"Discovery, Personalization and the TV User Experience"

Written by Susan Crouse

I recently had the pleasure of attending the Television of Tomorrow (TV0T) conference in San Francisco. This included a fun hour participating on a panel about "Discovery, Personalization and the TV User Experience.” The conference is a great collection of industry experts, providing interesting insights, knowledge and entertainment. TVoT seems to find all the newest upstarts both on the technology and talent side, particularly in the area of “digital media,” which TVoT and others define mostly as OTT originating from the Internet. They also are closely tracking the television viewing habits of the millennial and gen Z demographic, as they seem to be eschewing television services, satisfied with on-line and OTT options.

On the panel, I was joined by Campbell Foster from Adobe, Kimberly Hicks of Viacom, and Andre Swanston of Tru Optik. Gerard Kunzel was our moderator. We discussed a wide range of UI ideas including recommendation engine integration of social and other big data sources, simplification of the UI, personalization for each household member, the trend toward voice control, and much more. If you missed the event, TVoT will eventually have videos of all the sessions on their website.

TVoT

TV of Tomorrow, San Francisco was held last week, creating an opportunity to pick up on terminology trends. I was surprised a number of panels were using the term 'digital' to describe "content delivery to consumer devices' like phones and tablets, however, content to the living room TV is also digital. I am hoping this trend does not take hold, as it doesn't make sense. The older terms OTT (Over the Top TV) originally seemed to cover these devices, but with Smart TVs, TIVO, Roku and other devices, the television is also an OTT target, so that's not a fit either. As the market gets muddier with IP offerings and new devices like HDMI sticks, maybe the target device shouldn't be segregated this way. Of course most devices require specific transcoded video to meet display specifications, but in the end the streams are all digital, whether recorded or live. I welcome a different interpretation of how 'digital' was used at the conference to clear this up.

Another term that seems to be picking up steam is the "backwards L." This is the shape made when the main video content is pulled to the upper left of the screen leaving a portion of the screen for additional meta-data, personalization (tweets), or advertising. As our screen resolution continues to expand,  it's appears to be more acceptable to share the screen real estate with other related content.

Visit Alticast at TV of Tomorrow 2013

Alticast is proud to be a sponsor of and speaking at TV of Tomorrow 2013, which takes place June 25th- 26th in San Francisco.

Stop by Alticast's itvTEA stand for a coffee, then stroll over to watch Alticast's Susan Crouse speak on the panel "Open to Innovation: Enabling the Evolution of Pay TV".  Here is a description:

Following on the heels of the Cable RDK Fireside, this session will bring together leading technology vendors to discuss how they are adapting to meet the evolving needs of pay-TV operators, as those operators adopt open-source technologies and move beyond the set-top box to embrace multiple connected platforms and enhance their traditional content line-up with a range of online and mobile content and services.

Panelists will answer such questions as: How significant a development is cable's embrace of the RDK and how are you addressing this? How are you innovating--what new developments do you see happening in the pay-TV space over the coming months and years and how do you plan to respond to those developments? How are you building a developer community? In what ways do you feel that the UI/UX of pay-TV services needs to evolve--how will subscribers find the content that interests them? How significant a role will cloud-based approaches play in the future of the pay-TV platform? And what do you see as the principal threats to pay TV and how are you helping counter them? Panelists include:

• Sefy Ariely, EVP Americas, Viaccess-Orca
• Susan Crouse, Technical Product Owner, Alticast
• James Field, Ecosystem Manager, Service Provider Video Technology Group, Cisco
• Adrian Fowkes, CTO, S&T Americas
• Dan Patton, Director of Multiscreen Solutions, Alcatel-Lucent
• Jay Tannenbaum, VP of Marketing, Sling Media
• John Tinsman, CTO, OpenTV

We look forward to seeing you there!

http://www.thetvoftomorrowshow.com/schedule-sessions