Christophe Stoll, aka Nitrada, co-founder of precious, a design consultancy based in Hamburg, Germany. http://precious-forever.com
You can start watching a show on your HDTV one night, pick up where you left off on your laptop at lunch, watch another chunk on the bus ride home on your iPhone, and finish watching in bed on your iPad. The time to watch your favorite shows is any time you want.
… and hopefully anywhere you want soon!
More information in the Hulu Blog.
As much as a product can be successful just because it has a great and easy-to-use user interface (the iPod way), it could also fail simply due to little engaging and boring user experience (the Apple TV way?). That was my first thought after watching the video above.
I'm not sure if it's the best way to design TV interaction mainly around a search box. For sure, that's what Google is all about. But also, no matter how simple and reduced the Google search website might be, you need to have an idea of what you want. The whole web is just waiting for you behind a tiny slot – but you have to feed it first. You have to take the initiative. That's also something we (Johannes and I) talked about quite often: we like Spotify, the cloud-based music service, its search works great and there's almost everything available. But as soon as you don't exactly know what you'd like to listen to, you're pretty lost.
When I'm watching TV, I'm mostly in lean back mode. Everything demanding for sophisticated interaction (if any) happens on another screen – communicating with friends during live events or gathering some information about what's currently running. On the TV screen, I want to focus on just one thing at the time. This could also be some simple interactive content or a game, but I mainly want to be quite passive and entertained – I want to be guided, I want to discover, I want serendipity and I want my TV to learn from my watching habits and behaviour so it can continuously improve. I think Boxee has some promising approaches – it pulls in video content from your social network friends and let's you send videos (via browser bookmarklet) you're stumbling upon during the day –while you might have no time to watch– to a queue, waiting to be watched on your TV, in your living room. I also referred to some ideas around aggregation-based TV curation in a previous posting.
My knowledge of the US television environment is too limited, but as much as I understand from that video, Google TV is going to be positioned in addition to cable providers, as an extension of what people are already using. Adapted to my personal TV experience, that's actually not what I need. I don't want another box and cables in my living room (some TV sets have it pre-installed), I don't want another, additional user interface. My problem with television isn't the way I interact with it, it's the content that's being provided. I'd gladly like to replace, not just complement it. I'd like to have a single, elegant entry point to my TV experience that let's me search, but also just channel-surf (or similar random-based scattering techniques). Where I can watch the news, live sports coverage, video clips as well as feature films and documentaries.
For sure, Google TV is more a platform (based on the open Android operating system) than a product and third party developers are going to create inspiring and helpful applications. But as an out of the box solution and as far as I can judge from watching an introduction video, I'm not convinced. I'm looking forward to checking out the real thing, will give it some time to evolve and then recapitulate on the topic.
Yes, the constant arrival of information packets can be distracting or addictive, especially to people with attention deficit disorder. But distraction is not a new phenomenon. The solution is not to bemoan technology but to develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life. Turn off e-mail or Twitter when you work, put away your Blackberry at dinner time, ask your spouse to call you to bed at a designated hour.
… and I think we should create more digital tools that help people develop these kinds of strategies. Tuning off is just one of many imaginable scenarios for self-control and it demands a lot of self-discipline. What if our digital toolset for information and communication would suggest and motivate us in some way to enjoy some silent periods every now and then?
That's the good thing about advertising breaks on TV: most people I know actually leave their television set for a few minutes, going to the bathroom or their balcony for some fresh air, a drink – or a cigarette.
In the past few weeks, I stumbled upon three approaches regarding aggregation and curation of video content that I found interesting.
bitly.tv ("What the world is watching now") is the most popular example, I guess. Developed in the labs of link shortening shooting star bit.ly, it pulls all videos of shortened links pointing to video content and therefore gives you quite a good feeling of what's hot (or at least being watched) at the moment. They provide a very clean and simple interface with just a grid of videos and a slider to select something between "now" and "7 days ago". Reconstruct the video Zeitgeist of the past week with just a few clicks.
Tweetz TV does similar things, but instead of aggregating videos of millions of unknown people, it just pulls moving image links from your personal Twitter timeline ("My TV"). If there's not enough or too boring video content among the people you follow, you can always switch to "Public TV" mode for a much broader offering.
But the one I found the most compelling is a Boxee app, developed by students of NYU Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Trend Lines “dynamically curates online video content based on current, socially-driven trends". In the demonstration video below, they analyze Google Trends, Twitter Trends and The New York Times to extract relevant video content:
