Hardhit US news publishers are flirting with the idea of getting their content in front of TV-watching couch potatoes, instantly booming their audience-share and the reach of ads. Yahoo recently announced deals with Samsung, LG, Sony and Vizio to carry its Widget channel web platform built into future flat-screen TVs. Those widgets can be built by any developer who wants his application to run below any kind of TV content — with users being able to flip through them with a TV remote. MySpace announced it would have one of the widgets that would run on Yahoo’s service, letting people send messages to friends. So will people go for this new web-TV combo, the NetTV?Some analysts project that 14% of the TV sets sold in the U.S. in 2012 will be Net-enabled, up from just 1% last year others think it is a mission impossible: “The experience of watching TV as opposed to using a laptop computer or mobile device is different…TV is a ‘one too many’ medium.” Well, do we think that argument is true?
I guess our parents found the remote-control a pretty handy tool since they no longer had to walk to switch program, but could anybody have expected that this would create a kind of Homo Zappiens with this simple Infrared tool? The same might be true for NetTV. Many people already use interactive tools while watching ever more boring television. Think of tools like Iphone or MSN. So what is the real problem why the holy TV-screen seems to be impossible to become more interactive?
Is it the simple-remote interface, the distance between you and the TV, the nature of TV content, the infrastructure, the content? My opinion would be that the web-tools are just not good enough. They are features with a lot of promise but without a lot of genuine benefits or usability from the user perspective… my UPC on demand screen looks and acts worse than my first PC-interface ever.
Meanwhile Netflix recently announced to be built into several TV-sets as well… Sounds like an ok application, will that be the killer-app for NetTV? No, so what is the real problem? To answer that I will quote a TV-expert at the recent IBC-convention:”In five years time digital TV will be nearing the analog experience.” I think he is righ, that sais it all… might analog TV just be too good for our current state of digiTech?
