For the last few weeks Mrs H and I have been watching TV programmes almost exclusively using on-demand services. We have BT Vision at home, which includes a comprehensive iPlayer ‘application’ as well as catch-up players for the other channels.
I often refer to catch up players/ on demand television as TV version 3. Version 1 was standard, or linear television… switch the box on to any channel, sit back and watch it.
Version 2 was the invention of the Personal Video Recorder, or PVR. No tapes were required, yet you could instantly record or pause live television. In the US, PVRs took off with Tivo, and in the UK they took off with Sky+.
TV v3 is very different though – you sit down and then choose which programme you want to watch. There’s absolutely no planning involved. There’s also no monetisation... there are no adverts whatsoever.
For the BBC iPlayer this doesn’t make any difference because if you watch a BBC channel there’s no monetisation in the first place. Though watching any other channel such as ITV, Channel 4 or 5, or Discovery – it’s very strange to watch a 44 minute programme in… 44 minutes, without using a DVD.
If you watch the ITV player online (i.e. on a computer), they ‘hard code’ (you can’t skip them or speed them up) advertising breaks into the programme.
Perhaps the audience using the TV to watch catch up programmes is small – which is a real irony in itself.
I think it’s one of the reason why product placement on TV programmes is becoming so important. For the last few years – since TV version 2, we’ve been skipping through ad breaks, and with version 3 we don’t see them at all, so advertising needs to move inside the programme.
On “I’m a Celebrity…” next year, start getting used to the idea of the contestants wearing branded clothes, drinking specific beers in the evening and seeing low flying jumbo jets overhead!
In my opinion, the new homepage addresses the usability challenge very well. I like the 3 tabs along the bottom as different ways to browse content (Most Popular, What’s On and Explore).
The new toolbar at the top is very Mac/ Google-esque, providing the most common links throughout the entire BBC web estate. At the moment you can see the style of the toolbar changes across this site, and I expect this to become common over the coming months.
Finally, there’s the scrolling features area at the top of the site. Very iPhone-ey (no pun intended). Great on a touch screen but with a mouse it’s quite fiddly. It’s the same as the new version of Chrome, with the ‘Apps’ and the ‘Most Visited’ sliding navigation. Great on a phone, poor with a mouse.
Next year will see an explosion of touch screen PCs once Windows 8 is released. Earlier this year I considered buying a touch screen PC for home, but human hands (and especially my children’s hands) are too greasy to consider using on a flat surface. We bought a standard PC in the end and it still annoys me how many fingerprints appear on the [non-touch] screen.
I was in a meeting yesterday with a few people, one of them with an iPad. One of the guys turned to the iPad user and said “You use the letters ‘e’, ‘u’ and ‘s’ a lot, judging by the state of your screen”. The iPad user replied with “Interesting you say that, because my boss’ name is Sue”.
Back to desktop touch screens – I don’t think we’re ready for touch screen’s yet. It’s solving a problem that doesn’t exist – I’m faster typing and navigating with a mouse and keyboard than colleagues with an iPad.
In summary, I like the design of the new BBC homepage. It solves a huge challenge really well, by consolidating a huge site into a number of easy to use components and promoting some of them nicely. Now I need to use it with clean hands and a touch screen.
It’s been absolutely crazy busy at work for the last few weeks, mainly on the new business front. I’d like to add this is a report, not a criticism. Anyway, when it gets this busy at work I often remember Bill Gates’ book The Road Ahead where he discusses how future business will all be conducted by electronic systems exchanging data with each other.
The truth has turned out to be quite the opposite – customers want ever increasing levels of detail before signing up to a product or service.
I did get a chance last week to go to an interesting technology event run by Vizrt. The event was aimed at their large publisher and broadcaster customers – many of the broadsheets and tabloids use their system (or similar competitors) for creating content for their newspapers or TV news snippets. We were there because we work with some large publishers, integrating their systems together.
One of the speakers at the event was Morten Holst who is a Product Strategy Manager for Vizrt, and raised some interesting points which are paraphrased below.
Morten’s first point was to wake up the audience with the following video:
His point was that whilst the video is amusing – a baby who knows the iPad interface so well that she can’t use a paper magazine, and even checks her finger to see if it’s her finger that’s broken – this baby is going to be a consumer in ten years. Publishers and broadcasters need to wake up and realise their consumers are changing very quickly.
His next demonstration was a comparison of a web site 10 years ago and nowadays. I’ve used the BBC News website as an example below.
Look at the two homepages for a few seconds, and you can see many similarities. In fairness, over the ten years, not a huge amount has changed.
I’m not particularly targeting the BBC (it’s still my favourite news site). The point here is that publishing hasn’t actually changed very much in 10 years.
Now look at another entertainment industry over the last ten years. Look at the video below – if you can, try to watch it in HD.
Morten’s point here is that 10 years ago these kinds of graphics and sound effects were considered motion picture quality. Now they are considered the acceptable standard of computer games – this year’s Battlefield 3 (the video above), FIFA 12 and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 are good examples.
The video games industry has recognised a number of times that it needs to push the boundaries of user interfaces, presentation and design – think of an Xbox 360, the revolutionary Wii controller, then the revolutionary Kinect controller. To put that into perspective, the Xbox and Wii were launched within the last 6 years.
His final point was about comparing printed content to digital content. If you read paper magazines, the photography is usually outstanding - full, double page and high quality. That same image will be shown as a 2 inch square on the web, and won't get a second glance.
The iPad is encouraging publisher's to think more creatively, by designing beautiful interfaces. In truth there's no reason the iPad can encourage creativity and a web browser can't. However the iPad has been disruptive enough in digital terms to make editors want to push the boundaries.
So, on to the future, Morten encouraged the audience to start pushing the boundaries, to stop doing things the same way because that’s how they’d always been done. The functionality has moved on enormously, yet the editors aren’t using the new features, yet.
Last night on BBC3 (why BBC3??) was the first part of a three part documentary on Superbrands, and why they mean so much to us. Last night’s episode was on Technology, with next week investigating Fashion.
The series is well produced with a Louis Theroux style presenter, Alex Riley, who you can’t tell if he’s mocking his interviewee or being serious.
In case you don’t watch the episode, (and even if you do, I’m not giving too much away), the crux of the episode was “Why are Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Sony such powerful brands, and Nokia not so powerful? After all, Nokia is still the largest handset manufacturer in the World, and has more handsets out there.”
One of the light hearted parts of last night’s programme is that various groups of people were asked to describe these brands as if they were a personality. These groups included primary school children and older children, to people in the street. Facebook was described as “your mate in the pub who knew everything about everyone and bought you a drink as you walked in, but you weren’t sure if your wallet was safe with them.” Microsoft was the “middle aged BMW driver” – not bad for the company who produce the hippest games console.
The programme’s conclusion was about Control:
Apple own the entire user journey from turning on your phone to the app, to the advertising on the app.
Apparently Sony lose around $200 per PS3 unit because they want to use the highest quality components including a Blu-Ray player which costs almost $100 per unit. Its a small price to pay when it provides a mass market desire to buy Blu-Ray discs, of which Sony has a revenue sharing model.
Microsoft was interesting because of its image as an Operating System vendor (yawn, and please look at the recent Windows 7 launch video) and a generally ‘boring’ application stack. Except for Xbox that is, which interestingly has no Microsoft branding near it.
Yet Nokia only own the handset. They are a hardware manufacturer. A non-exciting consumable manufacturer.
The programme was highly entertaining however I can’t say I learned anything new from it, except the Xbox-has-no-Microsoft-branding and the scientific (via MRI scan) similarity with brand loyalty and religion.
Thinking of other superbrands with similar levels of Control, Visa is another great example. It’s a Superbrand in the Control category because as soon as you pay for an item in a supermarket with your card, or online, you have regular reinforcement of the brand. The logo on your card, to Verified-by-Visa (I’m not saying V-B-V is a good thing) if you’re shopping online. And Visa has similar levels of Control of the successful technology superbrands because they understand spending data across retailers, which virtually no one else has. Actually, Akamai has probably more data about consumer behaviour, but is a B2B brand rather than a Superbrand.
I'm looking forward to next week with Superbrands: Fashion.
The FT have started using a good implementation of a tag cloud on some of their blogs. E.g., if you go to the FT Alphaville blog, look on the right hand side under 'Tags' - and the most commonly used tags appear larger than other text. It's quite useful for browsing and looks quite nice. The FT uses WP-Cumulus to do the tag cloud, which is a free plugin.
However the nicest implementation (which admittedly, is of comments not tags) I've seen is on The Economist. Go to their 'Comments Homepage' and you can see how all the comments posted on to the website relate to each other. Very nice, and pretty guaranteed to find something in there of interest.
Navigation such as tag clouds, or The Enonomist's 'comment cloud', or the BBC's Most Read (again, look on the right hand column of most BBC News articles) lists are an excellent method to promote a longer visit on a website and more pages per visit.
The web started with a browsing navigation style. There wasn't a huge amount of content, so users meandered around the web looking for interesting content. Next came searchable navigation style. Google recognised the explosive amount of content on the web, and we started using Google to search for our data nuggets - deep diving into sites for our specific information, and then moving to the next site. We've now moved back to browsing. We use Facebook Activity feeds to burn five spare minutes, or our Twitter feeds to spend 15 minutes looking for recommendations from those that we're following.
Groupon have capitalised on this - sending out broadcasts to say "Hey, this product is 80% cheaper - why not buy one?" Within two years we'll be back to a search based browsing experience, which will be fine because Google or Bing (Microsoft) will own Twitter by then.
The public (and press) are too quick to criticise the BBC for the licence fee. I've said before that I think we get fantastic return on investment for our £150 a year - with top quality radio, TV and Internet content.
This week though, I got another pleasant surprise from the BBC. Despite having a two year old flat screen TV without the latest Internet-apps capability, I pressed the red button whilst watching one of the BBC channels because I saw 'iPlayer' on the red button prompt.
And there it was - iPlayer. On my TV.
So I browsed around and started watching something from iPlayer on the TV. Completely on demand, with pass and play functionality - everything you get from the website equivalent.
The impressive-ness of the experience was that iPlayer was streaming content over the Internet on to my TV without me realising that the TV could do it!
Quality is OK - although Mrs H didn't find it a problem, I could see that the bandwidth needs to be increased to give a TV-quality experience.
So a round of applause to the BBC for once again delivering something beyond expectation. A special commendation should go to Panasonic of course for also delivering beyond expectation! And both for doing it without increasing the cost.
Last night I sat down with the wife to watch Top Gear. We realised we hadn't recorded it, so we went to iPlayer to watch it. Unfortunately iPlayer was down last night, presenting a rather humble and plain looking '403 Error'.
We look after some rather large sites at Endava, and I can only imagine what the poor techies at the BBC were going through last night - undoubtedly trying to roll back the latest code or environment changes, or work out where the extra traffic was coming from (simultaneously trying to work out what to do with it).
At times like that, I think that I think differently to other users - I start feeling sorry for the service provider (and specifically, the individuals there) rather than a 'typical' consumer complaining about where the service has gone.
The infamous England goal during the World Cup was the same - as soon as the advert on ITV HD came on during matchplay, my stomach curled up and I thought "someone feels really bad for this" - despite me missing out on the England goal at the time... although I must add that the conspiracy theorist in me questions whether it was a publicity stunt or not.
A client (who came from a traditional TV background) once said to me that the difference between the web and TV is that TV never goes down. With iPlayer on my TV at home - is that still really true?
My kids are under 10 years old. As they've been growing up, I find their use of the web interesting.
If there is an award for the ultimate way to design a website for the masses, it should go to BBC CBeebies. For those of you who don't know (because either you don't have kids, or your kids are a little older than mine), CBeebies is aimed at under six year olds.
The CBeebies website amazes me because it enables under six year olds to navigate their website as quickly as adults navigate their favourite sites.
My kids were all able to use the website well before they could read letters. They simply go to the top right corner of Internet Explorer, can type 'CBeebies' very quickly, and then they click the top result. Once they are on the website, there is an index page of their favourite shows. Most of the icons have a clear voice over as well.
Watching a three year old navigate the web with such ease is amazing to watch. It's a cliche to say that the new generation will be web-literate, but as far as my kids are concerned, it looks like a pretty sure thing.
I felt sorry for the BBC this morning. For months they have been attacked by MPs and the media for being all too powerful, and were asked to scale back their operations to give commercial organisations a chance to compete.
So they've announced a number of cutbacks including closing a couple of stations, and suddenly they're berated for doing so!
Maybe they should offer BBC 6 and the Asian Channel to commercial organisations to continue running them, rather than simply closing them down. Or maybe that would be interpreted as providing a state funded start up corporation (hmmm.... reminiscent of BT, O2, British Gas, National Grid, etc. etc.)
Last night a number of MPs stepped forward to say that closing BBC 6 was a travesty, and the BBC should leave the station alone. One can only speculate whether these MPs knew the writing was on the wall, and they simply joined the side of the public to scrounge a few more votes later this year.
One of the changes at the BBC that I disagree with is continuing Children's BBC for a further two hours to 9pm. Kids need sleep, and TV (at least in my house) is the enemy of going-to-bed. I would imagine that the daily 7pm 'shutdown' is a signal to thousands of children across the country to get off the sofa and go upstairs to bed.
The BBC have been showing a TV documentary over the last few weekends called Virtual Revolution discussing the origins of the Internet, as well as the issues it currently faces (commercialisation, IP & ownership).
I've been quite surprised about how few people in the industry have seen the programme, or even knew anything about it.
It’s presented very well by the natural-born-presenter Dr Aleks Krotoski who judging from her Twitter feed is clearly passionate and proud of the series. Some parts are presented over-simplistically to anyone who has some level of knowledge of the industry, but even then, every few minutes there are some thought provoking comments from the likes of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Tim Berners-Lee, Krotski and many others.
