TV Internet - A Real World Review

TV-Internet – A Real World Review

NTCA’s Fiber: Opticmize Your Network gave me the rare chance for me to stay in a real hotel, as compared to my normal mode of leaching off friends. This hotel had a very interesting configuration with regards to Internet access, as it had Wi-Fi in the lobby, dial-up and high speed Internet via the television in the guest room. In a rare moment of pecuniary craziness, I decided to splurge and spend $9.95 (excluding tax) to surf the net with the convenience of remote control - what a waste of money!

So, I noticed the hotel levied a toll for all calls outside downtown Pittsburg. A quick calculation and the high-speed Internet over the TV seemed like a pretty good deal. They had a free “walled-garden” area to give guests a feel for the service. This area provided information on the local weather, local restaurants and other things that would be of interest to a person from out-of-town. Sign-up was pretty straightforward as all billing is direct to the hotel. One good thing is that the user interface is tightly integrated with the existing VOD and navigation methodology, such that it is easy for someone who is familiar with ordering a movie to order up the web on TV.

The downside is that, once you are online with this system, you might say that surf is not up. It had been a long time since I spent a significant amount of time using an Internet-enabled set-top box and I was disappointed to see the system deployed by the Hilton was more difficult to use and less capable than technology I evaluated two years ago. If I had not already had experience with this sort of service, I would have probably given up after 10 minutes and asked for a refund.

Some of the problems I experienced included:

A wireless keyboard was a necessary evil, as I didn’t have the patience to try the virtual keyboard. The downside of the wireless keyboard is I could feel the onset of carpal tunnel after about 20 minutes of use. Also, it did not always react to my lightening fast, 10 words per minute typing, so words would come out more jumbled than normal.
Several times I received some sort of message like, “system busy”. The system uses a shared bandwidth over coaxial cable solution, so it wasn’t clear if the blockage was intra-building or whether it was the Internet pipe from the hotel to the outside world. Regardless, it was very inconvenient.
It crashed several times. I had to reboot the set-top box by powering on and off. I think it was jammed up by pop up ads on my Yahoo! account.
Some web pages were just too difficult to read. Granted, web pages should be designed for viewing for television to acheive optimum results, but the problem is most of the web pages that people want to surf, like Yahoo! are designed for the PC. At one point, I was lost on the main Yahoo! web page searching for the little email icon. I think I had to reboot.

Some of the things that could really improve the service include:

While I was surfing and checking email, it felt oddly silent. I realized that I almost never watch television with the sound off. It needs music, maybe a surf sound, as I viewed the web.
Another way to make this a visual-aural experience is to create a picture-in-picture, where a thumbnail of a television channel is superimposed onto the web page. If something of interest appears on television, then the user should be able to switch the television channel to the full-screen.
Doesn’t support POP3 email accounts. It appears that the only way it is possible to retrieve email is with a web-based email account. If you don’t have a web-based email account, then you can’t retrieve your emails. POP3 email might be a feature in this system, but it sure wasn’t obvious.
It doesn’t allow the user to retrieve attachments (e.g. Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat), and I don’t believe it supports Flash. Obviously, this is a pretty big limitation, but the lack of documentation is a real problem as it would be very confusing to most users.
The set-top box should have an Ethernet port to allow guests to plug their lap-tops into the high-speed network.

The point of all this is that it took a painful night in Pittsburg for me to relearn that television, as someone recently reminded me, is a “sit-back” experience, while using the computer is a “lean-forward” experience. From an independent telco perspective, it is important to keep this in mind when defining the integration of web-based content into an interactive television system.

Further, the web content which probably makes sense to integrate into the television is that which augments existing television programming either to make stickier services or drive new revenue streams (e.g. impulse shopping). It should also be possible to navigate using the television-centric, remote contol (i.e. no keyboard necessary). Of course, that is today, as the technology improves and behavior adapts to a more interactive television, so will the demands for interactive content change.

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