Kylo

» see kylo.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Kylo was a Gecko browser with everything scaled up. Enormous type, enormous buttons, and an on-screen keyboard you drove with a pointer, all of it built to be legible from a sofa rather than from eighteen inches away. Hillcrest Labs released it free for Windows and Mac on 19 March 2010, aimed squarely at the people wiring a computer into a television.

That was a real audience in 2010. Smart TVs barely existed, streaming boxes were early, and the practical way to get web video onto a big screen was an HDMI cable and a spare laptop. The problem with that setup was never the picture. It was that the browser assumed a mouse on a desk and a reader close to the glass, and Kylo fixed exactly that.

Hillcrest also sold the hardware half. The Loop was a $99 in-air pointer, a mouse you waved rather than pushed, built on the motion-sensing work that was the company's actual business. Kylo was there partly to give the Loop something obvious to do.

Three days after launch, Hulu blocked it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ ten feet ~

The design language for this was called the ten-foot interface, and it is harder than it sounds. Text has to survive being read at distance on a panel calibrated for movies rather than documents, and navigation has to work without a cursor anyone can place precisely. Text entry is the part that never gets solved, which is why Kylo shipped an on-screen keyboard nobody enjoyed using.

Kylo's answer was mostly brute scale plus a grid of large site tiles on the start page, so the common case was one click from cold. It worked well enough that reviewers liked it, and it never mattered, because the sites people actually wanted were the ones with a legal department.

~ the hulu problem ~

Hulu had worked during Hillcrest's pre-launch testing and stopped on 22 March 2010. Chief executive Dan Simpkins made the obvious argument in public: Kylo was a web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox, not a device pretending to be one, and blocking it was blocking a user agent string rather than a category of viewing. It did not help.

The block was a licensing decision wearing a technical costume. Hulu's content was cleared for the computer, and the same show on the television was a different deal at a different price with a different set of signatures on it. A browser that made a computer look like a television broke that boundary, and the boundary was the whole business. Boxee spent years fighting the identical fight and lost it the same way.

~ what replaced it ~

Hillcrest released the source under the Mozilla Public License on 15 May 2012 and handed the project to whoever wanted it. That is usually the last press release a product gets, and it was here. No community picked it up at any scale, and the browser stopped moving.

What made it unnecessary was the television growing its own software. By 2013 the set had apps in it, Chromecast was $35, and the specific problem Kylo solved, a desktop browser being unreadable at distance, stopped being a problem anyone had. CEVA bought Hillcrest Labs from InterDigital for $11.2 million in July 2019 for the sensor technology. The browser came along in the paperwork and was never updated again.

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