 Hi, I'm Paul Miller with The Verge, and I'm here with Peter Goodall, the product manager for Ubuntu TV. Thanks for coming, Peter. Nice to be here. So what is Ubuntu TV? So Ubuntu TV is part of this strategy that we announced back in November at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, and it's effectively adapting Ubuntu to many different form factors. And Ubuntu TV is the first thing to come out from that strategy. It's actually a technology preview, so it's something that's a very early stage product for us. What we're demonstrating here at CES is effectively taking the Ubuntu user experience, which classically has always been a very PC-centric experience, and showing that that adapts well to a TV experience. Is that the concept behind Unity? Because I've played with Unity on the desktop. Is that what you guys were hoping to set up with all these different screens now? Yeah, but it's important to note that what we don't want to do is take a PC interface and just put it on a bunch of different devices. What we want to do is set up a common set of, or a set of common elements, rather, that will work well in different form factors. So if you combine, you see the Unity demo, I think you guys have a video up online, you notice that there are some common elements there in the sense of, like, you know, you have your lenses on the left, launchers for applications, you can switch your views and things like that, and it all looks familiar, but it's not exactly the same as the PC. Because that just wouldn't work. And we recognize that with a TV, you're pretty much navigating with a remote. So you need up, down, left, right, and that's it. You don't have a mouse, you don't have a keyboard, you shouldn't have to type excessively. So yeah, we just want to make sure that that experience worked well in a TV. And it's more than just the user experience, so that's kind of where we started. But then from there, we want to actually create a product that people want on the TV. There are a lot of TV products out there today. There's a lot. Can you speak to that? Sure. So we realized, you know, when we looked at a lot of the products out there, nobody's really gotten it right. And many of the experiences that are out there today, a lot of the devices are very separate, right? They are a box that you hook into your TV. And if you think about it, there are a lot of boxes you hook into your TV today just to do certain things, right? So you have your cable box that you hook into your TV, and that allows you to watch just regular TV, cable, satellite, terrestrial, whatever. Then you have, you may have some kind of online box that gets you to connected content, right? And that's a completely separate thing. Then you have a Blu-ray player, and that may also have some internet media. And then what if you take pictures on your phone and you want to show those pictures to your family, right? In order to do that, you have to copy it off your phone onto a USB key, stick the USB key in some other device, and it all becomes very, very complicated. So what we wanted to do really was combine all these different boxes into the same thing. So Ubuntu TV is effectively the OS for your TV that does many different things, but it's all kind of in front of you and presented in a simple manner so that it's not navigating through lots of menus. We don't have hidden functionality. It's all very on the surface right there for you. You can still browse your channels just the way you did, watch TV just the way you did, but now you can actually go and find anything you've recorded. You can buy and rent movies. You can go through anything that's available for purchase or stuff you've already purchased. It actually seems a lot like Windows Media Center. Yeah, I suppose in some sense. Windows Media Center still is very much, well, so it can run in a set-top box. It can run on a PC. It is still a very separate experience. Now I think Microsoft's coming out with some new stuff. I think they have some deals with cable and satellite and things like that. But the other thing about going with a solution with Ubuntu TV is Canonical, the parent company for Ubuntu, is a very flexible partner, and that's another thing we think we bring to this table. There are a lot of really large companies putting out products that have a similar experience, not quite the same, and at the same time, because they're large companies, they tend to dominate certain aspects of the relationship. And Canonical can be that neutral party, neutral partner that you can build products based on Ubuntu, not just TVs but other devices, and we'll see those throughout 2012. And at the same time, we allow you to effectively have a bit more freedom and flexibility in the product. For instance, if a partner already has their own services that they want to integrate into that. Things like how do you make money after you actually sell the device. Manufacturers these days don't make a whole lot on the hardware, so they need to be able to make money post-sale, and we want to enable that as well. So you guys, when you say you, you're talking about these manufacturers that you're working with presumably? Correct. Our customer is the manufacturer, and we build products to help both them and their customers, the end users. We want to make sure that once they sell that product, people like that product, and it's something that they're going to keep, and they'll want to buy more products. Is that a different strategy than say, the Ubuntu desktop? No, not in a sense. Ubuntu desktop, we've actually been working with PC manufacturers and server manufacturers for a long time, and putting Ubuntu desktop on that. TV is just basically a different space, right? With the PC market, it's just very different, right? It's classically, people are using this for work, they're using it for writing documents, maybe browsing the web, things like that. When you move to a TV, it's just a very different, very focused experience. What you want to do is you want to watch TV, you want to watch movies, right? Relatively simple there. The other thing is that it's becoming much more common these days that when people buy a TV, they want to do more with it. They may want to watch movies, but then they always get the idea of, I mentioned before, watching a slide show or a movie they recently took. They don't want to have to go out to the video store to rent a video. They don't want to wait in the mail for something to show up for a DVD. It's about taking all these things, this very focused experience, and putting these things all together in a package. You guys are doing your own store? I saw in the preview or whatever you have sample videos, but it looks like you can purchase or rent video. The demo that we have today is very offline. We're not hooked up. What we have is, Canonical has an online service called Ubuntu One. Ubuntu One has a number of things. It started off with just simple file sync, but it's also effectively services, identity, and billing. That means that we have media partners. For instance, today we have the Ubuntu One music store, where you can purchase music. What we're working on is deals so that you can actually purchase other stuff like videos. You can purchase or rent those videos and then stream them to any Ubuntu One device. While we're putting this into Ubuntu TV and making sure it works there, you'll also be able to watch them from any other Ubuntu connected devices. That's something you guys are working on just in general? Yes. It's kind of an overall strategy. We realize that, for instance, not everybody runs Ubuntu. People have many devices in their home. They may have a tablet. They may have a phone. Today, they aren't necessarily running Ubuntu. They may be running iOS. They may be running Android. Ubuntu One already works on those platforms. We want to be able to enable people to have the media they want to get access to on all their devices. You guys are supporting things like cable and satellite and cable card. Is that just being realistic? Because a lot of the TV stuff happening here is about getting away from that and distributing just purely online. Yes, but that's not necessarily reality. Today there's a lot of different providers, cable and satellite providers, large ones like Comcast and Sky. They do provide a very valuable service to people. People are already using these subscription services. They already have access to things like movies that are showing on TV or TV shows that they want to be able to watch. And so while you can go to that video lens and you can find maybe a video you want to buy or rent, at the same time you can also search quickly or filter quickly for a show you want to watch and then set up a recording. And then it's also going to be in the same place. Again, easy to find all your video content in the same place. And as you guys work with... You guys are kind of in between the hardcore open source completely Linux guys and then the manufacturers just in it to make a buck. How is this being received by those people? By your Linux core community? I think the Linux community at their heart really wants to see Linux proliferate. They want to see it used in many different places. And the Ubuntu community in general is very happy with this strategy because they've always been very enthusiastic about Ubuntu. They enjoy contributing to it and they enjoy seeing their work effectively out in the public. People who are not necessarily the same as them. They're not hardcore developers. They're just average people. And seeing them using free software and using Ubuntu on a device I think is something they're excited about. So you guys built this kind of in-house. Now you've pushed it out and now your community is helping you build it. Yeah, yeah. And it's very much a collaboration with the community. At this point we're setting a direction. When we first announced the strategy for multi-screen and we talked about Ubuntu TV, I think Ubuntu TV was the most popular and active discussion community. We have internet chat rooms effectively that we use quite a lot. Those were definitely vibrant discussions about how it should look, how it should work, what are the technologies that we need to build into it, what are the things we need to consider. We also have a mailing list which is also quite active. And so it's been really good actually to see the community get really excited about this and we want to continue that. So we worked in-house to take a technology we've built already, Unity, which is the actual user experience basis for the user experience, and then adapted that. And now from here we want to continue building out, like I was talking about, for the backend. It's more than just what people see, it's how things work in the backend. How do you share media across a network without making people think, what protocol do I need? Or what access credentials do I need? And things like that. We want to make things much more simple and seamless. And some of these things are things that have already been solved in open source and some of these things are things that if they were solved in open source they'd be helpful to all open source projects? Yes certainly. So there are a lot of different products today that do a few of these things and they'll do them very well. But at the same time, often the backend works great, but the front end is kind of, it needs a bit of work. You want to make sure that, like I say, you don't expose these to just so much technical detail. They don't want to worry about where does this content live, they just want to see it. They don't want to know that the movie is necessarily in the cloud, on Amazon, or on their machine. They just want to know, I want to watch that movie. Or I want to see those pictures and how do I get to that. So when should we expect this in the market? We can't necessarily announce a timeframe because right now we're actively engaging with device manufacturers and it all depends on when they're ready to go to market. But I will say that this is a very early stage product. We've worked out the user experience, we think. We've got more to work on, more specifics about things like recording videos and things like that. And then we've got work to actually integrate it on a device and then integrating partner services. So it'll be a little while before you see it, but this will be the first of many technologies I think that you'll see coming out of Canonical over the next year. Including, you guys are working with phones and tablets. Yeah, that's part of our strategy. We want to make sure we work accurately toward that and hopefully you guys will see more of that throughout this year. No dates? No, no, no dates. It's exciting. I mean, I think it'll be great to see it. I do want to see, you know, I think a lot of people are sad to see MeeGo go down and there hasn't been really an open source alternative. Yeah, yeah, we're excited to bring a bunch of these different devices. I think it's really important actually for the platform itself. We've done well in PCs and we've done well in servers, we're actually growing quite well there and in cloud as well. But at the same time, we need to be able to go into these different devices that are completely separate from what we've done classically, I think. All right, well thank you so much Peter. Thank you. It was good talking to you. It was good talking to you too.