PC and mobile apps are used by individuals. Interactive TV apps like MOG’s Roku channel are used by groups. Everybody in the living room can see a living room app at the same time. Everybody there wants the benefit of the movie or the song or the map or whatever the app does. This limits interactivity. It’s like the issue of fighting over who has the remote — everybody is watching the TV, but only one person is picking the channel. Picking the channel can’t be the main point, or it won’t be fun for anybody but the one person with the remote.
GoogleTV shares part of the problem space that HDTV fundamentally has. There’s two parts: the experience portal -AND- the content. Question to be answered: Will GoogleTV, on the “home experience portal”, be more emotionally engaging/fulfilling than an iPad/tablet and earphones?
Logitech is a high-end remote control provider, and the Revue is a computer augmented Google-infused next-gen version of that.
It’s a really hard market to get any traction in… No one wants to pay for much of anything.
Len, I think that the reason GTV would be more has over a tablet is that it doesn’t use earphones. More broadly, the user experience design of a tablet, from hardware on up to UI, is for a solitary user.
In a way this is a profound difference in the computing experience. How do you design so that the system operator is many people at the same time?
We’ll see in a year how the first generation of IPTV apps worked out, given that Pandora, Netflix, etc are ubiquitous on blue ray players and high end tvs. But I’d be surprised if those access were to Pandora and Netflix in the living room wasn’t considered as basic as power and water.