Commentary

The OTT Dilemma: A Gazillion Channels And Nothing On

I find that if I take the time, I can make most of my Internet-connected devices work a little easier. But I don’t have the time for that, because I want them to work a lot easier.

Maybe this is the Shame of the New. We want things to be easier. We know they could be. And yet, we soldier on, hoping somebody big and powerful will figure it out.

Recode’s Peter Kafka is reporting that Apple is working on what essentially would be a 21st-century program guide so viewers might be able to more easily discover what’s available from various OTT providers — and possibly use just one authentication code to access online versions of cable networks.

Kafka writes: “A digital TV guide could have obvious upsides for consumers. And for Apple, too: Making a constellation of apps and programming easier to navigate would make Apple’s hardware more valuable.”

Well, there’s that.

I am not at all happy with the way Apple TV works, or Amazon Prime or Netflix  for that matter. And on Amazon, while I’m able to use its voice activation to find Amazon-produced content, I can’t use it to shoot right over to content on Netflix or anywhere else. Every content pusher has similar problems.

Discovering what’s out there is not easy, and I’m not the first one to whine about it.

Say what you will about cable, but its electronic program guide does let you zip around the 500-channel universe rapidly compared to OTT devices. Right now for me, OTT “discovery”  is the equivalent of using a stick shift in what has turned into a pretty automatic world.

Nagra, a Swiss company that operates worldwide to help figure this out, put out a report going over some of the same ground. We’re talking “user interface” here, a horribly unfriendly and unintuitive name for a solution that would be, well, friendly and intuitive.

Nagra quotes its own Crx Chai, director of user experience, who laments: “Too often, users are faced with TV interfaces that frustrate and discourage them from exploring and discovering the full array of content that can be available to them. A smart and intuitive UI is the front store through which viewers can access a personalized line-up of live and on-demand content.” (Why do I think Chai meant “front door”?)

“Video content such as a TV series and programs is increasingly ‘unbundled’ and made available à la carte,” the report says, “This means that viewing can become more personal, but users need help to navigate their way to the material that is relevant to them. So media curation — the collating of relevant content from multiple sources for individual users — becomes an increasingly important form of content discovery.”

The problem is that there’s no center place from which a user can start navigating, and that’s what Apple seems interested in solving. “Navigating between content apps searching for something to watch is a difficult and taxing process,” said Tom Laidlaw, vice president at Kannuu, also in the business of creating intuitive technologies.

Writing on the Website Videonet.com, he said: “If apps become the new channels, then without unified discovery features we’re stuck with something that’s the equivalent of an EPG with no listings! No clues as to what’s available at all, just the aloof diffidence of the ‘icon wall.’ This is threatening to become a serious problem, one that makes the connected TV experience at best frustrating and at worst essentially a broken medium — an outcome that benefits no one.”

And that, right now, is what we seem to be stuck with. Which is why Laidlaw and Apple are working on universal search that can make the OTT experience from the get-go. It’s not that way now.

pj@mediapost.com

 
2 comments about "The OTT Dilemma: A Gazillion Channels And Nothing On".
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  1. Doug Garnett from Protonik, LLC, August 5, 2016 at 2:41 p.m.

    Thoroughly agree that there's a problem. But... I don't think they can solve it. (Heck, Amazon can't even recommend books well based on what I've read in the past. And that's simlper.)

    Apple would do well to remember GoogleTV. This was entirely the goal of GoogleTV and it failed. 


    Here's a bit from a blog post I wrote in 2010. "Google’s release material put quite an emphasis behind the idea that today’s TV program listings are too complicated. Then they promise Google TV will fix this tiny problem by creating a much bigger one: finding programs by searching the internet." The Sound and Fury of GoogleTV https://dsgarnett.wordpress.com/2010/05/24/the-sound-fury-of-google-tv/

  2. Paula Lynn from Who Else Unlimited, August 5, 2016 at 9:33 p.m.

    Just because Google cannot do something doesn't mean it cannot be done. But in this case, it would be like someone being able to do 100 things at the same time while mind reading.

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