"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.

Trends in Recommendation and UX at TVoT

I traveled to Television of Tomorrow (TVoT) last week in NY City. This show runs twice a year bouncing between NYC and San Francisco, and although the NYC conference is shorter, it is just as intense. There was the usual mix of targeted advertising, User Experience, and OTT trends resplendent with Periscope stars. I participated in a panel on recommendations and UX trends led by Patrick Donaghue, the longtime Cablevision UI visionary, and included representation from LG, Digital Smiths, Rovi, Freecast and Lingospot.

While recommendation engines have been around for sometime, they are starting to mature with new trends blending big data from social networking to increase the effectiveness of recommendations. Taking all those new data points and creating an innovative UX that addresses a new generation of viewers is the challenge put forth to Alticast UX designers. Our 4K AltiView 3 concept UX was shared to exemplify these new trends.  The biggest challenge is bringing all these great ideas together and getting them out in front of consumers.

Pay-TV Strategies for Engaging Millennials

With Millennials accounting for one in every five dollars of consumer spending, there’s the need for for pay-TV operators to reshape the video experience of Generation Y’s unique viewing habits, including increases in online consumption, multitasking and gaming-related activity.  John Carlucci, President and CTO of Alticast US, recently spoke about how pay-TV can engage this high-value demographic through higher quality UIs, as well as innovations such as simultaneous viewing of multiple streams of content and transitioning between handheld devices and the television with the swipe of a finger.

Alticast at IBC

Optimization

As Operators begin to use HTML5 to deliver the User Experience for millions of people to multiple devices, understanding how to optimize their UI will be very important. We are keeping our sights on this and will be posting various ideas for optimization so that Operators can broaden their scope of devices where they might deliver an HTML5 UX. The television industry has unique devices with legacy systems that are quite restricted in CPU and memory, so optimizing the UX can really pay off. 

The cable industry isn't alone in considering this challenge, and in fact there is a whole conference that is held at least twice a year on Web Performance. Fortunately the conference posts videos of their talks and interviews on YouTube. Below is the listing of videos from their most recent event in SantaClara, and if you are in the area, the next one is in London starting Wednesday Nov. 13th. We'd like to hear your ideas too, so please enter comments or contact us to enter a guest posting.

http://bit.ly/1fklO00