Digital DNA

During this year’s International CES in Vegas, it was apparent that connected TVs were going to be one of the main tech evolutions for 2011.

But we all know that new technology platforms tend to experience teething problems and are not adopted by the mainstream for quite a while. But I am surprised by the number of tech savvy consumers who have been struggling with their new connected TVs. Here’s a first hand experience from a friend of mine who works as CTO for a tech start up. He has been in technology and software for the past 30 years. So he knows a thing or two about tech.

“Just so you know, I bought a new Sony Bravia TV with an IPTV service. The intention was to see how the new TV-based services worked in comparison to PC-based, and STB-based approaches (I also have 2x AppleTVs (1st and 2nd gen), a PS3, Xbox 360 and a Mac mini-based system for TV viewing).

I tried to watch a film last night using the Lovefilm streaming service from the TV directly. I managed to find out how to search their catalog using the TV’s remote control which meant that I did not have to interminably click through hundreds of titles (no recommendations available).

The film was fine for the first 50 mins, although I did notice pixelation at times. Then the film just stopped and went back to the summary page. I had to then click on the movie again and scroll to the position where I thought it had broken – not that easy. In all this happened three times in the space of 15mins. After the first couple of outages I tried to remember roughly how far I was into the movie to aid fast forwarding when the next failure occurred. Why Lovefilm couldn’t recognise that I was resuming the play is beyond me – smacks of a rushed deployment to me.

I checked the bandwidth going through my router and noticed that Jack was doing a download – I asked him to stop and resumed watching the film. Bandwidth into the router went down to c2Mb and managed to watch the rest of the film without incident. I do know that some evenings traffic congestion gets so bad round here that I barely get 1Mb. Probably insufficient to watch the film. BT’s two-tier service announced yesterday would obviously help deliver a better QoS.

I have set up traffic shaping on my router to prioritise some traffic and de-prioritise p2p stuff – obviously didn’t work. I will now find out what traffic protocol Lovefilm is using so that I can manually prioritise.

Setting up the service is also a pain. You have to register with Sony to add your TV to their system and then link the TV to a Lovefilm account on the Lovefilm site. Both activities need to be done from a computer. When you’ve activated Lovefilm you then have to wait about 5 mins before you can view a movie.

Lovefilm is poor in that it is purely packshot based with only the selected packshot giving title info. Sure, they have a landing page with a range (32?) ‘channels’. The Drama channel has c900 titles which show c15 to a page – the packshot is too small to be instantly recognised hence the need to select it using the remote control to see title etc.

Before finding out how to search it was necessary to laboriously click through all the film images until you found something of interest.

An easier route is to use their website to find films using the recommendation service – you add a selected film to your queue, set it to low priority so that it does not sent mailed to you and then you can see if it is available to stream. I think a small proportion of their catalogue is available this way.

The service costs £9.99 per month – you get one movie at home per month and unlimited streaming.

I guess what this seems to cry out for is a better streaming experience, i.e. to either download a little of each movie in my queue beforehand (not possible with my disk-less TV) or to give me the chance to set the service up to pre-load a certain % of the movie prior to starting to watch. That way I could set the streaming going – browse for a few minutes and then come back to watch the title without service breakage.

I also tried to find out how to access Lovefilm from the PS3 but failed – I will now search the internet for instructions.”

There is no doubt that the people behind all of theses TV-based UIs and services need to spend more time on the user experience & UI. In the rush to get widgets, apps and partners signed up, it looks like they have forgotten about their consumer and how they will experience the service.

Over the last 3 months I have seen enough evidence that device manufacturers are becoming aware of this problem as they work on using companion devices (iPads/SmartPhones) to provide a better experience for the user. Will be watching this space.

Created a visualisation of my LinkedIn network using InMaps.

“Less is more”, a mantra you would find me repeating ironically frequently to people around me. I’ve always believed that too many words end up watering down a point. Too many slides make a presentation forgettable. So does this stand true when it comes to the explosion of digital content?

First the backdrop – best illustrated by a quote from google’s Erik Schmidt “Between the birth of the world and 2003, there were five exabytes of information created. We [now] create five exabytes every two days. See why it’s so painful to operate in information markets?”

This is backed up by more data stats. I read in a great blog post from Brett King on the world of exponential data grwoth that Facebook users share 30 billion pieces of content every month, the Twitterati create 95m tweets every day and You Tube users upload 24 hours of video every minute.

It is fair to conclude, therefore, that there is more content than we could ever cope with. Question is, if less is more, is the reverse true? Does more content actually deliver less enjoyment? Well, no. With the advent of intelligent filters that use historic activity, context, social influence, etc, we are already learning how to cope with more content. And even better, we should get even more enjoyment out of the fact that there is more content, as long as we have filters that pick out the most relevant piece of content at the right time and place.

I was drawn to the story on YouTube trying to “avoid Van Halen fatigue” by improving recommendations.
My team at The Filter have been delivering recommendations based on behavior and consumption (rather than based on key words/tags) for some of the biggest video companies on the web (US TV networks and video aggregators). So, we know that what YouTube are talking about is true – delivering keyword based recommendations creates fatigue, whereas, using behavior and consumption data delivers increases in video views per visit (by over 20%) and in repeat visits.

Every week there’s a news alert about ‘ad funded music services’ Spotify or We7 reaching new milestones for user numbers. Last week Spotify announced 2 million UK users, this week it’s We7′s turn to announce 2 million unique users.

I am chuffed to bits to see two European-based music businesses growing so rapidly. These guys have clearly demonstrated that there is a demand for free (and legal) music which is effortlessly available on the web/desktop. This demand will ultimately lead to us having access to all entertainment content at any time on any device. There are still many distribution, rights and business model issues that need to be sorted before this happens, but it will happen.

So, once digital distribution has been sorted, the businesses that will thrive will be those who have also sussed out digital demand. In a world where everything is available to everybody at any time and on any device, demand is no longer based on what is available, but on what content is most relevant to us at that specific time. We will need smart filters that serve up relevant content to us based on location, time, entourage, past activity, tastes and mood.

That is why I am so excited about the work that my team is doing at The Filter. For the last 5 years we have been developing recommendation and relevance technologies for all types of digital content that use multiple inputs (consumption data, meta data, location, time zone, social data, etc…) to build models that enable us to work out the probability of what content goes with what situation – by using behaviour and mashing it up with meta data to provide a user with the most relevant content possible for them.

I am very proud that we have proven beyond any doubt that providing users with relevant choices of content leads to an increase in consumption per visit AND an increase in the number of visits because the user finds more content that they like at each visit. Over the last 12 months partners that use The Filter on their sites have seen uplifts in consumption of 15-20% based on increases in streams per visit and visits per week. And for us, it is just the start. As we get access to more data (using location on mobiles) and fine tune our engines, technologies like this will provide better content choices to individuals leading to more consumption.