While TiVo unveiled its new interface and Premiere DVRs on Wednesday, combining regular TV with internet services, the TV of Tomorrow Show in San Francisco gave a glimpse of the future.
In a New User Experiences session, Immersive Media showed off its 360-degree video first used in Google’s Street View and latterly at the Vancouver Olympics , Alticast demonstrated more advanced TV interfaces being enjoyed by viewers in Korea and NDS showed how cable operators could fight back against the threat from “over the top” internet services.
NDS, the News Corp company that specialises in enabling secure digital content through set-top boxes, gave me a private demonstration of some of their concept interfaces and new technologies a few weeks ago, and showed some of these, such as 3D TV at the TVOT show.
Nigel Smith, chief marketing officer, showed me an interface codenamed Oona dreamed up by NDS’s Danish user experience team.
It shows how operators can provide context to what viewers are seeing on the screen through widget and guide overlays. For example, a Gordon Ramsay show could bring up a widget containing video of how to cook a particular recipe. A natural history documentary on Papua New Guinea might be linked to a Flickr widget that could be expanded to show photos from the country.
This kind of contextual awareness in an operator’s set-top box would give it an advantage over TV makers, for example, who are beginning to offer on-screen apps such as stock prices and news in their integrated internet-enabled sets.
“The thing about Yahoo Widgets for example is they are not related to what’s being transmitted and are therefore very limited in what they can do, just things like the weather, horoscopes, generic stuff,” said Mr Smith.
Another Oona app links with Facebook to show what you and your friends are watching, prompting on-screen chats about programmes.
Snowflake (pictured below) is the name for a smoother, more elegant interface developed by NDS’s Paris design team. It has much simpler choices and has the minimalist look of an iPhone or the latest Microsoft Zune interface.
NDS is also working on substitution advertising, where ads can be seamlessly replaced by ones stored on the hard disk of the set-top box that are more relevant to the viewer based on the time of day and what is known about them.
The most impressive app Mr Smith showed me was an iPhone remote control app which takes programme listings from a set-top box and mixes it with relevant YouTube clips, IMDB movie information and other internet content. Programmes from the set-top box can be streamed to the app or set for recording from anywhere in the world. Shows, films and actors can be searched for by inputting text or speaking key words such as “Brad Pitt” into the iPhone. A future version could download converted content for offline viewing.
This “TV everywhere” solution is another service operators can offer to persuade subscribers to stick with them. It appeared to be almost ready for primetime and Britain’s Sky TV is reported to be impressed with its capabilities.
