Posts for 'Kinect'

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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