The Nittany Turkey

Primarily about Penn State football, this is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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Logitech Revue Epilog

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Last week I told you to go forth and buy yourself a Logitech Revue with Google TV. This week, I’m telling you: Not so fast! Here’s why.

I noticed that the sound is not a straight pass-through from the satellite/cable box to the receiver. Recall that the Revue box sits between the cable/satellite receiver and the AV receiver or preamp, with HDMI connections to both. The problem is that what starts as Dolby Digital 5.1 at the satellite/cable receiver often is output by the Revue as analog multichannel or PCM multichannel 2.1, at least in my case. This is apparently a flaw that has affected enough Revue users to be easily searchable via Google.

If you do the search, once you start reading the results, you’ll see that people have been complaining about this flaw since December 2010, but Logitech has yet to fix it. In fact, they’re not talking about it in public or even acknowledging that it exists. The situation is a mess because different AV receivers seem to do different things with the PCM output. People are suggesting all sorts of workarounds involving using the S/PDIF output to the receiver and the HDMI output to the TV, but avoiding that kind of awkwardness is why I went to an AV receiver with multiple HDMI inputs in the first place. Furthermore, I spent enough money on seven speakers for a home theater that I don’t feel like being told “you can’t do dat”.

As it stands, the Revue will be relegated to duty as an Internet interface for the TV, outputting its signal via an alternate HDMI input directly to the TV so AS can play Scrabble and torment her Facebook buddies without bringing the laptop downstairs. I cannot leave it in-line between the satellite receiver and the AV receiver for much longer without getting pissed off when I have no surround sound for NFL games.

I wonder whether Logitech reduced the price to $99 knowing that this problem existed. Perhaps they are not responding to comments about it because they intend to fix it in Release 2.0 — new hardware, which they might or might not ever put on the market due to the lukewarm response to the original device. So, they piss me off even if they do market the mythical machine.

It has been reported that there is degradation in picture quality, although I haven’t observed any myself, perhaps because of my old eyes.

I know that this issue is not deal killer to many of you, but for those who I led astray with my kudos, I humbly apologize.

Whither Google TV and the Logitech Revue?

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So, it seems that the market has spoken about the Logitech Revue, with its implementation of Google TV, and what the market has been saying is not pretty. In fact, for whatever reason, there have been more returns than there have been sales to satisfied customers.

A friend, Jackstand, who happens to work for Google, got one of these devices when it first hit the market. He paid around $300. I’ve been to his man cave several times since then, but beyond an initial familiarization tour, I didn’t have much interest. I sure as hell wasn’t going to plunk down $300 on one.

Well, times change and so do Turkeys. ???? ??????? ??? ??? Logitech recently dropped the price to $99, and the proverbial bell went off in this foul old fowl’s bird brain. I immediately ordered one. For those of you who don’t know about the Revue, there are plenty of reviews (Revues?) on-line. I won’t get into detailed descriptions here, or I might bore you all more than usual. Along somewhat similar lines, I’ve had an Apple TV since way back when, but the price of this thing was too good for me to worry about redundancy between the two. (AppleTV doesn’t do Netflix or Amazon, for obvious reasons, and it doesn’t give you web access with a browser. The Revue has the Google Chrome web browser, so it can access anything out there on the web that you can access from your laptop or desktop. Both boxes give you YouTube.)

Installation in my home theater was easy as pie. Fifteen minutes, most of which was spent dressing cables behind my receiver, was all I needed. It was quick like a vasectomy — snip! snip! One HDMI cable goes from the Set Top Box (STB) to the Revue and another goes from the Revue to the Audio Video Receiver (AVR). Then just hook up the power adapter and you’re there! Cranking it up and getting the software configured took about a half hour, as the magical box does stuff like load guide information for all the TV channels you receive plus configuring the specifics of your equipment so it can seamlessly communicate like it was a giant remote control. ???? ?????? 888 Take that, Apple TV! 

Once I got it going, the interface device, a lightweight keyboard, amazed me. I knew about all the functions, having played with Jackstand’s more expensive version of the same thing, but I still marveled at the mysteries of the Revue. Somehow, it flawlessly controls STB, AVR, and TV with no discernible infrared blaster and where the hell is the battery in the stand-alone keyboard? Not only can’t I find a battery, but the damn thing doesn’t even have to be plugged in to be recharged! It is truly stand-alone. [I’ve finally found the battery compartment, which neatly hides a pair of AA batteries. —TNT]

Last night I introduced the Revue to Artificially Sweetened for the first time. She seemed delighted with the notion that she could now waste her time on Facebook without lugging the laptop from upstairs. “This is much better,” she said convincingly, and that was even before I showed her some of the fancier features. She got up to get something to drink and came back. “Give me my keyboard,” she said. Oh, now it’s her keyboard. She had taken possession of it.

When I showed AS the picture-in-picture function, which I demonstrated with the main screen filled with Facebook and the inset screen displaying Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, she was delighted because she didn’t have to line up the laptop and peer over the top of its screen to see the TV anymore. She speculated that this could be a fine bonding experience with her nine year-old son, good ol’ Sharkbite. He could be watching a how-to video about converting your semi-automatic assault rifle to full automatic while she plays Scrabble® on facebook. Yep, that’s parent-child bonding, 2011 style!

So, why did the product flop on the market if AS and I think it’s great? Well, maybe a lot of folks are daunted by the learning curve, if they’re not very tech savvy to begin with. ???? ????? ???? ??????? Perhaps some didn’t understand that it’s not like the WebTV of the 1990s, which could hook up to any old TV and make it look like the RF-modulated, 480i crap that it was. The Revue requires HDMI connections in and out and preferably, a set-top box (either cable or satellite). Doubtless, some dolts who plunked down $300 were dismayed, disgruntled, and depressed when they opened the box and didn’t find a coaxial interface or even a trio of brightly color coded red, white, and yellow RCA phono jacks (as we old farts call them, because they were invented by RCA and they were used to connect your 45 rpm RCA record player (phonograph — “phono” for short), which had no amplifier or speaker, to your RCA TV (which did) — but I digress wistfully and paleotronically). Another big factor was that the promised content was mired in legal machinations as the TV networks restricted access to content — in particular, free content. Finally, the $300 price tag was just too steep for dolts and geeks alike.

For $99, even if we use only the web browser, the Logitech Revue with Google TV is a win. For Artificially Sweetened, it is, anyway. I don’t know whether I’ll ever get to see it again.

The Anachronistic NFL Blackout Rule

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The NFL’s TV blackout rule states that if stadium seats for a given game are not sold out, television coverage in the local area (defined as broadcast signals reaching within a 75 mile radius) shall be blacked out. This is a simplification of the rule, which has been around since 1972; there are many ifs, ands, and buts inserted by whichever high priced Park Avenue law firm the NFL retains for rule obfuscation. The idea is that if the game can be seen via TV, people won’t buy the remaining seats. I contend that in this economy, stadiums in some markets might never sell out, and the more blackouts there are, the worse it will get.

Consider the past Sunday. As you might or might not know, I’m a displaced Pittsburgher who has long been a Steelers fan. On Sunday the Steelers were playing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Tampa. I’m in the Orlando area, approximately 85 miles as the Raven flies from Raymond James Stadium. However, the way the rule reads, the Orlando TV channels cover part of that 75-mile radius circle around the stadium. The game did not sell out despite heavy ticket sales to Steelers fans (one Tampa Bay player said it looked to be about half and half) and a base of 40,000 season tickets, therefore it was blacked out for me. I wound up listening to the 1 PM game on the radio. Meanwhile, the hated Philadelphia Eagles were playing in Jacksonville at 4:30. At least, I thought, I would be able to cheer on the Jaguars as they throttled the Eagles. No such luck. Alltel Stadium is 113 miles from my house, but there’s that signal penetration thing going on, I suppose.

But there’s more. I have DirecTV, and one—if not the—reason I do is that the satellite TV company has an exclusive deal with the NFL to broadcast all the in- and out-of-market 1:00 and 4:30 games each Sunday. Aside from the non-sports entertainment portion of their charges, I pay an additional $350 per year for the NFL Sunday Ticket package. The NFL sucks off a portion of that annual fee as well as whatever extortion DirecTV pays them to maintain exclusivity of the NFL package. They’re being compensated quite well by us morons who demand to see every game. Only thing is, we’re not seeing every game, because the blackout rule is applied whether we’ve purchased the Sunday Ticket or not. I don’t think I need to tell you that we don’t get billing credit for blacked out games. So, even with this extra expenditure, I didn’t get to watch either game.

Naturally, the NFL would like to fill all its stadium seats. It not only wants the bucks from ticket sales, but also, it wants stadiums to look full for people watching from afar, thus enhancing the appeal of attending live games. The obvious purpose of the blackout rule was to make certain that people had no other way to see a “local” game if they didn’t buy a ticket.

Would I have bought a ticket for the Tampa Bay game at $120? Perhaps, but if I was going to take Jenny and two kids, it wasn’t going to happen, especially since the kids aren’t big sports fans. Would I have attended the Jacksonville game in person? Hell, no!

Perhaps the NFL doesn’t understand that in this recessionary economy, people tend to ditch the frivolous extras first. You take a team like Tampa Bay, whose record was 3-13 last year, and you feel damn lucky that there are 40,000 suckers with season tickets, because your ticket window sales are going to plummet. Start pissing people off in the local area (which apparently is more like a 150-mile radius) and you’ll depress future sales, too. Jacksonville is one of the smallest media markets in the NFL and they’re not doing well at all. They’ve even cordoned off whole sections at Alltel Stadium to reduce its capacity in view of the sellout rule (the NFL requires that if you do this for one game, you have to do it for all games, including the playoffs), but still they get blacked out. Better they should get some local TV revenue than trying in vain to sell tickets.

I know that for the NFL it sounds a lot like “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”, but shouldn’t a league that is raking in money hand over fist (including over $20 billion in TV revenue) be a little more sensitive to the economic plight of the typical football fan? Either reduce ticket prices or ease up on the blackouts, but how about taking a hit like the rest of us?