Category Archives: Television

Goodbye TVC

TVC

Disclosure: I’ve worked on-and-off for various bits of BBC for many years.

The closure of TVC is one of those left-brain/right-brain things: The logical “right-brain” spreadsheet lover in me looks at the old building, the amount of asbestos, the legacy cables and the fact that News, Sport & Childrens have all moved out and thinks that it’s the right thing to do.

Meanwhile the left-brain in me is screaming loudly “BUT IT’S TELEVISION CENTRE”, it’s a place of dreams, of wonder, where I was in a small room in the basement while they filmed Jools Holland above. A place I got lost deliberately at lunchtime just so that I wouldn’t get lost that one time I was running for a meeting.

The truth probably lies somewhere in-between; News being in West1, unified with world-service is a great thing for the output. BBC Worldwide and BBC Studios will be moving back in a few years. Studios 1-3 will survive.

So on this, the last day the building is still in general operation, I will think fondly of the past, and hope that post re-fit the building emerges leaner and all set for 21st century.

My friend wrote about his recreation of a famous moment: On Tap-Dancing at TVC.

Pessimistic about TV Apps

I was on an episode of Tech Weekly today (23 minutes in) talking about Connected TV alongside the head of the DTG, Richard Lindsay-Davies. I was perhaps a bit down on TV apps and wanted to expand on that a little, in the hope of being more nuanced.

I think that Video Apps on the TV video are great: I love using iPlayer and NetFlix on my TV/PS3/AppleTV far more than on my laptop. You can glance away, and glance back when something interesting happens, in the way you watch TV. You’re not cmd-tabbing through windows to try and find the iPlayer tab before the interesting bit ends.

The BBC Olympics application will let fans have access to nearly all the sports, not constrained by how many channels the BBC has – a useful extension and I think it will be popular. The Twitter app on my TV? Not so much, I used it once, and used it to say how awful sending that tweet was.

I really don’t think we’ll manage to have that many TV-only apps. No developer without lots of video (the Broadcasters, Netflixs and YouTubes of the world) is going to pick up a TV SDK – they’re going to learn Android or iOS programming. There’s already a lot of fragmentation in the TV space and billing is never going to be as easy, and lucrative, as on the mobile platforms.

I think that in the future we’ll see some of these phone/tablet apps throwing interesting graphics and content to the TV screen, like the scores at the end of a round. There’s scope for real innovation here, but it’s about feedback, not interaction.

The TV should be the easiest screen to get content on, you shouldn’t have to think about how you get content there: It’s about leaning back and relaxing. We tried ordering pizza via TV in 1998, it didn’t really work. Today we’d just do it from our tablet or smartphone.

Have a listen, let me know what you think, am I being too pessimistic?

Big things are obvious, but sometimes smaller things niggle as much

I love my AppleTV, it’s the easiest way I’ve got to get music playing on my TV, which is the way to get music through my stereo.

The only thing that could make this nicer would be if Apple more fully used some of the features of HDMI. While I’m not really a fan of HDMI, it does have some useful things in it.

My PS3 can trigger my TV to turn on, or to change input to display it through the use of HDMI’s Consumer Electronics Control¹.

The AppleTV doesn’t send any signalling: meaning that every time I’m sat playing music from my Laptop or iPad, if my TV isn’t in the right state, I have to find the remote control (or even worse stand up from the sofa).

It’s minor. Totally minor. But when I get this gripe most days, and when I know the thing sat beside the Apple TV can do this, it’s annoying.

People notice big things that are wrong in products, and complain about them vocally – but small recurrent niggles also wear down consumer satisfaction. It’s the only thing I really don’t like about my Apple TV. I forgive it not playing non-iTunes content, and its lack of favourites on radio stations.

I know it’s unlikely, and I don’t even know if the hardware supports it, but it would be lovely if an option appeared in settings after an update “Change TV input when Apple TV starts”.

Pretty please Cupertino?

Consumer Electronics Control signalling allows the device to prompt the TV, and also for the TV to send remote key-presses to be processed by the device – allowing me to control my PS3 with my TV. Controlling devices like that can end up more a confusing novelty for anything more than basic 5-point navigation ↩

Hashtags as plausible deniability from compliance

Various broadcasters have done “chat around content” applications: the Apprentice and The X-Factor being two examples. These are expensive to run, because the second the content is on bbc.co.uk or itv.com then you face the wrath of compliance.

This is not a compliance rant, broadcasters need compliance, and at its best it helps programme makers get the most out of their rushes. It is an overhead though, and given we’ve yet to really see how we can “monetize” those people talking about shows, is it worth paying that penalty for highly vocal, but very small minority?

Enter the hashtag: Now shows have been transmitting with cues of suggested hashtags for many years. Now really only used on Twitter, but you could argue that a tag is really a platform neutral way to flag your content.

You’re not hosting the discussion, which means you’re not paying for moderation, and you’re not liable for the compliance. The broadcaster is saying “you guys can go and huddle over there, but it’s not really anything to do with us, understood?”

This has implications for second-screening because I think it means that broadcasters are going to be loathed to actually build wide-scale chat-around-content style applications: their name being associated with it just causes too much expectation. Can you imagine installing the “BBC Socialiser” app and getting the “THIS APPLICATION MAY CONTAIN BAD THINGS” pop-up from the iTunes store? It’s not what people would expect from the BBC.

Most people are still lazy, lean-back linear content consumers – the TV is a familiar friend at the end of the work-day who doesn’t expect much response, but over time people will want nicer ways to contextualise their tweets about content.

And so to the meaningless predictions…

Much as they will be loathed to let go, Broadcasters will realise that they can’t justify self-providing these services, and they will give more data away about schedules and items on-air in a form that can be better used to tag content by 3rd-party services
Services like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ will provide ways to embed this metadata in posts, so the a unique identifier of a show could be associated with a post, in a similar way to geo-tagging appeared.

The combination of those two things mean that you could create an app that was specialised twitter client. I don’t want a new social network for telly, but a client that embeds the magical codes to make everything more findable feels like a workable compromise.

Gareth Klose

writes about technology, television and travelling