Apps for telly
Last week, the BBC Trust gingerly announced provisional approval of the BBC’s Project Canvas.
The aim of Project Canvas is to define a set of standards for set-top boxes that will allow integration of web and TV. Although, it isn’t clear exactly what the standards will consist of and what Project Canvas’ vision of IPTV really is.
Set-top box manufacturers such as Thomson, Humax and Cisco are involved and have committed to share intellectual property relating to Canvas with the rest of their industry. Content providers such as ITV, Channel 4 and 5 are enrolled within the organisational structure of Canvas itself, as are broadband providers such as BT, TalkTalk and Carphone Warehouse. Google has also voiced clear support during public consultation. One organisation we wont see supporting the project is BSkyB who claim the proposal is anti-competitive and not within the remit of the BBC.
Canvas won’t create, aggregate or sell content or act as an ISP. It’s merely acting to convene disparate industries and organisations to create a set of standards for Internet-enabled TV.
But who really wants Internet-enabled TV?
Bear with me for a moment, but for me the Internet is a very personal medium. It’s usually just you and a screen, be it on your phone or on your computer. You and your email, you and your bookmarks, you and your Facebook account, you and the blogs and newspaper sites you visit, you spouting your opinion on forums you identify with etc. The experience itself is very personal, yet it connects you to whoever you want to be connected to. It’s highly social but a very personal experience. However, TV is something that most people experience as a group. You sit there arguing over who does the best tango despite never having tangoed in your life, professing expertise in subjects you only have a rudimentary knowledge of to impress your loved one or shouting encouraging words to footballers that are actually over 3000 miles away.
Fundamentally, TV is more fun together. TV is a big screen that sits over the other end of your front room. It’s big so that lots of people can look at it at the same time, we even get into debt to buy giant chairs that can sit a whole family on, just so we can watch it together. It’s always been social.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-convergence. But what concerns me the most is that Canvas seems to be entirely about getting the content that’s on the Internet onto the big screen of our TVs.
This is how I believe the BBC sees convergence, and their role within it.
To me that’s not the most exciting thing about convergence. It needs to be about more than just getting content from the Internet onto our TV. Perhaps that’s the first step (and one that’s within the BBC’s remit). But the thing that really excites me most about this is how we bring people watching TV together? How do we make TV more social? How do we unlock the convening power of a television that’s plugged in to the Internet? Boxee is about to launch something that may do this.
Instead of just concentrating on getting content from the Internet on to our TV, I’m hoping that the BBC can crack open the potential of that big screen in the corner by placing the innovative thinking in the hands of others.
Three simple things the standards could do.
- Connect TVs to the web
- Make it programmable
- Create a marketplace of TV apps
Connecting to the web is pretty standard. That’s the pre-requisite. The really interesting thing is making it programmable. What I mean by this is some form of API that gives DIYists, manufacturers, content providers and anyone else that wants it, the ability to hack, mod, change and extend the functionality of their TV. Then by creating a marketplace for this stuff they are allowing innovation to flourish in the most open way possible.
Thankfully, some super-smart organisations such as ALL3MEDIA, the Open Source Consortium and Amino have responded to the public consultation by requesting some form of API to be made available on the boxes.
So what do you think? What kind of app would you like to see available for telly?
11 comments
The greatest benefit of an app store, in my mind, is a market place. And thus competition. So, say you don’t like the EPG/recommendations for Canvas. No problem – you can download the Sky version, or the Google version, or the What’s On TV version.
Additionally, while I agree that the internet is inherently personal, there are opportunities whereby a social internet can be incorporated. For instance, Liverpool fans at one TV set bantering with Everton fans at another during the local derby…
Nice idea, it would be especially good if there was a webcam involved and they could intimidate each other with insulting gestures and chanting from the comfort of their own living rooms.
I agree with you all the way. Here’s my little penny worth – I was amazed when I turned on the WII and jumped on the internet through that on my big TV, it was great – except, the websites that are “on the Internet” are designed for web browsers, so they looked crummy and did not work well for the WII / TV experience – but the interaction from my arm chair using the WII remote was amazing – so – I ran upstares and quickly started building a website that woudl work on the WII – bigger buttons simpler interface etc, then testing it it was a doddle it worked like a dream. SO they key I think is in the design – the TV and IPTV guys just need to give us guys the ability to GET TO THE TV SCREEN, and then to use the standards as they call em, .xml, .html. .swf. and back end stuff too, and we’ll do the rest – we’ll start developing and designing TV friendly sites and applications, that work for group entertainment, communication ect. The big problem is the TV and IPTV gang do teh walled garden thing, and lock out the innovators – instead inviting big corps to come in to the garden and play, but the essence and spirit of the web is that innovation can and does come from anywhere.
So for me – its about giving the keys to the kids and letting them lose on the thing, will the standards allow us, simple folk to dev our own stuff and put it to the poeple?
best,
Asa Bailey
VIRAL AGENCY.
A very interesting article. Thank you. Here are some of my thoughts:
I think your view of the internet as a personal activity is narrow. I agree that the internet has, to date, been a solo activity because generally only small screens and single user interface devices have been connected to it. The advent of connected TV can change this. A large screen will be connected and I don’t think it will be long before multiple user interface devices can connect to it as well. The obvious beneficiary of this would be casual gaming and the industry that creates those games. Who needs to buy a games console to play half the stuff that exists on XBL or PSN? All you need is a big screen capable of plying Flash games online and with the ability to connect multiple controllers. But there are already a fair number of social internet activities – browsing YouTube and Flickr for example – and I think that the social internet will only grow when connected TVs become prevalent.
Then you’re also ignoring the massive commercial driver behind connected TV. My XBox has known my credit card details and my address since 2002. I would therefore imagine that it won’t be long before my TV knows this also. From a commercial perspective this would make connected TVs a very powerful tool – think about the ability to buy the back catalog of a TV show when you happen across an episode on broadcast TV, or imagine being able to order a product at the click of a button when something you like the look of is shown in a ad break.
Totally agree. We got a Wii this Christmas and one of the first things I did was to have a browse about online. I thought exactly the same thing, YouTube worked great because it gives you a special layout for TV, but for many other sites it was just weird.
Ooops… I forgot an important point that my comment on James’s article has reminded me of. And that is social TV content discovery!
If your TV knows who you are, and who your friends are and what your friends like and watch then your TV is very well placed to recommend content for you to watch. And if Intel’s predictions of 500 billion hours of different content available by 2015 are anywhere near correct, then we’re going to need all the help we can get finding content that’s interesting to us!
Thanks for the comments Jon, I’m pretty excited about social viewing, particularly if it’s a Twitter-esque model i.e. asymmetrical following. And, as you say, targeted ads and integrated payments are pretty damn cool.
Great to here Boxee get a mention in the UK.
I’ve been using Boxee for nearly a year now and I love it. It’s great being able to sit on your couch, in front of the big TV with your remote and watch local or online content.
For me this is nearly the future, it has social features such as friends, commenting and discovery, it has an api for extension (I even dabbled myself) and the user experience is a shear joy. I could go on and on. The 2 major downsides that are preventing me from using it as the ‘one box to rule them all’, is I have to exit Boxee to watch the TV and most of content is American, meaning you really feel the hurt of the short-sighted content providers geo-blocking.
The soon to be released Boxee box is really going to help it get into more living rooms but I think those 2 things are still going to prevent mainstream take up. It’s only Beta so I think it will only get much better.
When they released the beta, they streamed the event live. With social commenting overlayed on top, via Cliqset, it made for a real engaging experience. I would watch the X-Factor if I could comment live on it. Who am I kidding I watched it anyway.
Let’s hope Canvas devices can come somewhere close or that Canvas standards allow for an even better Boxee.
I wasn’t talking about social viewing so much in this context, more social TV-content discovery, but I agree that social viewing is an exciting area right now.
What’s really needed is a well designed social viewing interface that somehow caters to both broadcast/simulcast and time-shifted TV. So for example I loved reading what people thought on Twitter during The Day of the Triffids over Xmas, but as I watched the Doctor Who episodes on iPlayer a day late I wasn’t able to partake in any meaningful social viewing – the difficulty is in catering for both situations.
Maybe it’s something you bright folk at Made by Many can work out? (c;
That would indeed be sweet, something like last.fm but for TV content.
Thanks for the comment Tom. There seems to be a lot of chatter about Boxee and I’m certainly considering the box when it comes out over here. Very exciting stuff.