Posts for 'Devices'

Today, I'm pleased to share a guest post from Alan Wolk, Global Lead Analyst at KIT Digital. As Alan points out, the Xbox Kinect technology has helped open up a new world of possibilities for navigating video content on TVs (I was recently in KIT's offices and played with their Kinect Sky TV app, which I thought was amazing). Beyond Kinect however, further technology improvements are coming, all of which means the remote control is poised to move far beyond its humble roots. Read on to learn more.

Building the Next Remote Control: Kinect is Just the First Step

by Alan Wolk

In the pre-cable TV world, the remote control was a truly amazing device. It allowed viewers to raise and lower the volume without getting out of their chair, while jumping seamlessly between the handful of channels that were available.

The advent of cable TV made the remote a little more complicated: with 20 or 30 channels in the line-up, the remote now needed a keypad to enter the actual channel number. The more channels cable systems added, the more critical the remote became. But around the time we moved from dozens of channels to hundreds of them, it become evident that a better system was needed: scrolling through so many channels ten at a time was not particularly time efficient, especially since viewers knew the names of channels they wanted to watch, not their constantly shifting numbers.

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I'm pleased to be joined once again by Colin Dixon, senior partner at The Diffusion Group, for the 126th edition of the VideoNuze Report podcast, for Mar. 23, 2012. This week finds Colin in London, providing him an even better perspective on our first topic this week, Sky's new over-the-top service called NOW TV, which it will launch this summer. Colin is bullish on NOW TV and likes the lessons it provides for U.S. pay-TV operators.

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Brightcove is powering NBCU's recently-launched Emmy screener app for the iPad dubbed "NBCU Screen It" with its App Cloud and Video Cloud platforms. The app allows 15,000 members of the Television Academy who vote on the Emmy awards to gain authenticated access to view NBC's programs.

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adRise, which has offered a video ad exchange for connected TVs, is moving upstream, introducing "adRise Connect," for content providers to easily create and distribute video apps across multiple devices. Farhad Massoudi, founder and CEO of adRise told me yesterday the product is will allow content providers to avoid developing expensive custom apps, as well as dealing with the submission process, for each connected TV platform.

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I'm pleased to be joined once again by Colin Dixon, senior partner at The Diffusion Group, for the 124th edition of the VideoNuze Report podcast, for Mar. 9, 2012. In this week's podcast we discuss Apple and its TV ambitions.

This past Wednesday Apple announced a few minor feature updates to its $99 Apple TV device. While the device continues to improve, in my view it still does not come close to representing Apple's ultimate ambitions in the living room. I think it's inevitable that Apple will introduce some type of "television" (timing TBD) and that when it does, it will be both a design and an experience breakthrough. My caveat here is that Apple needs quality content to support the device, and what it will be able to offer is still unclear. Stirring the pot, in the past week the NY Post reported that Apple is negotiating for rights to turn channels into apps, and Steve Jobs's biographer said that he purposely left out of his book details of what Jobs thought Apple TV should be.

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Not that long ago, when only authorized set-top boxes could receive video service, life was relatively simple for cable operators. But now, as cable operators and TV networks have begun deploying TV Everywhere, one of the key hurdles has become the time and expense involved with integrating and maintaining these services with the ever-expanding array of connected and mobile devices that consumers prefer. To address this pain point, mPortal, a provider of mobile service delivery solutions, is announcing this morning its SPRINGBOARD Media product, a cloud-based approach to help accelerate TV Everywhere rollouts.

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Everyone knows that online and mobile video consumption is soaring, as tablets, mobile devices and connected TVs proliferate, but new data from Ooyala helps quantify things. According to its Q4 2011 Video Index report, released this morning, viewership on these devices doubled from Q3 '11 to Q4 '11. This is being driven by users clicking "play" more often when presented with video choices and then watching longer as well.

Tablets led with 22% growth in quarter-over-quarter growth in time watched per play. Connected TV and game consoles led in engagement (as measured by completion rate per video viewed), with viewers completing 47% of videos. Tablets were second with 38%, followed by desktop and mobile. Videos longer than 10 minutes added up to 57% of the viewership time on connected TVs and gaming consoles, while on desktops it was just 25%.

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