takes the cake.

Meanwhile, some Google engineer realized you could solve 90% of phone-to-TV streaming applications and 100% of the hard technical problems by just telling the TV to download and display the YouTube video itself. Genius!

[TehCorwiz]

Yes, genius if the content is asynchronous.

Any real-time or interactive display will need to be able to stream at sub-frame latencies. At 60fps that means less than 16ms, at VR friendly refresh rates ~90fps that means 11ms.

While their approach works beautifully for their core competencies, static and non-interactive streaming content, it doesn't really work for any other application.

[jrockway]

To be fair, the idea of a centralized computer generating content for dumb terminals to display has been around since the dawn of computing. Terminals connected to mainframes. Local X servers drew content as requested by remote X clients. The idea of having all your software and data on a very powerful computer inside your home (or pocket) is the crazy new one.

Certainly the concerns and dynamics of the situation are different now than in the 70s and 80s, but some of the thought processes are the same. People want to stream video games because they don't have $2000 up front to lay out on a gaming PC. Streaming lets them pay $5 a month instead, and unlike credit, there is no commitment. That's valuable. Greed is another reason for the cloud. There is no reason why someone should pay $10 per month for Photoshop, but since it's the only option, people do. That's free money for Adobe's shareholders.

I can see why people try to poo-pooh this stuff; computing is built on hobbyist experimentation, and the cloud takes all that away. You can't write your own video game. You can't tweak settings, or make mods. You just get a game that someone else made. But from a technical standpoint, streaming stuff is probably going to work. I have less than 1ms ping to a nearby datacenter (speed of light distance: 8 microseconds), and so do 10 million of my neighbors, so it's probably quite profitable to have a collection of high-density GPUs and CPUs rendering games for a few peak hours a day and then training machine learning models outside those hours. The technical challenges are minimal; the idea has been around for 50 years. The actual challenge is getting the people who own the cables in the ground between your house and that datacenter to actually switch packets quickly enough to make it all work. When you were connecting a mainframe in the basement to terminals upstairs, you made it work because it was your job. But now, one company owns all the cables and another wants to make content to send over those cables, and the incentives no longer align. Sure, Spectrum COULD update their core routers... but they could also not do that, and then your video game streaming service is dead. (Meanwhile, they dream of showing up and making their own video game streaming service. They have as much time as they want, because they own the cables!)

[fulafel]

I think it'll become easier to write your own cloud-streamed video game in the maker/hobbyist kind of way, even if the cheap or open source Stadia-workalike backend hasn't arrived just yet. (Of course Google might open up Stadia itself at some point too)

[foota]

Doesn't stadia use it?

[ben-schaaf]

Stadia is riddled with latency issues. Taking numbers from Gamers Nexus review (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0gILReDQsY) in a high framerate game it has 85ms input lag (22ms for local play) and low framerate games it has 110ms (61ms local). Of course these numbers depend a lot on your internet connection.

[AstralStorm]

Even with mediocre routing Steam Remote Play beats these times by being 3x faster while also moving more Mbit. (~40 ms, 25 Mbit.)

The limitation on speed there was the ISPs insane peering scheme - Orange Poland is a dinosaur so everything cross network (that does not pay their scalper peering rates) got routed out of country and back.

[strbean]

And now it's easy to tell my TV to play a Youtube video via my phone instead of just using the remote, but a magnificent pain in the ass / impossible to share my screen to my TV or stream an actual video file directly. Pretty lame outcome.

[angry_octet]

You can share a Chrome tab or your desktop to a Chromecast. Playing a video requires a low enough bit rate and decoding requirements, but it works.

https://support.google.com/chromecast/answer/3228332

[planteen]

I remember hearing about these around 2008 and then the application being pushed was no cables to your fancy flat screen TV. Blu-ray player uses UWB RF so no cables are necessary. I don't think anyone saw then the end of physical media and the rise of streaming on the horizon.

I also remember in 2008 hearing about how RFID would soon be ubiquitous on consumer products like UPCs and you could just load up a cart with groceries and walk out the door without scanning anything. That one may actually pan out, but it is much later than it was supposed to be.

[jiofih]

You mean Apple. AirPlay was there years before google made a move in this area.

[adrianmonk]

If we're going to talk about who did it first, DLNA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Living_Network_Allianc...) came out in 2003 and had the concept of a "renderer".

A renderer is a device that receives commands to go pull some media from somewhere and start playing it. And that can include video.

So the concept has been around a long time.

[jiofih]

Well, DLNA and IPTV were never a mobile phone feature, but the point was simply that Google did not invent it. Thanks for agreeing with me.

[fulafel]

IPTV happened in the late 90's according to WP, you could stream to your STB equipped TV from the internet or from your laptop. But of course we started seeing direct Youtube->TV only after Google started working with smart-tv and STB companies.

[jiofih]

The f with downvotes? Just check your sources:

Airplay: 2010

Miracast: 2012

Google Cast/ChromeCast: 2013