A new service launching in the UK and US will sell TV shows directly to consumers - bypassing Netflix, Lovefilms and other services.

But the question is in a time of 500,000 entertainment choices, will users really want another channel?

The OTT industry desperately needs a common universal search and discovery User Experience to make things easier for customers to find exactly the type of entertainment they are interested in. And it should have broadcast entertainment options integrated as well.

Another channel like A3M means yet another app icon on my Smart TV service that I have to go in and out of when searching for something cool to watch.This is not how I want to spend my time in front of the boob tube.

Read the whole story here: https://connect.innovateuk.org/web/convergence/articles/-/blogs/all3media-to-sell-shows-direct-to-fans-via-connected-tv-apps

socialtvdigest:

Peel: Personal, Social, All-in-One TV Experience [VIDEO]

Reblogged from Apartment Therapy

Last year we covered Peel, the universal remote control designed by Yves Behar that works together with your iPhone. The startup just revealed its newest capabilities for Peel at SXSW this year, which could change our behavior when it comes to watching TV… [Full Story]

So my first week at WD is in the can, and boy, what a ride it has been! When you join a company with 62,000 employees (nay, now 100,000 with the HGST acquisition) there is an incredible amount to learn in the way of processes, acronyms, policies, metrics, yada, yada, yada. I gotta tell you, my eyes were swimming! It’s very difficult to feel like you can make a positive impact when you don’t even know what the column heading on the spreadsheet means - let alone the data itself!

I have to say I entered into this new social contract with the hard drive behemoth with some trepidation about losing my identity to the Borg. But MAN, was I wrong. This place is off the hook! So many good people, all focused on doing the right thing. It is truly amazing. You should see the stuff these people are working on for the future of the connected home. It’s crazy good.

I can’t wait to share it with you….

The founder of GigaOm recently traveled to India and visited with family. He writes about turning on his Mom to the iPad and how that epitomizes all that is right with Apple’s design methodologies:

When at home, I did a FaceTime call with my siblings who also live overseas. I handed over the iPad to my mom. She had this look of amazement, one of pure unadulterated joy as she chatted with her grandson.

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It didn’t matter how it was happening — just that she could talk to her grandson who was oceans apart from her. If there ever was a moment that captured the emotion in a piece technology, that was it.

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Apple, clearly, is not for everyone. But for me that moment of joy experienced by my mother is enough of a reason why there will be no other computer company. Apple’s competitors will do their own thing. Some, like Samsung, will do spectacularly well. But for me, Apple finds ways to delight people, pushing technology into the background. When Steve Jobs passed away, I wrote:

Jobs put life and soul into inanimate objects. Everyone saw steel, silicon and software; he saw an opportunity to paint his Mona Lisa. People saw a phone; Steve saw a transporter of love. People saw a tablet; he saw smiles and wide-eyed amazement. They made computers; he made time machines that brought us all together through a camera, screen and a connection.

The smile on my mother’s face captures what I wrote the best.

Read the entire post here.

I am excited to tell you that I am joining Western Digital Corporation as their Vice President & General Manager of the Connected Home Solutions Group. This group develops and markets consumer products for the digital home, such as the WD TV Live Hub and the WD Personal Cloud Storage products.

You probably know that developing great user experiences for the living room is a passion of mine, so you can understand why I took this position. Western Digital is investing heavily in consumer product innovation, and I get to be in the middle of that!

Do you own any WD products? If so, I would love to hear about your experience with them.

Or, if you know of some interesting products or technologies that would fit well at WD, please send me your suggestions.

B2C has posted some interesting preliminary results from a group of 10 second screen users they asked to report on their experiences during the Super Bowl.

We did second screen socialization at our Super Bowl party and I have to say I pretty much agree with their five findings:

1.  Second Screen Synced Ad spots can be socially disruptive:

2. Certain second screen spots may* cause lower engagement with the first screen television spot:

3. Device problems and fragmentation created advertising issues.

4. Programming related Companion Content was well received:

5. Incentives went a long way for our couch consultants to create engagement.

Be sure to read the details and user anecdotes here: http://www.business2community.com/consumer-marketing/super-bowl-second-screen-advertising-and-connected-tv-insights-from-the-couch-consultants-0129243

From the Wall Street Journal:

New Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai described his strategic goal as teaching the company’s 168,000 employees that past successes in manufacturing must be replaced by selling the harder to quantify ‘user experience’.

The world has moved on, he said, “We can’t just continue to be a great purveyor of hardware products, even though some people expect us to do that.”

…. In August he created a new centralized unit called the Integrated UX, and gave it authority over product planning managers for digital cameras, TVs, PlayStation machines, audio/visual products and Vaio computers.

“YuMe, the operating system for TV 2.0, today announced the results of a joint study with Nielsen, which quantifies the true impact of online video when combined with a major CPG TV advertising campaign: reach, frequency, and recall increase substantially even as the CPM rate decreases…..

A high level summary of key findings from the YuMe-Nielsen study highlights the many benefits of a TV 2.0 campaign strategy:

• Content present on multiple media extends reach: YuMe online video increased reach for the targeted 35–54 age demographic by 7 percentage points when complemented by a TV flight. In addition, nearly 9 million people were exposed to the campaign on multiple screens.

• Average frequency across screens increases: The number of respondents exposed to the PHD campaign three or more times increased by 31 percent, while those exposed to the campaign six or more times rose by 52 percent.
• Low eCPMs for online video drive substantial cost efficiencies: Although less than one-sixth the cost of the TV schedule, the $500,000 spend invested in the YuMe Network drove an increase of 34 percent in gross rating points (GRPs) from the original TV schedule. The efficiency of the online video spend was nearly double that of the concurrent TV spend and the cost per point (CPP) was reduced by 11 percent.
• Brand and message recall improves with YuMe: Impression-per-impression, YuMe online video outperformed TV in terms of both brand and message recall compared to the campaign TV norm. Results of a Nielsen TV Brand Effect analysis showed an increase of 22 percent for brand recall and 31 percent for message recall one day post-exposure.
• YuMe outperforms online video ad network norms: YuMe’s Connected Audience Network outperformed its peers in both brand and message recall, demonstrating an increase of 33 and 50 percent respectively seven days post-exposure.

Read the whole story here.

” results of the first trial of the second screen application with another broadcast partner seem to suggest that just fifty users posted an average of two messages each over the two month run.”

Read the whole story here: http://informitv.com/news/2012/01/22/zeeboxtrialquestions/

This post is the fifth in a series on Social TV check-in apps for Android-based smart phones.

The first thing you think when hearing about SocialGuide is, “Finally - somebody gets it!” The two biggest user experience problems with similar apps like GetGlue and Miso are that: a) they do not report  real-time “what’s trending” numbers - reducing their content discovery value; and b) their original versions suffered from empty room syndrome, because chat was restricted to users of their app who happened to be watching the same show. SocialGuide was the first app to elegantly solve both those problems by using the real-time Twitter-verse as its “membership” base.

Installing SocialGuide is quick and painless with an interesting twist. You can set up a unique logon or login with Twitter or Facebook. If you do link your social media accounts, SocialGuide imports all your friends automatically. After the login process, SocialGuide requests your zip code and television service provider (ie. Comcast, DirecTV). This allows SocialGuide to mine the Twitter-verse for viewers in the same time zone as you – making the “what’s trending” show list much more relevant, and enables them to show you what channel to tune for a trending show.

The SocialGuide UI is simple and intuitive. The home screen is a scrollable list of currently airing TV shows sorted by the number of Tweets they are getting. Clicking on a show takes you to a page that shows comments being made in real-time about the show, sorted into Everyone, Your Friends and Cast categories. From here you can comment on the show to Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately there is no metadata or poster art for the show, so you can’t tell if you’ve already seen the episode currently being broadcast.  

Across the top of the SocialGuide home page are category tabs that let you narrow the trending shows list to TV Series, Reality Shows, Movies, Sports or News. Below the category tabs is a “timeline” that lets you look back one hour and forward two hours. So if you’re in LA, you can see what’s trending now on the East Coast and plan to watch it later. Oddly, there is no search capability in this Android app. If you can’t find the show you’re watching by browsing the categories – you’re out of luck.

While SocialGuide is full of innovative ideas, its implementation has room for improvement. The version released last October seems to actually have more bugs than its predecessor. For example:

a.       The app hangs often, especially when trying to scroll a list, yielding “app has stopped responding” error messages. This appears to be due to the real-time nature of SocialGuide. Perhaps it is taking longer to search the Twitter-verse than Android allows for application response.

b.      If you make a typo error in the create login process, you continue to get an error message even after you correct the misspelling. You have to exit the application and start the process over (with no typos) in order to set up an account.

c.       SocialGuide supports rotation into landscape mode, but if you do it while in one of the category tabs, the app inexplicably jumps back to the home page.

d.      When inside a show page and trying to scroll thru viewer comments, the list will not scroll until you switch to landscape mode.

Compared to most Android Social TV apps, SocialGuide is an ambitious achievement. It has a unique approach and clean graphics. Also, the integrity of the engaged viewer numbers that SocialGuide reports on their website should be rock-solid data for advertisers, since they are simply reporting total number of real-time tweets, rather than accumulating unaudited check-ins from badge seekers. Still, I cannot recommend this version of SocialGuide. It hangs too often and needs both search capability and show metadata to become a truly effective content discovery tool. Also, SocialGuide would benefit from “push” technology – giving users a richer Social TV experience and advertisers a route to engage them. Perhaps by adding these features and resolving the bugs, SocialGuide can start to build a user-base against its more established competitors.

Written by Scott D. Vouri, January 13, 2012

Once the dust of Social TV hype settles, content recommendation will be changed forever

Cory Bergman founder of Lostremote, a web site dedicated to social TV, speaks of “a smart social guide” displaying 4 kinds of recommendations :

1. new episodes of shows you customarily watch;
2. current shows your friends enjoy;
3. trending shows across the larger population, and
4. what your friends are watching now.”

Maybe like the four sides of a cube?

Read the whole story here: http://nbry.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/once-the-dust-of-social-tv-hype-settles-content-recommendation-will-be-changed-forever-22/

itswilder:

Last night Yahoo’s IntoNow app made a nice entry into main stream by promoting & utilizing their TV check-in app. Over the course of the debate, if users had downloaded & had the app open, the app would show relevant information about the debate and candidates.

Overall, it was a very nice experience, but it did come with a few rough edges. Here are a few screenshots and my thoughts about what was good & what needs a bit of polish. The good news is that they have a year to get it jusssst right.

Read More

The following is excerpted from this case study.

On May 20^th, 2010 Google Product Manager Rishi Chandra gave the world its first peek at Google’s forthcoming Android product Google TV. Washington Post reporter Rob Pagararo described the scene:

“9:27 a.m. PDT: Google TV starts with an interactive guide to TV programs that simply lets you type a search for what you want to watch. Unintentional hilarity ensues when the TV feed shows an especially unsubtle campaign ad from Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman — and then the first wireless keyboard remote doesn’t work. Ouch.

9:34 a.m. PDT: You can click on a listing for a future program to have your DVR record it when it airs. But then … in a series of cringe-inducing moments, presenter Vincent Dureau keeps having trouble with the Bluetooth and asking ‘Can we switch to the other box?’ Then Chandra — I am not making this up — asks people if they can turn off their phones to free up the Bluetooth airwaves. Ouch. To add to the awkwardness factor, the TV stream keeps showing some of the weirdest footage imaginable for daytime TV, like an MSNBC bit about Nicolas Cage’s ‘animal sex diet,’ whatever that is.”

After the ill-fated but prophetic demo, Google CEO Eric Schmidt assembled on-stage the CEOs of Intel, Sony, Logitech, Dish Network, Best Buy and Adobe to chat about their support and impressions of Google TV. Paul Ottelini of Intel had already declared the previous week that, “The revolution we’re about to go through is the biggest single change in television since it went color.”  Brian Dunn of Best Buy predicted this would be the “holiday shopping season of a lifetime” and many of the other CEOs confirmed their commitment to ship Google TV products “in the Fall”.

So what happened? How did Google TV crash so badly?

Many say that Google TV failed for two reasons - it lacked access to content and it had a horrible user experience. But that is really the “what” of the failure, here’s the “why”.

1.  Google did not build an eco-system for Google TV prior to its release.

Third party applications and accessories can make a new product category a success by leveraging the product in ways the original designers don’t foresee and driving down pricing through competition. Google did not create a third party Google TV App Market, or enable outside hardware vendors to develop accessories. Had they done so they could have brought at least three compelling new activities to the living room:

a.       Social Gaming – Microsoft Xbox and Sony PS3 divisions were focusing at the time on their hard core gaming franchises, so Google’s would-be application partners could have had this market to themselves.

b.      Social TV – along the lines of IntoNow and GetGlue. With Google TV’s tight live broadcast integration and included keyboard a “second screen” wouldn’t even have been needed.

c.       Super-easy Video Chat with family and friends. Logitech did come out with that function for their Google TV Revue – but with a camera price of $150 on top of the $300 base Revue price, it was a non-starter.

2. Google didn’t seek to understand the important differences between the smartphone and living room markets.

Consumers have a higher sensitivity to bugs and user experience quirks in living room products. TVs, cable boxes and stereo receivers have always “just worked”, and any new device going into the living room must be just as easy to use. In the smartphone market, original Droid consumers were more forgiving because as long as the phone calling and texting functions worked, they could suffer the learning curve on other features in private, without it affecting their spouse or children like living room mishaps tend to.

3. Google did not address content providers’ concerns about potential lost revenue.

Movies and TV shows cost a lot of money to create and that money comes from advertising and cable subscriptions. If Google was now going to sell ads overlaid or inserted into online content, would it cannibalize existing revenue streams, as had happened in the print newspaper business? Google never forthrightly addressed this issue head on. Instead they asserted that Google TV was just a browser platform and if a PC browser could display an online TV episode for free, then a Google TV browser should be freely able to do so on an HDTV.

Compare that indifferent attitude to the way that Flingo introduced their connected TV application platform service to broadcasters and advertisers:

a.       We have technology built into internet connected devices (TVs, Blu-ray players, media streamers, etc.) that can detect in real-time what a person is watching.

b.      We have a suite of free app development tools that let you quickly deploy your premium content via custom, branded apps to over 10 million TVs around the world that support our service.

c.       We’ll give you robust analytics on how your content performs around the world.

d.      Our partners include Samsung, LG, Vizio, Fox, CBS, Showtime and MTV. 

e.      We’ll split the revenue 50/50 with you.

4. Google did not assemble a team of proven Connected TV and User Experience specialists.

Instead of assembling a team of connected TV experts from companies like Netflix, Roku and Hulu, Google chose most of the TV team members and leaders from existing projects such as Google Apps, “a suite of Google applications that brings together essential services to help your business”.

5. Google did not conduct a valid beta test.

Dish Network ran a 400 user beta test program for Google in late 2009, early 2010. Dish was chosen because they integrated support for Google TV directly into their STBs, allowing users to change channels and set recordings from within the Google TV user interface – rather than having to jump out to the STB’s show guide, as was necessary with all cable and DirecTV boxes. Unfortunately Dish Network had only 14% market share overall, so Google did not receive testing feedback from a valid cross-section of customers.

6. Google did not have the discipline to under-promise and over-deliver.

Instead, they promised to:

a.       Ship in the “Fall”. Technically, mid-October, 2010 was in the fall, but any channel person will tell you that September 15^th is shipping D-Day for the Holiday Season.

b.      Have “thousands” of apps running on Google TV. Through October, 2011 there were about 30.

c.       Ship an upgrade of Google TV software to all users “at the beginning of 2011”. An upgrade was released to Sony users in November, 2011 and Logitech Revue users in December.

d.      Support the downloading and running of Android apps. “If you’re application doesn’t require phone-specific software, it should work [already] on Google TV.” Through September 2011, there was no way to download made-for-Google-TV apps, let alone regular Android apps. When announcing the product update on October 28, 2011, Google’s VP of Product Management stated, “of the hundreds of thousands of Android apps, there should be around 1,800 apps that will work with Google TV initially”.

e.      Open source Google TV software in 2011, creating a “flurry of new products and services integrat[ing] with the Google TV movement.” As of December, 2011 Google TV has not been open sourced.

7. Google did not cancel the release of Version 1.0 and improve its product offering.

By September, 2010 things were looking bleak for Google TV. Networks were talking about blocking access to their content, beta-testers had responded to a Dish survey that the $300 price was too high, Roku had preemptively dropped their Netflix streaming players to $99 and below, and Apple announced that version 2 of their streaming device, the Apple TV, would also sell at $99. Given that without broadcast network support the Google TV would be nothing more than a $300 Netflix streaming device that required a keyboard to use, one would have expected Google to rethink its product strategy. But Google had seven major U.S. CEO’s put their personal reputations on the line back at that fateful announcement in May, 2010. How could they retreat?

Result

On August 26, 2011 Google Chairman Eric Schmidt admitted that Google had shipped a beta quality version for its product release in October, 2010 “I think it’s a beta product,” he said. “Google typically brings out beta versions, and they’re not for the faint of heart, and I think that’s what you saw. We were not able to get the product perfect before we shipped it.”

On November 10, 2011, Logitech CEO Guerrino De Luca announced it had lost over $100 Million on the Google TV powered Revue and called his company’s Christmas 2010 launch “a mistake of implementation of a gigantic nature”.  De Luca told investors that the company had “brought closure to the Logitech Revue saga” by making plans to let inventory run out this quarter and that there are “no plans to introduce another box to replace Revue.”

Written by Scott D. Vouri, December 8, 2011

Now this is cool.

LostRemote is reporting that IntoNow has teamed with ABC to allow its second-screen app users to interact with the GOP Presidential Candidate Debate in real-time:

Viewers who “tag” the debate on TV will be able to participate in real-time polls that tie to specific candidate questions and answers. ABC News will be watching the data and at times incorporate the audience’s response in the broadcast with a follow-up question. For example, “72% of the Yahoo! audience thinks you did not answer the question. Would you like another chance to respond?”

Will there be unintended consequences?