Network Insight Institute

Session 1 - Discussion

Session 1 - Discussion

ANDREW COHEN, Io Research: You need to think of interface as being as simple as an onscreen display from your VCR. There have been so many studies published about the difficulties people have in setting up their VCRs correctly, making calls to support service centres to help them do that. I think the more interesting work is going to come out of the user interface being developed for SMS on mobile phones. Their problem is a very small screen and the need to simplify the whole process so that people can interact with it very simply.

I don't think there are any technical difficulties right now in presenting the more complicated services. There are business difficulties in, as I have highlighted, ensuring that all the data is there, but these can only be overcome by design. So in a way we are out of the technical woods in many respects, and in the designer's hands. How long will it take designers to come up with user interfaces that will not fail more than 50 per cent of people? Who knows? Someone might be sitting with one today and soon bring one out, but what I have seen so far doesn't encourage me.

MARK HUGHES, Accenture: As Andrew Cohen said, you can get a long way to making people feel like they are interacting without necessarily actually having to have that two way link. For things like being able to access additional information about sports players, a lot of that information could be carried down in the broadcast rooms. You don't necessarily need real time interactivity to do some of that stuff.

So the interactivity is happening today. The applications are out there. The systems are getting integrated. We have done it several times, and there are lots of other ones that we probably haven't been involved with, where the integration is being done. It is hard at the moment to do that integration, because there is no one standard that says 'everybody else shalt conform to this standard and this is how you shall do it'. That is where things are heading, but we are by no means there. At a guess I would say it will take two to three years to get to that kind of stage.

DUANE VARAN, Interactive Television Research Institute, Murdoch University: Something I think is really interesting is that in the UK, of the households that have interactive television, the actual rate of adoption (in other words, not the number of people who have the technology but those who are actually using it) has been fairly static over the past two years. In fact it has actually gone down from 54 per cent initially to about 50 per cent. But in the past four months we have seen that shoot up to 76 per cent, a dramatic increase in usage from those who actually have the technology.

The reason primarily for this increase is because up until now there hasn't actually been any content. Most of what people have had as their interactive television service has been about interactive advertising, or T-commerce. T-commerce is great as a revenue stream, but from a consumer proposition, you don't use this interactivity just so you can see an interactive ad.

As we chart the future, it is really important for us to remember that consumer uptake will come once we see content. It is now starting to come into the stream, particularly with the BBC's decision to acquire interactivity with its new digital channels. Now that that interactivity is coming in, the whole dynamic of adoption will change.

MARK ARMSTRONG: Mark Hughes, what interactive applications are getting all the consumers excited in the UK? Are they high bandwidth or low bandwidth?

MARK HUGHES: I think there is a variety of different types of content and services, but a lot of them do require at least a modest back channel. Take for example the whole Big Brother facility in the UK, which has had a tremendous response: for this they multi-channelled the different camera angles so that viewers could choose their own camera angle. Even if we had a modest back channel - and I know there are a lot of issues, in our landscape, about how we're going to approach the whole back channel issue - but even if we had a modest one, we could see a whole range of new services on offer. We would see for example the ability to do things like to poll and vote. A fantastic programme, on cable admittedly, is Bonsai, which gives people the capacity to 'sitcom', which means to sit down and play along. This is fantastic, a very good example of a new genre. Playjam, the interactive game channel, is now ranking between the 8th and 12th most popular on the Sky platform, in terms of overall viewing. This now makes it more popular than MTV. So we are already seeing new genres emerging, that audiences are engaging with enthusiastically.

INGRID SPEILMAN, ABC: Can anyone tell me what the experience is in these places of managing data on hard discs attached to TVs? Regarding some of the issues you raised before, about discs getting full, I am interested in the rights perspective on that.

ANDREW COHEN: It is a brilliant question. The right for protection is shot to shreds when it comes to any number of TiVo or Replay discs, which enable the content to be taken out and placed onto a hard disc in standard mpg format. Rights management is a disaster area right now, there's no question about that whatsoever. If you read the message-boards about TiVo, most people who really are using them to their greatest extent have bought interchangeable discs, and they swap over their disc drives. Now that is not something that the average consumer is going to want to do. But that is the way a lot of people in America have started to approach the problem, and maybe it is something that will take off here as well. People will just be replacing the disc drives, and you will start to view a disc drive not dissimilarly to the way that you do a VCR now.

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