Out of all the evolving forms of media that we hear about these days, the format that has fundamentally changed the least so far is the television. These innocuous boxes have been teased with monikers like "Smart TV" and "Connected TV," but really they have yet to change the way we think about our TVs--they remain appliances for watching certain programs. I for one have watched with hesitancy as these new devices are paraded around as game changing, touting features like on demand video services to supplement your plain cable. Let's face it, a connected TV is just a box with some apps. I not only intend to make the argument that TV is fundamentally unchanged at this time, but to lay out the criteria which will create an innovative, industry-disrupting connected TV.
One of the new buzzwords in this era of rapid innovation is the natural user interface (NUI), perhaps coined as a formalization of the craze Apple has started with their popular iOS touch interface. By using touch, speech, haptic, and gestural controls, NUIs hope to make all computing devices easier and more intuitive to use. While the NUI explosion hasn't happened yet, the fact that corporations like Microsoft are researching NUIs heavily just goes to show that this concept is here to stay. To that end, I also hope to address what effects the adoption of NUIs will have on connected TVs and their surrounding ecosystem, including the usage of peripherals for control and the concept of an app when dealing with large screens.
These ideas I am presenting are just that, unadulterated concepts that I feel would make connected televisions much more useful.
Current Affairs
For all of the articles comparing the different boxes on the market today, there are really very few differences between the different connected TV boxes. They all fundamentally allow the same behaviors, only with varying levels of compatibility with different services and different user interfaces. My bet is that many of these boxes are bought simply to connect TVs to dear Netflix, and yet there are also new TVs with these services built in. I have these features on my new TV/monitor, and the only one I use is Netflix. I might use Hulu or Pandora if I was especially fond of streaming TV shows or music, but regardless we've found a fundamental flaw in this supposed "new class" of devices: they don't do anything fundamentally new. Apps on TVs are just more ways to do the same thing a TV has always done.
The business of creating these boxes is surely difficult, what with all the different content distributors to deal with, but there simply doesn't seem to be much that these devices are accomplishing. Yes, you can browse the web on some of them, but why do you want to in the first place? In fact, what is true purpose of a TV? With their large screens, TVs obviously excel at content consumption, especially video, and thus their assumed role up until now. Connected TVs claim to bring more content for you to consume, and yes we all love having Netflix on our TVs, but what the entire industry is missing is the chance to change the way we consume our content completely. By allowing the content to exist free from the restraints of a TV station--something that necessitates broadcast schedules and channel numbers--connected TV could potentially do to our televisions what internet has done to virtually every other medium: give the user complete control.
Streamlining the Frontier
The very basic assumptions in TV today are up for reevaluation in an day when all content is delivered instantly, over the air, whenever we want it. The idea of a TV station as we know it may simply disappear in the next twenty years as over the air broadcasts become dead to a new generation of internet savvy consumers. These consumers expect their "connected" TVs to deliver digital content in a functionally digital way--allowing for Netflix-like consumption of any content, from a network's entire library of shows to live news and sports. Fundamentally, what this change means is that time slots should be cast out in favor of an on demand model for all content. Imagine being able to scroll through a list of shows available from your favorite network and to watch the any episode at any time. It sounds wonderful, right? It gives users the control, something they have to come love with services like Hulu or Netflix. While this sounds like it could mean the end of "tuning in" to catch your favorite shows, this can still be preserved by presenting whatever is on currently alongside a network's on demand options, also allowing the traditional TV advertising model, commercials, to remain in existence.
Another fundamental change that connected TVs can usher in is the elimination of the pesky numbers we have come to know all of the networks by. The system now may seem to function perfectly well, but imagine the power rush you'll feel when you are able to arrange your connected TV's home screen however you want: you can arrange your favorite channels in slots one through eight and finally rid yourself of the Home Shopping Network. This, in turn, will benefit the networks by allowing them to form a closer connection with their consumers. The same way apps on your smartphone feel personal because you choose to download and then arrange them, your TV channels will be personalized to your tastes. The possibilities extend even further with the potential for different home screens that change automatically based on the time of day. Future connected TVs could streamline your experience by automatically detecting the channels you watch at night, news and network dramas, and separating those from the cartoons your family watches on Sunday mornings.
Natural Tendencies
Today's connected TVs may be making a little progress in the area of content, but where they have taken a huge step backwards is in their user interfaces. Google's smart TV actually ships with a controller that has a keyboard... on the controller. It's just awful for usability, and certainly kills any sense of wonder that the box could provide thanks to its lack of intuitive controls. Someone has got to do something about this--this is an area in which even Apple is weak. While Steve Jobs has repeatedly called the Apple TV a "hobby," the lack of a powerful user interface definitely makes practicing this hobby a little bit slow. Getting to the point, a reasonable assumption is that smartphones and tablets will continue to penetrate the market and by the time connected TVs become widespread, they will be in a majority of consumers' pockets. This will benefit the connected TV industry in two ways: control and continuity.
While there are remote controls apps for some smartphones already, the true killer for a connected TV as described above would be a tablet as a remote. I'm not talking about including a tablet with every TV, but traditional controllers simply have no place in controlling these devices--manufacturers should at some point in the future stop including separate remotes for these boxes, at the very least. A tablet remote would allow the user to view a shrunken version of the TV's UI right in their laps, allowing them to interact with the content itself right from their couches, leveraging the handheld device's native gestures and keyboard rather than creating a new smart TV specific solution.
In fact, another great benefit of this type of interaction is the ability to integrate with existing operating systems. The connected TV's interface should be heavily influenced by the touch-based mobile user interfaces, allowing big players like Apple and Google to retain control of their platforms and create continuity, while forcing smaller players like Boxee, Roku, etc play nicely with their competitors' mobile OSs for remote capabilities. I think it's inevitable that the big players will begin rolling out unified OSs across all of their devices, both mobile and home devices (including computers), and thus these interactions will help usher in a new era of seamless computing, allowing interoperability of documents, media, and apps at home and on the go.
While apps on the go will remain as tools to accomplish specific actions, my hope is that apps on large television screens will shift away from blown up versions of mobile apps that have no additional functionality to computer-like apps that usher in a whole new wave of functionality, similar perhaps to the "hubs" concept in Windows Phone 7. A connected TV app for Netflix, for example, would allow touch friendly media browsing and advanced searching, versus a channel for Netflix, which would simply list your instant queue alongside all of the other networks' content. Add an intuitive natural interface that can be used across all of your devices we've got a winner. Not only is usability the winner when consumers can access their content more naturally, but the whole industry will explode.
Conclusion
My hope is that connected TV manufacturers will wake up and stop trying to make video services and app stores to compete with their opponents in their typical "me too" fashion, and instead focus on innovating. An operating system that lives on a single company's box doesn't live or die by its app ecosystem, what it needs is an innovative way to give consumers greater control over their media--the extensibility that comes with apps is unnecessary if your platform doesn't differentiate itself from your opponents! By allowing the principles of NUI design to guide their choices, connected TV manufacturers have a chance to revolutionize both the TV interface itself and the way consumers access their content. Powerful TV viewing unlike anything we have today may only be a few years away, if only the focus turns away from offering a volume of content to allowing users to choose their own content, on their own schedule.
Sources
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/microsoft-research-techfest-2010-nui-and-the-cloud-dominate.ars
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