HDTV LOOKBOOK
We wish we could say more but we have IP to protect, suffice to say that the internet connected HDTV is the perfect place to enjoy a LOOKBOOK with precision visuals and video, custom interactive content that is easy for the user to control… Imaging your product or service and filling that screen, not for a fleeting moment of high cost ad time, but with the dwell time of an interactive PageBlend LOOKBOOK with it's deeper engagement.
The next target for consumer attention is:
The Internet Connected HDTV
We already know how to navigate and get this to work, this is not a revolution, it is an unstoppable evolution that will happen in a competitive battle for your living-room entertainment investment. It is a new reason to get the most out of your biggest screen and every mega-corp on the planet wants you to desire their entertainment engagement source.
This could change everything, in a home venue
on the largest screen available
where hours are spent every day by millions of people
who are internet connected already.
HDTV CONNECTED – ENABLED BY A BUILT-IN FEATURE
Closeup of a Samsung TV Remote for Internet Connected TV with Widgets and APPS, wired and wireless.
The top right button basically says it all… what we have done is get connected, scale to fill the screen, network to global CDN delivery in the millions, and craft a very low-friction navigation outcome that maximizes sticky-time for the best user experience.
A NEW MARKET, DISRUPTIVE OF CLASSIC TREATMENTS and BEHAVIORS.
IT BEGINS WITH CONVERGENCE OF HDTV AND WEB.
This opportunity is a billboard sized interactive situation that feels like a magazine, HD detail is stunning, and encountering an advertiser page spread is something that is expected in a page turning format…. We make that page-turned Full HD SCREEN experience engaging, with interaction and video that has the finesse needed for such content to earn its eyeballs and deserve deeper engagement, sizzle or wowfactor.
There is actually a long list of benefit to user-engagement outcomes that span a variety of affinity behaviors. The first thing to do right, is make the experience a destination-quality outcome that can become sought-after. The initial enablement for HDTV networking is through the existing mechanisms of initial access.
WIDGETS AND APPS
At this time all internet connected HDTV widgets are limited, typically Netflix Vudu and weather, and boring, do not offer any "window shopping" options, in the perfect place for a LOOKBOOK to offer high resolution on-demand detail, Video, and interactive elements.
There is also a new and fresh market for backstory and celebrity content that showcases and promotes major film and TV events. This type of engagement is built to be extended, video enabled and interactive and include fullscreen advertiser placements. Showcase books are something we already do and the HDTV is where it belongs, these and Magalog lookbooks are likely to be the first of what you will see.
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CTN BOOKSHELF
Optional launcher screen with a variety of affinity / genre selections in Samsung INTERNET@TV Apps.
Traction will build when built-in Wireless Networked TV's gain in ubiquity, and such extra features are readily available. Enablement right out of the box with low friction access to engagement options and on-demand content will make new markets and strengthen the reach of buyer processes. Catalog and "window shopping" in a lean-back context could change the marketing landscape.
DO EVERYTHING RIGHT
CTN produces pages that deliver video on page turn, no press to play required. ( during use, Pause / Play is allowed ) such that the user engagement is initiated from the first moments of exposure, The screen is in motion, reading for drill-down can be by Column Glide of the up-down arrow keys using font sizes similar to that of a channel guide listing and easily read – leading to drill-down value when it suits the need. Promotion and advertiser benefits are designed into the process of engagement.
This offers a solution for those promotional needs that do not feel right in the hyped QVC false urgency of the moment, or infomercials that have very low credibility, and most importantly, puts the viewing audience in control of content selection. Since the default action is to "turn the page", the user only has to click one button to choose to move forward, keeping the experience as simple as is possible. We do a lot of custom animating, many people keep turning to a new page just to see what will happen next, and we live up to that with creative outcomes that reward the click with something unexpected graceful and great to see. We have a preference for working with clients that desire these enhanced user experience efforts and richness of feel, appropriate and tasteful, by employing a carefully measured amount of showmanship designed for that audience.
EARN AND KEEP YOUR AUDIENCE
The biggest initial issue with Internet HDTV is that most content is that most of such content is also available on other lesser than large screen devices in pretty much the same user experience. The proper execution of any INTERNET HDTV content is to make sure that it is designed for, and exclusive to a desired livingroom experience. The best outcome is to make Internet TV usage become the go-to location for content quality and experience that is not available anywhere else in the same way.
With a Remote Control as the interactive tool, the engagement paradigm has fundamentally changed. A PageBlend viewer may leave the page and turn forward while they stay in your content and do not leave your "channel"…
The next page is an arrow click, and CTN does what it takes to deserve more dwell-time and attention capture with each LOOKBOOK page.
KNOW WHO THEY ARE
Tracking via internet tools already used, all are available, and with partnering, subscriber information is matched with time-spent-on-page data to reveal measurable ROI, along with the existing social network tools for posting interest snippets to FACEBOOK and TWITTER, ( already inherent in CTN PageBlend )
Nearly all current bluray players now offer internet connectivity, removing the barrier to entry caused by buyer resistance to HDTV upgrades, and these run from $89 to $299. This device solution has the benefit of optional memory and firmware upgrade enhancement, support unique device subscriber services. Game consoles include these same features.
CONNECTED BUYERS in a Lean-Back context
The "Hit-or-Miss" nature of TV screen time gave rise to saturation advertising … that is now being replaced by On-Demand access offering far better Ad Spend cost performance, in a natural fit.
The HD FULL SCREEN treatment furnishes the best of all worlds, available when the user seeks it and actually desires the content and in that context yields a far greater impact Q than any other option available.
This Includes Full Extras DVD streaming as a page turning book with behind the scenes and character backstory, a catalog of desired items, a tour of a destination location, any product that HD detail benefits from such as jewelry items to motorcars to Publications and catalogs.
Downloadable fullscreen books that enhance the entertainment experience and can be further monetized by ad insertions – purchased for HDTV using internet connected solutions should be available soon.
Click to view simulated example to the right ->
FALL and Holiday Season 2010
Every HDTV maker is refreshing their lines with Internet TV in a second surge of promotion and new capability. By November, the Net Connected TV will be Standard. In these systems there will be bluetooth or wifi remotes, everything we need is more than already there.
Visio launched The Internet TV and APP store in January 2010. Right now all Internet TV Makers are actively seeking engaging content for the VPN ( virtual private network ) of the Internet connection they offer. In some cases HDTV makers are actively funding developers to gain content-driven traction to draw audience to the APP stores that are all Brand-Centric "Walled Garden" implementations at this time.
Something for everyone .. with QWERTY KEYS – such remotes offer search and form filling options, social network short-form community engagement, and of course the ability to perform basic e-commerce. For most all screen-to-screen navigation… Select and hit "OK" is the DVD navigation paradigm and pretty much eliminates the learning curve problem of how to begin to navigate. Wherever low-friction to progress forward is presented, it will enable more to happen. Blue-red-yellow-green program-able context based function keys round out the need to support fundamentally unique options with a single click.
BLUETOOTH REMOTE CONTROLLERS are devices you may already own. These systems allow for any bluetooth touchscreen to download an APP that acts as a remote. iPod Touch, iPad, iPhone, Any Android Phone, Logitech, and will easily reach out to Panasonic VIERA, Sony BRAVIA, VISIO, SAMSUNG and more. DLNA – Anynet support network-aware connectivity to home networks at the router and wireless access point is growing also.
For HDTV there is a void of quality designed-for-HD content – provisioning a fresh visual source to find there is a wide open opportunity for entry and emergence of fresh new paradigms, already launch enabled and promotable in widgets and apps that at this time are rather lame and do not meet expectations. That is about to change. Compelling, HDTV exclusive APP delivered wide-angle of reach and content will rule this space as
… the next attention-getting content battleground for media will happen in the living-room… you already own the internet connection… control it with a click and prefer that experience to the non-interactive behaviors of cable tv.
EVERY HDTV AND INTERNET TV SOLUTION HAS ITS OWN PORTAL
All these islands of access to the web are special cases, subscriber managed in some way and roped off from the real web. Most On-screen App Stores are category-based, Pandora Twitter Facebook and Netflix, with some gallery and YouTube in the mix. None of it has a Home Theater look and feel, or any unique outcomes to look forward to. Whomever creates the most desired HDTV NET PORTAL wins, and currently that is a wasteland of whatever the HDTV makers can get, which isnt much… yet. Anything substantive will stand out in such a situation as we have now.
ENABLEMENT and EXCLUSIVITY
The solution has to be easy and immediate, very visually attractive, impose no huge "Search Load" to find. The problems facing HDTV makers is they have very little in the way of compelling content reasons to go there and use that INTERNET BUTTON for it. Content discovery in the early stages of new feature rollouts is far easier than it is when the clutter of an APPLE APP store becomes the user experience. Brand establishment at this time will benefit by setting the standard with a solid value-add. People don't really want thousands of junky apps, they do want a couple dozen useful ones that are easily had with the limited interface response and navigation options of current remote controls.
What matters even more is to have a destination-quality user experience that is sought after by some relatively large affinity group, and use the web-side to promote the TV side… Content and Advertiser placements crafted in ways that are not adequately served by any other smaller devices, and make that content exclusive to the IPTV, monetizing through interactive features. CTN has developed access-control at the CDN that assures only the proper HDTV APP can connect to load and stream specified content and keep exclusivity intact.
RISE ABOVE THE MUNDANE
It is important to provide multiple compelling reasons to visit interactive content on a home HDTV that must compete with laptop and desktop user experiences.
CTN HD LOOKBOOK engines and pages are designed on HDTV screens with videos and interactive visuals.
This is "best-of-class" user engagement, it is our DNA.
THE HD SCREEN
If there is any take-away from reading this, it should be that CTN designers create all LOOKBOOKS on HDTV screens, and this has been our way for 18 months. Other systems to support this HD experience are crafted in market-chasing after thought, and it shows. The competitive systems are clunky and unusable without "ZOOM" modes and entirely unsuitable for remote-control lean-back use-cases.
CTN books start out in HD and therefore are crafted to that resolution, NTSC color gamut and 10 foot readable couch distance testing.
The benefit list for advertisers has always been key to the buldout, and the user experience for leading to product and service first point of encounter enabled to enhance the purchase desire process is likely the first and most favored value that the extended screen time of an interactive video enabled book can deliver. This is really an engineered creative effort that is agile enough to support new ideas and convey enough value to gather repeat visits. We see a lot of 2-3 return visits per IP in the weblogs, leading to a total time-spent of 15 mins on up to an hour, and usually the higher the user's screen resolution, the more visits we measure.
BEING ON THE CURVE
To be on the adoption curve at the hockey-stick inflection point where exponential growth begins, you have to be ready, and connect the dots of supply/demand nodes for every point in the path that leads to the customer touch-point. This means design for digital screen, visuals for todays standards of recognized excellence, and showmanship that keeps them there once you have them… and have all the engines of CDN and client-server ready to deliver at global market scale. CTN has been building for this moment for over 2 years. That is our DNA and why CTN could enter an already flooded market of page-flipping stuff, gain share and be respected for it.
At CTN, the HD scaled user experience has always been our design reference.
( FULL 1080p which is 1920pixels of HD NTSC color gamut )
When we build your book, we do it on HDTV screens, and if it looks and works well there at 1920 x 1080 , we take it to 1366 x 768 and check varying color intensity and pixel density. All out Layout Artists and Designers are HD equipped… that mantra is simple: Pixel perfect is the only way and it must be scale-capable to various resolutions in text, bitmap and video.
Internet Portal Access built into TV with wireless "n" is the primary path to ubiquity, Blu-ray players and DVR boxes will also do this, and emerging iTV, BOXEE, Google TV REVUE systems will be 99 bucks and sit in every Wallmart and BestBuy right next to the HDTVs that fill entire walls. Many will be totally wireless "n" and configure themselves for immediate use with a single OK button push. That is done and happening now.
This alternative solution means replacing the existing HDTV is not required, just a one-time cost to extend the value of a broadband connection into the living-room. many people are doing this for themselves already, forging the increased adoption rate, blogging the experience, and its very much positive. All this is happening faster than we would have predicted.
By 2011 the critical mass of user-base for HD enabled Net connected content will be like a super-massive black hole that brings the quality content into its orbit. The initial marketspace to date has been acting as a natural filter for higher-end preferences, and as is aways the case, it will expand to include larger and more diverse audiences. The difference will be that there will be almost too many ways to get Net-Connected content to an HD screen, a situation never before present in the entertainment spectrum. This makes for a very competitive landscape based on what is actually available for content and exclusive value added.
We believe highly interactive HD quality content in the living-room will be one of the better and more sought-after validations of Internet TV, and entry to this space is already enabled in our PageBlend System.
The cross-section of device platforms supporting Flash ( 3.1 lite ) and 10.1 is going to grow dramatically in the very near future. PageBlend is already capable of supporting these new device implementations.
Laptops used to be desk and kitchen table devices, but now are migrating to the coffe table and with HDMI output will compete with net connected TV. This migration to the livingroom is a wholly different experience that must have inherent design style and strategy to fit the new venue it can be found in. The proliferation of HDTV as Second Monitor for a laptop, will result in the compute power comparisons that will take place between TV Net connected browser and Flash / HTML performance .vs. Laptop driven responsiveness. Design-for-device is the only best way to gain parity. This means developers generally have to do battle with incompletely reasoned Tv Browsers and new javascript library environments, testing for each platform.
OVER THE TOP
This is a fresh consumption-cycle category in the HDTV IPTV world, serves to define the "extra" connected outcomes from a variety of devices and protocols that can be added to existing set-top and over-the-air source categories and always has some hot new term assigned to its internet / broadband value point. The practical reality is that many people that cant wait for IPTV to be built-in and appliance-like, are using laptops and small media computing solutions, Windows Media Center in preference to what they see for devices now. One of the tests we did found that people dislike adaptive bit-rate content. period. Its kind of an all or nothing outcome where buffering and degraded quality visuals in the HDTV are just not worth it, they will move on to other content options. BOXEE and such devices both benefit and suffer as a result.
The beauty of PageBlend is that the content of a page is 100kb and has a screen residence time of 2-5 seconds vs the 800 kb per second of marginal quality video that dies at the hand of local non-CDN supprted content sources. The sub-second arrival of a page leads to available bandwidth for preparing load of fine high quality short-form content deliverable at system max bitrates rather than ISP bottleneck limited stream rates. This IP is unique to the structure of CTN PageBlend.
NET-CONNECTED IS NON-TRIVIAL.
It seems simple but in fact requires a massive amount of code and infrastructure. We know quite a lot about that now because we did it end-to-end and use focus groups to gather reaction engagement and affinity. The bandwidth profiled tuned-flow of PageBlend delivers more rich screen content with less, and gathers typical screen-time numbers of 10 minutes per book with only 3 megs of 30 page images and interactive content… this provisions open bandwidth for arrival of fast-start video.
MAJOR STUDIOS GETTING ONBOARD – Internet TV Solutions expanding rapidly
EPIX AND NETFLIX ANNOUNCE EXCLUSIVE INTERNET-ONLY DEAL TO INSTANTLY STREAM EPIX MOVIES TO NETFLIX MEMBERS
NEW YORK and BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., August 10, 2010 – EPIX? and Netflix, Inc. [Nasdaq: NFLX] today announced an agreement through which Netflix members can instantly watch an array of new releases and library titles from EPIX streamed over the Internet from Netflix. Movies from the multi-year deal will begin streaming from Netflix on September 1 and include movies from Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM.
EPIX has subscription pay TV rights to new releases and movies from the libraries of its partners and will make these movies available to Netflix 90 days after their premium pay TV and subscription on demand debuts. Historically, the rights to distribute these films are pre-sold to pay TV for as long as nine years after their theatrical release. For Netflix, the agreement is a significant step in building the company's streaming offer, adding many popular movie titles from some of the world's leading studios. It adds meaningfully to a growing library of movies and TV shows that can be watched instantly on TVs via a range of leading consumer electronic devices capable of streaming from Netflix and on computers.
For EPIX, the deal reflects the value of the EPIX platform which, from its start, has provided new rights and flexibility for the distribution of its movies. The agreement allows EPIX to continue the distribution of popular content on a variety of platforms and preserve the premium television, subscription on demand and online window reserved for cable, satellite and telco television partners.
"Adding EPIX to our growing library of streaming content, as the exclusive Internet-only distributor of this great content, marks the continued emergence of Netflix as a leader in entertainment delivered over the Web," said Ted Sarandos, chief content officer for Netflix.
"The EPIX deal is an example of the innovative ways in which we're partnering with major content providers to broaden the scope and freshness of choices available to our members to watch instantly over the Internet."
Netflix model is shifting to Web-Based delivery, they feel the time is coming for internet / TV convergence.
Netflix is an Icon on every Internet TV offering at this time.
Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings will pay $900 million over five years for online rights to films from Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures, Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. and Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. That made available more than 3,000 titles from the three studios.
More than 61 percent of Netflix’s 15 million subscribers streamed movies and TV shows, the company said last month.
SONY: QRIOCITY
Pronounced "curiosity" in a hard to spell but Domain-Name-is-Available kind of way, is the Bravia Portal, considering Sony's huge BMG and film/TV library this is substantial and category rich, makes very good use of the ABCD red-blue-yellow-green remote keys.
The Register says: "As of now Qriocity’s movies can be seen by Internet-connected Bravia TVs, the newer Sony Blu-ray players. But once the entire thing can be seen though a window on the PlayStation 3 network (surely this will happen)
Sony says that in future Qriocity will be a service available through third party devices not just those built by Sony, but that we think it’s first port of call is Sony Ericsson. It does sound like Sony Connect all over again, but perhaps this time Sony can manage it without it breaking on the first day (Connect crashed on its first day) and it can at least get all of its divisions to talk about it, not just one. When Sony Connect launched it was like a news blackout compared to the way Apple gets its products written about, and hopefully it has learned from that."
APPLE
The Apple TV "Hockey Puck" is basically apple's logo on a Roku-like serve-stream system that adds the "slingbox" local transcode in some ways, enables your PC to be the source of your HDTV content. The APPLE TV ITSELF has very little memory and the A4 chip inside is not much muscle for 2 megapixels of screen… Basically HD for this device is 720p and not 1080p. Although you are not limited to iTunes, the intention is that APP store is your provisioning service.
Most important here is the general Price-Point attention this has created. $99 is the value of the device and 99 cents is the value of a TV show, with $4.99 as the feature film rental.
SOCIAL HDTV
We believe that the market will first engage with polished professional content, to be followed by the emergence of DIY user authored specific broadcast feel of HDTV content around 2013. The Twitter/Facebook "What I Am Doing" clicks will be a viral commentary-driven "What Im Watching" that will attract the dedicated viewer audiences, likely sports and racing will benefit most followed by whatever scheduled TV events choose to support it. On-Demand will be Getting into a WEB-HDTV world will require and benefit form specific tools to author and deploy a variety of BOOK and Player paradigms, many with interfaces suited to both the Remote and the bluetooth/wireless touchscreen.
LG NETCAST
