Web and TV, can they be bedfellows?

Amongst the big trends at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in America was a renewed interest in television sets that come pre-packaged with connectivity to the web. Intel and Yahoo! announced hardware deals for TVs to ship with the CE3100 chip that uses both the Yahoo! Widget Channel technology and a version of Adobe’s Flash to create web-like experiences for telly viewers. Wireless router makers and set-top manufacturers all joined in with new takes on the ‘Net enabled TV platform. As someone who purchased a ‘connected’ TV three years ago (but who has since been, in truth, disappointed with it), I’m curious about what advances we could expect in this space in the next year or two.

People still watch between 5 and 25 times more TV than they spend time on their PC, according to a recent CNET article (this largely depends on your region – in Israel the two are close to parity). However, more and more TV viewers are finding themselves spending time on their laptop or PC whilst channel surfing. Put aside the fact that these audiences are young and don’t tend to be – at least not yet – purchasers of high-end TVs with internet chips, and it’s clear that both TV manufacturers and web companies are betting that the age of ubiquitous connected TV sets that people actually would use may be here very soon.

There are plenty of people who doubt that web-enabled TV is going to take off. After all, Microsoft, Verizon, AT&T and others have all tried their hand and failed. But user behaviour when watching telly is changing, and that could reignite the movement. It may be hard for older consumers to imagine, because they are not typically the ones ‘multi-tasking’ with laptops whilst watching TV. But if more young people come to experience watching TV whilst being online, they will one day ask ‘why can’t I just use one interface for all this?’ And Yahoo! and Intel are betting that that moment is coming soon.

Traditionally, watching TV is an exercise in passivity compared with browsing a website. The ‘living room’ experience has always been geared towards entertainment, not utility. The thought of ‘following a link’ on a TV screen is anathema to most couch potatoes. However, services such as Teletext and red button services have for many years helped guide discovery and entertainment in the background, albeit in a ponderously slow way. In a sense, the web of connected data has always been there burbling in the background, crying out for a quicker, and more human-centred approach to exposing and interacting with it. But the new modes of accessing that peripheral data on TV will push information to the screen and not make you chase after it.

Intel’s user research drove decisions to abandon a full web browser experience for the next-generation TV platform, opting for the bite-size widgets instead. Users had also rejected ideas for a ’sidebar’ approach to the widgets, preferring the bottom bar detailed in the picture here. The idea is that your favourite bits of the web will be accessible through little windows at the bottom of the screen, and be sensitive to the channel or context that you found yourself watching. This last bit is the interesting bit.

I wrote a week ago about how Channel 4 will be opening up more of the meta data that its content is soaked in over the next year or two. That will include information such as music tracks contained within an episode, and tags that group programmes into genres, for instance. So it’s not a stretch to imagine several Connected TV widgets being served into a stream of a Channel 4 programme that allows you to play or purchase any of the tracks straight through your TV, which would then share that MP3 with your phone or music player. Or take a programme like Channel 4 News and its new SnowBlog from Jon Snow. The widget served at the bottom could beam up the latest opinion from the host to augment the visual reporting. Or it could play back video reactions of the day’s news. In the case of a long-running series such as Desperate Housewives, I can see the widget displaying useful information about the characters in a given episode, or allowing you to explore a virtual map of the fictional town. What if you knew which of your Facebook friends were online and could easily share with them what you were watching and whether you thought they’d like it? CNN just proved how dynamic this experience can be with their mashup during Obama’s inaugural speech yesterday.

If your TV came prepackaged with internet-connected widgets, what kind of content or services would you want to interact with? How would it change your TV watching?

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