Prince Philip is the tall chap who married the queen of England, enjoys making beautifully inappropriate comments, and feels intimate contact with his television might be necessary in order to make it work.
In a revealing interview, only some of which seems to have appeared on the Buckingham Palace YouTube channel, the prince laid bare his electrical dysfunction, one that many might, secretly or not, actually share.
His interviewer, a rather well spoken chap called Kevin McCloud, brightened up the pages of London's Times newspaper with some of the prince's heartfelt words.
Perhaps the most elegant of the phrases turned by the 88-year-old prince was: "To work out how to operate a television set, you practically have to make love to the thing."
It has never been my habit to wonder about the conjugal behavior of the regal.
However, once one's mind goes quickly beyond boggling in order to consider how one might make one's plasma pulse race, one begins to appreciate that many people do find it rather difficult to grasp even 10 percent of their gizmos' workings.
Of course, the prince's imagery is so disconcerting that I wonder just what actions came immediately before the creation of, for example, Prince Charles.
However, Phil the Greek, as he is sometimes known in pejorative circles, will no doubt receive some sympathy for his giddy criticism of technology's grave new world. Why can't things be just blindingly simple, especially for those whose eyes are not quite what they used to be?
Not satiated with his criticism of televisual operations, the prince turned his mind and, one feared, his devilishly seductive eyes, toward the Web.
"The Web sites I've seen are so awful it's untrue," he told McCloud. "They're so unfit for purpose I'm surprised anyone tolerates them."
Surely he has a point. There are so many ill-designed sites on the Web that one's eyes sometimes water with pain. However, given the prince's somewhat outre position on the subject of televisions, many will find themselves caught in the uncomfortable posture of now considering which Web sites the prince has, um, actually visited.
Please might readers suggest something appropriate, as I fear my own thinking has been addled and muddled by the prince's highly colorful imagery.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings tells conference attendees the time is right for Web TV comeback
(Credit: Greg Sandoval/CNET Networks)SAN FRANCISCO--Let's try combining the Web and TV sets one more time, says Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.
Hastings told an audience Thursday at the NewTeeVee Live conference that TV sets are key to the future of Internet video and all next-generation sets should come equipped with Wii-like controllers, browsers, video codecs, and some serious processing power.
"The real breakthrough will be in remote controls," Hastings said. "The video game generation is comfortable with pointers (like the one from Nintendo's Wii video game) for the TV. Remember, it was a revolutionary event when we went from PC to the Mac and let go of tab keys in favor of the mouse. It was incredibly radical. What will be a similar transition is when we abandon the remote with 54 buttons and go to a simple pointer."
The Wiimote controller is fully motion sensitive so it provides a lot of freedom of movement and motion and allows users to engage an application with hand gestures.
Web-enabled TV sets are needed to help Web-video services, such as Netflix, Apple, Hulu, and YouTube, as well as a host of electronics manufacturers, make it to the promise land for Internet video: people's living rooms. Study after study shows that people prefer to watch video on big-screen TVs rather than on PCs. Internet video won't be able to compete with broadcast, cable or pay-TV providers until they make it the so-called last 10 feet from an Internet connection to the TV set.
But Hastings idea wasn't universally popular at the conference. Some attendees sitting near me groaned when Hastings called for a Web TV comeback. Hastings appeared to anticipate the response. "Putting the Web on TV has a bad rap," Hastings said. "The idea was tried and it failed 10 years ago."
But those were the days when TV could supply only standard definition, clunky dial-up connections, and user interfaces that only allowed people to move cursors up and down, left and right, Hastings said. We now have high definition, broadband connections, and better user-interfaces.
MG Siegler over at VentureBeat wrote that navigating a device like Apple TV is difficult with a traditional remote. AppleInsider reported recently that Apple has recently filed for two new patents regarding remotes.
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