LAS VEGAS – Why can’t the cable TV user interface be as simple, elegant and useful as Apple’s iPod?
That was the question facing a number of executives during a Monday afternoon session at the National Cable Telecommunications Association convention in Las Vegas.
Cable operators, programmers, advertisers and so on, all agree that with the burgeoning content available on cable – the hundreds of channels and multiple thousands of hours of on demand content, the existing electronic program guides simply do not cut it.
“The guide system has been pretty broken for a long time,” acknowledged Gemstar-TV Guide president Ryan O’Hara.
Indeed, everything about the way the industry looks at and uses guides are about to change. “The age of the up-down-left-right (remote) is over,” said Hillcrest Labs president and founder Dan Simpkins. His company was showing a cool new two-button (!!) remote called The Loop (pictured) which works in concert with the company’s Freespace motion control technology, which senses motion in three dimensions and precisely translates human motions into on–screen cursor movement.
“It’s an operating system for television,” Simpkins added.
While video on demand has gained traction and is growing in popularity, it hasn’t yet become the killer app that MSOs had hoped for. Other interactive applications have also come and gone, due in large part to the difficulty in navigating content using a traditional remote and program guide.
“With so many choices we don’t really have a good way to interact with the television,” continued Simpkins. “Interactive television hasn’t happened because there’s no way to interact with the television.”
However, added O’Hara, it’s not just about search. If it was, Google would be taking over the TV IPG space already. “People need to have content presented to them,” he said. In effect, they need an editor. While new tools make search easier, applications that learn as they go (like when you visit Amazon.com and it recommends certain titles based on what you’ve bought before) will be a huge help to TV viewers awash in video content they either have delivered to them from their distributor, or video they network in themselves with various devices like Apple TV.
Adding capabilities similar to what’s available on social networking sites is another idea, added Peter Stern, Time Warner Cable’s EVP product management. That means having flexible platforms where the folks on your “buddy list” recommend shows to you, kind of like a digital water cooler.
“I think we’re getting to the point where the customer behaviour and what they want to do are catching up to the capabilities of the technology,” added Comcast Cable’s SVP marketing and sales, Marvin Davis, meaning cable technology is finally getting friendly and flexible enough to let people more easily find that expensive content the MSOs have already paid for.
“It’s worse to offer a lot of content that people can’t find that to not offer the content at all,” added Davis.
