The boob tube goes YouTube

When I saw the Samsung press release today that they were releasing an YouTube upgrade, to select Blu-ray players with BD-Live 2.0, I was pretty sure the player I had purchased earlier this year was going to benefit from this.

Sure enough, when I turned on my Blu-ray player this evening it presented me with an opportunity to install a firmware upgrade. 20 minutes later my player started back up and presented an option on its start-up menu to run YouTube (along with the previous options of Pandora, Netflix and Blockbuster).

I navigated to this option and started up YouTube. Once started it presents a non-logged in user experience as well as an option to log in with your YouTube credentials.

First the good news, the picture in non-full screen mode was excellent. The sound quality also benefited from my home theater's sound system. Switching to full screen mode was decent, but the quality of the original video isn't going to get any better watching it on a 47" screen and the defects only get magnified on the big screen.

All things considered the YouTube watching on TV experience was enjoyable. However, the issue with this whole setup is the user interface. While it looks and works just like YouTube on the web, using a remote control to navigate around the user interface and enter in keywords via the remote's "phone keypad" like keyboard is painful.

The first thing to do is sign-in using your YouTube credentials, it is painful, but once you do it the first time you can create a 4 digit code to use for subsequent sessions.

Signing in to your account allows you to access your favorites and channels previously setup on a computer, cutting down on the amount of remote navigation. It should be noted, that there are some nice features, that leverage the Samsung remote such as easily adding videos to your list of favorites via a single button.

Bottom line, this is another one of those technology trade-offs, the actual watching experience is much improved over a standard computer experience, especially if you want to share the experience with friends and family, but start navigating to what you want to watch before everyone gathers round the old "boob tube" (of course there is no longer a picture tube in today's televisions).

Once you get it all setup (or using any method to get to YouTube), my family and I highly recommend checking out this Gustavo Dudamel video to see music being performed for the sheer joy of it all.