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Talking to The TV

Posted on February 28, 2012 by metawrap

www.nbcsandiego.com/blogs/press-here/Google-Patent-shows-its-working-on-voice-control-for-Google-TV-140222103.html

.. I suspect this is in response to rumors of a Siri enabled Apple TV product being released end of 2012.

I think a big takeaway is that as the iPhone overnight mainstreamed gestural controls , we need to be prepared for voice control starting to feature more in TV UI/UX.

Even if this ends up being a folly, once Google and Apple, have a go, all the other TV manufacturers will most likely follow suit.

I don’t believe voice will replace everything a 5 button remote can do, but will augment the experience, in the same way that gestures on mobile/tablet are a layer over the traditional point and click. A big difference for TV is that the cost of switching modes is finding and picking up the remote as well as a complete mental switch from language to spatial navigation; a kind of inertia.

My suspicion is that it will influence that first 30 seconds where a user starts casual and then decides if they need to take the interaction to the remote.

The wildcard here is the ability for agents like Siri to facilitate the construction of a complex query and course of action through a conversation.

The cynic in me thinks that if conversational interfaces work and become the norm, we will be able to devote a lot less pixels to navigational prompts.. making more space for advertising :)

If the weak link in this,the voice recognition, fails to live up to expectations this could be a farce. As impressive progress as Siri is, it has not really lived up to expectations, so if Apple do introduce a TV with a Siri like function as a major component, I’m expecting it to bomb. … but deep inside, I want it to work and be a surprise and a delight.

Related…

forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?threadid=133953

The other possibility to this one, is that Apple are going to have a companion device with their TV half way in size between an iPhone and iPad – which would be just about the right size.

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My Life In IPTV

Posted on May 9, 2011 by metawrap

I was asked by a company to write about myself and my IPTV experience. I’ve left a lot out but here are the highlights.

James has been playing with computers on and off since he can remember. As a youth he cut his teeth on the periphery of the Australian demo scene and BBS underground of the 80’s and early 90’s. He then followed his passion by studying Computer Science.

During this time James became fascinated with using the computer as a visual instrument and developed software and hardware for the Amiga and later on the PC to allow output from the computer to be input to televisions and video projectors. James performed audio visual displays at various nightclubs with DJs and bands as well as using his knowledge of networking to set up live CB-Chat, IRC and CU-SeeMe hook-ups with the audience.

In the early 90’s he set up a warehouse, internet cafe and free ISP for electronic artists in Sydney Australia and co-founded the and ‘Kollektive’ and ‘Clan Analogue’ record labels.

In the process of getting electronic artists online, James started looking into cheap hardware solutions that would enable people to use the internet via their TV. This led to research into the software and hardware required to create a product that would allow the general public to interact with internet services on their TV.

This lead to the founding of a start-up, a crash course in importing, supply chain management, hardware manufacturing and some lucrative contracts in Asia just in time for the Asian Currency Crisis to wipe out all his clients.

James continued to develop software and take a keen interest in IPTV and started working at Massive Interactive in 1998 first as Technical Director and then as Chief Technical Officer, a role he remains in today.

While at Massive Interactive James was able to use his skills with Sky and Austar, a local satellite TV provider via development of many interactive “Red Button” style applications using the OpenTV platform.

For the first two seasons of Australian “Big Brother”, James ran the official IRC server that had a client that would also allow OpenTV, Java and Linux based devices to project the chat into the TV with the show.

In 2005 James architected and built the Telstra/BigPond Movies application for Windows Media Centre, PC, ViiV, Xbox 360 and DLNA devices. This allowed users to download movies and television episodes and watch them on their TV. This was nominated for an Technical Emmy.

In 2007 James designed, architected and built the innovative Telstra/BigPond V8Supercars project which ran on Windows Media Center, PC and the Microsoft Xbox-360. This took live television feeds from the devices digital receiver and combined it with internet video and telemetry data streams from within the car. This innovative application synchronised these three feeds together to give the user and multiview experience and allowed users to mix and match views of car exterior, in car and telemetry an leader-board information on their TV using their remote control. This was nominated for an Technical Emmy. Did I mention that it was innovative?

Since then James’s and Massive’s skills in the area of IPTV video on demand, catch-up and subscription services have been in high demand in various companies around the world. Understandably this has kept him fairly busy.

James sees the emergence of Trick-Play/Time-Shifting and the erosion of audience and advertising revenue as a major threat to the free-to-air market. Combining that with his experience managing and formulating live competitive and interactive events James believes that we will start to see the emergence free to air broadcasts with a time critical interactive element to keep users engaged in “real time”.

The great thing about Massive is that it really is a full service company when it comes to IPTV. User experience design, user interface design, front end development, back end development, systems integration, solution design, architecture and project and delivery management. We design and develop IPTV applications at each every stage of the production pipeline.

While originally Massive developed multi-platform libraries in Flash, JavaScript and C/C++ our new UI Library developed in the HaXe language and various cross-compilers allows us to practically target multiple platforms with a single code-base.

James has experimented with many single screen modes of interactivity and sees the new multi-modal/multi-device landscape as particularly exciting. The new Massive UI library means that the time and effort between an idea and a practical experiment is now greatly reduced.

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WebTV 2.0

Posted on April 13, 2011 by metawrap

As you may notice from my lack of posts, I’ve been rather busy for the last three years.

I’ve been working on my own personal project “ThumbWhere” which is “Software As A Service” Social Media/Video Transcoding API.

But this is not why I have been busy. Even my pet projects have been suffering from what has been taking up all of my time at work, getting the internet on the TV and TV on the internet

I’m talking IPTV.

If you follow me

… in the last three years you may have noticed I’ve been traveling around the world a lot.

I’ve been involved either directly or indirectly in projects with most of the big ISPs Telcos and MSOs and Airlines in UK, Europe, Australia and the US and Television manufacturers in Asia. I’m under so many NDA’s I’m not even sure I’m meant to acknowledge that I actually exist… so I’m not going to mention any specifics.

For those of you who have known me over the last 25 years then you probably know that I’ve been working on getting stuff from Computers to Television for most of my life. From my dance party visuals days and organising Cu-SeeMe events.

… even my first real commercial venture…

… and my experiments with early social networks on television 10 years ago..

… and 5 years ago probing the the interaction between internet streaming, live television, telemetry and chat…

So I certainly have been consistent in my career path.

Back in 1996 I was quoted in the AFR as predicting that the IPTV experience would be visually very similar to what we saw with the new Flash applications and animations that were starting to take hold. That prediction was fairly spot on.

I also predicted at some point that every single video library would install a server and you would download your videos from them… that was not so correct, but the spirit of it encapsulates what I have been doing for the last three years.

So in effect what I have been doing is solving the problem of getting applications and streaming video to your television and designing the systems that allow media to be ingested, transcoded, encrypted, catalogued and purchased by customers for various corporations around the world.

I thought I would sketch out where we are now and where we will be in the future.

But first some background…

History

In the beginning there was the analogue VCR. If you wanted to record a show on the spur of the moment, you had to have a blank tape handy. If you wanted to record a show that was on when you were not at home you had to “program your VCR”, and if you knew how to program your VCR you were a bit of a geek. This was something you had to learn and practice and rehearse.

With the advent of devices with an inbuilt computer, hard drive and a tuner we had devices that could“trick-play” – otherwise known as “pausing live TV”, skipping over ads. They could record and play at the same time. These are also known as DVRs, PVRs or by the referring to the popular generic brand “Tivo-like” devices. With these devices you picked the show you wanted to record from a list and pressed a button. There was not much to learn.

Modern DVR devices have multiple digital TV receivers and a hard disk. The device reads an EPG (Electronic Program Guide) from the digital broadcast. This is a list of what shows are on what channel at what time. You can then choose a show or a series and have it recorded to the devices hard drive. At a later date you can watch the show.

It means you can set a show to record, forget and then a month later binge on 4 episodes of your favourite weekly show.

It means that you no longer need to watch a show when it is broadcast – it is so easy and practical (compared to what you needed to do with a VCR) that you find that you never watch live TV again.

I have a Windows Media Center with 4 tuners. I can be recording 4 shows at once while I watch one recorded show in the bedroom on my XBox360 while others are watching another show in the lounge room. This happens all the time in my house.

This is life changing technology. We are now free from the TV schedule.

This technology has also been introduced into Cable Television Set-Top boxes, so you can record and playback content from your cable provider in the same way you can your “Free To Air” television.

It’s only recently that this reached critical mass in the mainstream.

Its worth noting that many IPTV solutions take the standard DVR for Free To Air or Cable Television as a starting point and then add the internet and applications on top while others are pure IPTV and lack the DVR function.

What is IPTV?

IPTV can be broadly classed as some Internet like services on your Television… and some Television like services on the Internet.

Which is a simple view focusing on what a consumer gets from it, but how that is done is is a little more complicated.

This is the kind of system I design an build for a living – but here is a simple diagram that is not too stressful of the truth.

There is a lot of systems integration that goes on, but enough of that end of the problem.. What I’m focusing on at the moment is all the stuff that happens in this bottom layer, where the rubber meets the road, in your home.

As a consumer, there are four interesting things that IPTV lets you do.

Video On Demand/Catch Up/Video Subscription Services/Live Streams – The ability to purchase and play video content on your TV or PC. The models range from free ‘Catch-Up” and content to “Pay Per Play/View” and traditional Cable-TV style Subscriptions.

Live streams are virtual TV channels that show a procession of pre scheduled content. This allows anyone with a streaming server to set up a virtual TV station.

While scrolling forward through your EPG, that program scheduled for next month can be purchased now but scroll into the past, there is something you missed that you can watch now as “Catch-Up”.

You can have the content delivered to your TV or your iPad.

You can watch what you want to watch, when you want to watch it.

Enhanced Television – Using widgets or other mechanisms as you watch content on your TV to interact with applications or online services. E.g. IMDB for more information on the show you are watching. Interacting socially with your friends via Twitter, Facebook as you all watch something simultaneously.

Applications – The ability to download and install widgets and applications onto your television. If you have an iPhone or an Android phone then you know what this means.

“TV As A Second Screen” – Now that your TV is a real computer, you can interact with it via other devices in your house. Also other devices in you house, can interact with your TV. In particular mobile and tablet devices. Cool.

I’m not going too much further that that as going into any details on any of these is a whole series of blog posts on their own.

Where Are We Now?

We are now in a transition phase, kind of what the minicomputer market was like in the 80’s before PCs came in and took over. The age of the Wang, Honeywell, Prime, DEC, Alpha Micro and a hundred other computer manufacturers each rolling out their own hardware, operation system and software.

Same with the mobile phone industry as it was in the 90’s and early 10’s.

Its all a bit hard to cobble together. All the bits are not really made for each other. Standards are not consistent across all. Welcome back to the future.

The Devices

Connected Televisions

These are Televisions that contain some kind of middleware that let you run applications.

Check out Sony, LG and Samsung (Who publish a really good SDK).

These TVs are fairly modern so the software development process around these is thankfully sensibly “standards” based.

As a general rule these devices run Flash and have a Web Browser.

The versions of Flash supported range from Flash7 all the way up to Stagecraft and Flash 10.X.

Standards based browsers like Mozilla, WebKit and Opera are slowly pushing out the custom web browsers that are a pain to work with.

The key takeaway here is that connected televisions are generally standards based. HTML/JavaScript or Flash.

The television loads the application in the same way that a browser loads a web-page or a Flash application.

With these and some clever development, you have the chance to create something that runs on multiple devices. The question here is what API does the device provide you to control video playback, channel detection/change? I had a small hand in the API design for one of the popular brands.

If you are going to develop in this area, you really need to know your CEA-2014 from your HBBTV.

Now that TV manufacturers have done their 3D thing, the next thing is the internet thing. If you ask me they set the IPTV industry back a year by doing 3D first. The real utility is in IPTV – industries will be founded on IPTV. 3D TV was just a fad. As people start to upgrade their TVs over the next few years we will see this segment start to pop out as its own distinct platform.

Custom Set-Top Boxes

Custom Set-Top boxes with Custom Operating systems and Custom SDKs… Oh my.

These are the last of the dinosaurs but there are a lot of them.

For these systems you are breaking out the C/C++ or Java compiler.

Or if they are OpenTV based a C compiler or their authoring software. Disclaimer. I did a lot of OpenTV development for a long time a long time ago.

If you are lucky they will integrate a Flash player or a “Standards” based browser of some kind and its integrated enough with the hardware acceleration to let you get some decent performance.

Otherwise its C/C++ for the lot of you.

These still live because, they are cheap and companies are creating solutions that let them squeeze more out of their existing deployed set-top box hardware instead of expensively upgrading their deployed boxes. Which does make sense.

These also live because some companies are holding onto obsolete intellectual property and believe they can compete with Google, Apple and Microsoft who at this point in time are battling each other to be the dominant player.

Most boxes nowadays run Linux and many companies are taking a good hard long look at Android and Google TV. Much in the same way that many of the mobile manufactures have, except Nokia who are busy setting fire to themselves with Windows Mobile 7. Good luck with that guys.

See:

Pace

NDS

There are a lot of companies that build boxes….

The PC

For the PC there are websites and applications that can run on PCs that bring the television experience to your PC.

This encapsulates your Hulu, NetFlix, iTunes, iSky, YouTube, iView and iPlayer solutions.

Companion Devices

Video can also be streamed to mobile devices such as Android and Apple phones and tablets.

Applications running on your TV can offer enhanced functions via these devices.

Imagine watching a video and when you open a companion iPad application, you have ability to control what is going on on the TV from your iPad.

Taking this further you can have the IMDB page one click away to settle any arguments or be able to browse the content catalogue and purchase related content.

How about declaring to your friends via Facebook and Twitter what you are watching? Inviting them to watch at the same time?

See:

xFinity Remote

Motorola Social TV

TunerFish

The Publishing Model

As a developer you can’t just get your app onto the TV. You need to go via the Service Operator or the manufacturer of the television.

Traditionally the Cable Provider/MSO/Telco/ISP will ship your app with the firmware of the STB and it will get updated when they perform firmware updates. If you are lucky they have a system that lets you update the application over the net.

If you want to target existing connected televisions –then you need to talk to the device manufacturer and convince them to let your app onto their main menu. If you are lucky it will go out on the next firmware update. The nicest TVs have your app just as a URL – but on some you still need that URL burned into the firmware somewhere in the first production run if you want your app to see the light of day.

App Stores for connected televisions are emerging now but are not widespread. Samsung are probably the best progressed at this point in time.

The Integration Model

If you want to deploy your own set-top box you need to select middleware, hardware and a hardware manufacturer and then get some application middleware developed and integrated and then get a custom application developed to run your storefront.

On top of all that is the infrastructure..

You need to stand up services to ingest and stream your video.

You need to license a DRM solution if you want to get any content from the studios.

You need to stand up services to manage your catalogue and make it available to the application running on the device.

These are big complicated projects that generally take at least a year from Go to first purchase by a customer.

The Future

So back to the transition phase I mentioned previously This is similar to what we are now seeing the tail end of in the mobile market.

In a just a handful of years we are going to end up with 99% of phones running just 3 operating systems. iOS, Android and Microsoft.

More and more manufacturers will abandon custom operating systems and take up the Linux/Android/Google TV stack. Instead of developing their own OS, Sony has gone with the Android Google TV OS.

The Devices

In the future I think you will see two classes emerging.

Generic devices based on standards based browsers. (covered above).
Personal Set-Top Boxes/Televisions.

Personal Set-Top Boxes/Televisions

Into this category I place Apple TV, Google TV and the probably soon to be announced Windows TV solution.

The utility of these owe more to the mobile phone industry than to traditional TV industry.

Like the mobile phone and the PC, these are personal devices.

These are devices dedicated to IPTV. Even the games consoles will get in on act. Rumour abounds that Sony will release Google TV on the PS3 and that Microsoft are going to compete in turn on the XBox-360.

As a developer you download/license the SDK develop and release your application into the App store.

See:

Google TV + Sony Google TV

Apple TV

Microsoft TV (Mobile7 + MetaCenter?)

The Publishing Model

In the future as an IPTV application developer will be able to simply develop your app and publish it to an application store.

This will work much like the Android and iTunes Application stores for mobile devices.

It will be that easy. As it should be.

The Integration Model

As a service provider you will no longer have to ship or design your own device.

IPTV devices will be products that people will already have. They will have bought them from a store. The same way that one now buys a TV, PC or mobile phone (outright purchase off a plan).

People will choose the one that suits them or just use the one