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Digital TV muses


Several buddies have just developed apps for the iPhone. Rejected apps are coming back with feedback from Apple – “Sorry, Minimal User Interaction”

I think this is an excellent construct for digital iTV. Our message is about the power of compelling user experience on TV with the measurability of the web. Compelling user experience is our life insurance policy as we build this amazing next-generation iTV platform.

Apple’s 360 Life Cycle

# 1, Apple says we need to be satisfied that users must really benefit from it, that it fulfills some unmet need. Apple says build us gloriously beautiful experience that are useful/fun and we’ll deploy them for free. We agree!

# 2, That goes full circle — now the audience are demanding iPhones (in-part) because of these high-value apps and the user experience benchmark keeps getting higher every month thereby rising more demand for product. Our cable/satellite customers/networks would agree!

# 3, From a development stand-point they’ve created an eco-system of developers that can build for the platform using a friendly GUI based environment, allowing some very clever API’s. Data flows back and forth. Calls to the trickery inside of the phone are instantaneous. Very cool.

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Sync Film Ideas

This spot for Guardian is the genius for why we should be attempting this project.

This is kinda fun given that you could run an underwater scene giving you a peek at what they are supposedly doing, bit smutty but that’s the point of it, you tease content that makes you want to swap visions. Looking at this concept with the strict confines of a ‘technical director’ you have your choice of cameras, and the availability of getting a camera to find the action – look up, look down, zoom in…

This idea is exactly a mix of two channels in one. It’s almost a directors cut of the idea. See – this is exactly what I’m talking about. Interactivity allows you to unlock the secrets behind a particular perspective! Brilliant. This idea would work a treat.

What if the audio carries through each of the perspectives, allowing an animator to draw one of the films all in sync with the action. That would be fun! Imagine suddenly some of the flavor of say an early Terry Gilliam animation to what Matt Damon is saying about clubbing baby seals, shrapnel in his buddies ass, etc. It could be really delightful to jump in and out of these 2 perspectives. What if we subvert the words with new sanitized PR imagery, irony anyone?

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Oddcast

Playing with some fun cross over ideas this week. Auto Callback is a powerful Oddcast technology that lets users take the online experience offline. Users can receive a phone call with a prerecorded or personalized message: from a movie star, from a brand character, or even from a live representative from your company.

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Understanding your visitors

Really digging into user behavior/user research for a new project. This brought up a good article about analytics tools and resources for web development. Now I’m curious to retrofit these apps for our needs at designing and building next generation digital tv applications.

User Fly creates some nifty videos that record all your actions, albeit without hearing the user talking. That has some value, although I can’t imagine we’d do much with it beyond cursory play and record usability sessions.

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BBC Personalise

The BBC are experimenting with some home page personalization, starting with lower level pages. The Guardian article examines the parallels with iGoogle, deciding that it was worth the effort, if only to prove a point.

I would put forth that adapting the experience, giving you choices for “what” to consume and “how” to consume it, gives rise to a whole new strategy of “adapting”. The technology to support this effort is now well known and refined, we can thank web 2.0 (yahoo/salesforce.com/igoogle) for such an approach.

The greatest challenge comes from refining the parameters of choice — meaning, giving you thoughtful ways to present information so that it’s still very usable. The assets I would want at my disposal would include shifting the headline, length of story, article summary, size and placement of a picture, maybe a community feed or a twitter feed?

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lab126

“Amazon started a company called Lab126 in Mountain View, 2004-ish, to design and manage the contract manufacture of the yet-to-be-named Kindle product (as opposed to partnering with an established mobile electronics manufacturer) because they wanted to keep the Kindle idea under wraps (as much as it is possible to do so, here in the Valley).”

lab126 guys’ main mission right now is to design cost out of the thing like crazy, and get the next version out there so it can be sold cheap, or “given away” as part of a subscription plan.

And Mr. Bezos concludes with some high-level thinking: “Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds,” he said.

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Honeyshed calls it quits

During my tenure at Schematic our team was involved in helping to conceptualize this idea. It scared the living daylights out of us, that said, when Droga and team talked about it, it always felt like an ad campaign to us, it certainly had the potential to be an internet property as long as they understood the crawl, walk, survive concept.

The site, billed by David Droga as “QVC meets MTV,” never found much of an audience in its 15 months of existence.

Lessons learn, plenty of course. Ad Week first reported this story.

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Zero sum + freemium

free beer tomorrow

Wall Street Journal discusses The Economics of Giving It Away

A couple of excerpts:

In a battered economy, free goods and services online are more attractive than ever. So how can the suppliers make a business model out of nothing? This article navigates the complexities of such a transaction, the examples they cite help illuminate the problem.

Long Tail author and Wired EIC Chris Anderson explains why the “zero sum” model doesn’t work alone in this economy—and teases his next book Free—in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. The argument: “free” wasn’t enough before for all but a few and it’s not going to work now without a pay component, whether it’s “freemium”—“free as a form of marketing to put the product in the hands of the maximum number of people, converting just a small fraction to paying customers” or flat out charging for the bulk of goods and services.

The essay itself exemplifies “freemium”—free for anyone who wanders by WSJ.com, not just to those of us who pay to subscribe to the site’s full content. It works for the consumer, or as Anderson puts it, “It’s a consumer’s paradise: The Web has become the biggest store in history and everything is 100% off.” Of course, that’s until the products they use disappear because the money isn’t there.

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Grid/Plane in Portland

Having lunch today with David DeCheser, loving his tip on grid/plane studio:

JD Hooge founded Gridplane to help clients bring their stories to life. Gridplane specializes in unifying practical user interaction with engaging design to craft unique experiences.

Over the past 10 years, JD has assembled a diverse portfolio of creative work for cultural institutions and companies large and small. Past clients include XBOX, Google, Sony, MTV, Helio, Nike, Starbucks, and Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts.