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An Interactive Conference About Interactive Television by Ken Pyle (ken.pyle@viodi.com), Viodi, LLC |
October 6, 2004 Issue |
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One of the things that made the ITA’s Reinventing Television Summit unique was the format for this day and a half long conference. There were special presentations that were meant almost as conversation starters. Everyone would split into groups to discuss a particular aspect of what had just been presented. Within each group, there would be a facilitator who would then summarize the group’s discussion. This approach made for some interesting dialogue, as well offering the opportunity to network in much more meaningful ways than most conferences. It is difficult to summarize the summit in a few sentences, but one of the important points is that user interfaces have to be simple to use. Another message heard over and over was that advertising integrated into interactive television has its greatest impact when it is relevant to the associated programming. The first roundtable I attended was on the role of PEG (Public Access, Education & Government) channels with regards to helping to inform voters. This was an interesting roundtable, as I had the chance to meet the people who made, as I call it, Politicians on Demand a reality at Altrio. Altrio worked with the Center for Government Studies to produce eight different videos, which were included as on-demand content on the Altrio system. We discussed the challenges of producing content for both an on-demand, as well as for traditional linear channels. This topic is worthy of a future article and is so important that we are integrating information about this into Viodi’s Local Content Workshop. Dale Herigstad, Executive Creative Director of Schematic, gave an excellent tutorial regarding the design and care of User Interfaces. With over 25 years of experience in graphics design for television and 12 years working with Interactive Television, he has some good insight as to how to create guides that allow viewers to find content with minimal effort. He provided several examples of User Interfaces from basic grids to ones that were animated and seemed to move the viewer through space. He emphasized that the above all else, the simplest interfaces to use will be the ones that win. He also suggested that the “Red Button” is something that the United States needs to help educate viewers on interactive television (in the U.K. the red button is the universal way to access interactive applications). He also stressed the importance of integrating meta-data along with the content. Building upon the theme of the importance of the User Interface, Rebecca Lim, Director of Interactive Television for Starz-Encore, described how Starz views the interface as an extension of their brand. Starz-Encore has 2 million plus subscribers to their on-demand service. They want it to be easy for people to find content. Starz is an advocate for virtual on-demand channels, such that a viewer can simply enter a channel number to find Starz on Demand. Lim also stressed the importance of navigation consistency to allow branding. Being able to have linear to non-linear navigation is also very important. For instance, an icon with a trigger in a standard cable channel could be a driver to an on-demand version of that programming. She also suggested that auto-provisioning, such that a viewer could order Starz on an impulse, is important. This is the type of feature that the middleware providers to independent telcos have been touting for awhile. Lastly, Lim reminded the audience that the inclusion of box art (i.e. the poster of the movie) is important to help drive usage. Mike Bloxham, Director of Testing & Assessment for the Media & Design Center at Ball State University, provided an academic viewpoint to the entire topic of ITV. He has been studying ITV, both in the U.S and the U.K., for quite a long time. He presented an interesting graph that suggested people’s level of comfort and understanding with interactive television increases in relation to their experience with the technology. This is not a linear relationship and he suggested that there are four phases - orientation, playing, using and controlling – a customer will experience before they are ready to personalize the user interface. The important lesson for ITV providers is that, in the beginning, things like “my favorites” and other personalization features are not as important as making the basic ITV service usable. He pointed out, what most independent telcos that have deployed digital cable systems know, that the Installation Engineer is very influential in how people use the service and what upgrades they take. Bloxham went through a description of the seven groups that they have defined as early ITV adopters. Each of these groups represented different demographics and had different motivations for why they were interested in ITV. The important implication from this was each group had their different content interests. An important point made by Bloxham was that ITV applications have to be relevant in the context of the content. Bloxham also suggested that text messaging applications is very appealing to viewers. This is similar to the idea brought forward by Phil Erli of Ringgold last month, when he suggested that Ringgold is looking at adding messaging on the television as a new application. A related ITV application that was reported on in one of the panels is a voting application whereby British viewers could interact with that stellar show, Get me out of here, I am a celebrity. Apparently one million viewers paid $0.50 each to interact in some way with this show; amazing. These are just a few of the tidbits picked up from ITA’s Summit. I highly recommend attending the ITA’s next event. Allison Dollar, co-president of the ITA will be speaking at IP Video @ Telecom 04, so please be sure to talk to her directly about their efforts to make ITV even more of a reality. All displayed trademarks, logos
and service marks are the property of their respective owners. ©
2004, Viodi,
LLC. All Rights Reserved |
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