The entertainment world has become a complex place compared to 20+ years ago. Back then the UK had 4 channels and the biggest challenge was in ensuring that you had an in house distribution feed for those terrestrial analogue channels, that you had remote control capability and that on at least one TV you had a video player/recorder and a video rental shop account. Simple times.
Now we have a combination of analogue (for a short while at least) and digital services provided by at least two methods – terrestrial and cable/satellite, combined with a proliferation of PVR/DVR devices, video on demand, push video on demand, OTT services such as iPlayer, iTunes and others, music services such as iTunes, Napster, and Spotify, and other video/music content newly converted into digital forms. The world is a mix of scheduled broadcast and on demand content delivered from near and far storage. This is a very complex environment, which operators and consumer electronics companies are starting to fight over as they recognise that this is the future, and that this is where money can be made and lost, business models found and destroyed.
Much of the effort is on making this home environment interoperable so that content can be as easily as possible delivered to whatever device the consumer wants to watch it on, whilst making some sort of profit on the transaction – either from the initial content purchase or even the actual viewing event itself. Some of the effort is focused on how to find and distribute the content but not a lot, and this home ecology has many solutions which focus on where the content is and provide a user interface that reflects this. The User Interfaces are a mish-mash of TV, DVR, Network, Internet, or local content. This, in my view, is not going to be a success as it leaves complexity management to the consumer, a consumer who actually does not wish to even think about where the content is or what the content is in format – only whether it is video or audio, and what that content is – the TV episode, the music track, the film, the photograph.
The consumer in my view wants a cloud approach – not a cloud as in the current Internet view of applications somewhere out there - but a cloud into which content is placed and out of which content is played out, a cloud that comprises local and far storage that does not bother the consumer with exactly where it really is – the cloud hides that. It is about the content … stupid after all.
In line with this, a new UI needs to appear… something akin to the EPG – the Electronic Programme Guide you see on all STBs, something that I like to call ECG – the Electronic Content Guide. This would be a UI that concentrates on the content and not where it is, that presents the content to the user as content they already have access to full time, content that they can have temporary access to, and content that can be shared around. This ECG would include in that view content that is being made available from the past, from the present and from the future. This would present the consumer with an old film that the person owns for example, give them access to content that is being played out now such as a football event and content that will be available in the near future such as the next episode of a hot new TV series. The challenge will be in presenting it with today’s technology and with the involvement of today’s content owners, distributors and device manufacturers.
More on this soon. What do you think of the UI and home ecology of the near future?
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