LIVEdigitally

Peter Kafka has a new article up at AllThingsD that proclaims Netflix is “crushing the digital movie competition.” In fact, according to new market research, Netflix controls 61% of the digital movie space. That means 6 out of every ten movies streamed is via Netflix.

The next closest competitor, Comcast, controls only 8% of the market.

As NPR reported yesterday, companies such as Amazon and Facebook are looking for ways to compete in online video. Quoting from that article:

“You know, it’s pretty unusual for the world to let you run away with a couple of billion dollars of revenue and a large market cap without testing the waters,” says Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer at Netflix.

Netflix showed astounding growth last year, and has over 20 million customers. As more people stream content, expect competition in this space to intensify in the coming months.

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the Over-The-Top TV Conference and wanted to quickly share some of my experiences at OTTCON.

Overall, it was an enjoyable experience with many knowledgeable industry experts in attendance. My talk on how the Connected TV space has changed in the last 6 months went well and was written up by Ken Pyle at the Viodi View. His article is worth a read, and discusses many trends in the Smart TV space, including the rise of the second screen. Quoting from his piece:

There are kinks with two-screen interactions that need to be ironed out, as pointed out by Jeremy Toeman of Stage Two. He cited the example of the use-case where multiple people are watching television and the one, whose smart phone is controlling the program, goes to the bathroom, effectively taking the remote control with him. Similarly, who is the master, when multiple people are trying to control the second screen from their respective personal media devices? This could portend a new generation of “remote control wars”.

Jeremy Toeman also gave designers some good tips, including:

* Lean back means “passive experience”.
* 2nd screen should have all the text heavy comments.
* People don’t want to log-in or have passwords on their televisions.

Toeman’s updated his predictions for losers and winners in his session. He cited the big service providers, TV manufacturers and content owners as being among the winners. He suggested that the biggest winner would be the consumer, provided the new features that the over-the-top approach unleashes are not overwhelming.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Thanks to everyone who attended the Over-The-Top TV Conference and shared their passion for the next generation of TV.

I recently had the opportunity to critique the Logitech Revue’s ten foot UI for Nikkei Electronics, a Japanese trade magazine that “offers prompt reports, to-the-point commentaries and in-depth analysis on advanced technologies.”

Phil Keys, US Correspondent for NE, approached me for this project. He wanted an expert opinion on how to build a better interactive user experience for the home theater. I have known Phil since my days at Sling and Mediabolic and working with him was a real honor and privilege.

I applied user-centric design principles to grade the Logitech Revue and point out its strengths and weaknesses. My review was then translated and printed up, along with photos of the Logitech UI. Here is a small sample of the article.

Thanks to Nikkei Electronics for the opportunity to deliver Smart TV best practices to a global audience.

Starting today, Amazon Prime customers can take advantage of the company’s new, unlimited video streaming service. Amazon Prime Instant Video is free, with a few caveats. Quoting from Engadget:

This is only for paid Prime subscribers, so if you’re a college student or the like with a free membership you’re sadly out of luck. Also it’s US only at this point.

Of course, comparisons to Netflix are inevitable here. Early reports say that Amazon’s catalog of titles is comparable to Netflix, while the quality of Prime’s video has been so-so. Prime Instant Video will have some ground to make up if it wants to compete toe-to-toe with the market leader.

Amazon streaming is missing from a few key set-top boxes, including video game consoles and TiVo.

There are 180 million current generation video game consoles on the market, and they all offer Netflix. So that means that Netflix is in more components, has a larger content library and offers higher quality video.

Which is not to say that Amazon is DOA. Not by a long shot.

It would be interesting to know what the goal of Prime Instant Video is. Do Bezos and company want more people to pay for Prime shipping, or is this offer aimed at getting people used to watching videos on Amazon and – later – purchasing media from their ecosystem?

Amazon can assemble a formidable library of content. They don’t need the same titles as Netflix, but the shows and movies need to be compelling. To win here they need to offer a blend of new releases and older classics (think TNT shows and the kind of programming you chill out with on a Sunday afternoon). Expect the library to mature as the service does.

Amazon could also white label Prime Instant Video and let other content providers offer their videos over the Prime streaming media center. The troubled Blockbuster brand could find new life here as a streaming only service (although at this point we’re not even sure if Blockbuster knows what streaming video is).

Finally, Amazon needs to get on as many pieces of hardware as they can. If people can only use Prime Instant Video on their desktop, it will have limited value. One of the first goals needs to be getting on gaming consoles, mobile devices and televisions. Again, this is an attainable goal, especially for Amazon.

I have always maintained that there can be more than one “winner” in the streaming media wars and there is certainly room for Amazon’s service to grow alongside Netflix. While the two services will probably compete for some customers, one does not have to lose for the other to win. It is clear, though, that the stakes of the online distribution game have just been raised.

For the third straight season, I signed up for NHL GameCenter to watch Montreal Canadiens games and so far the experience is a good one ($160 for 82 games is a pretty great deal, although offering 40% off a season that is 60% over is certainly questionable). I also have the sports channel Versus through my cable subscription, and they broadcast around 8 Habs games per season, which should mean more hockey for me (yay!).

But unfortunately, that isn’t what winds up happening. In fact, I get less hockey. Because Versus has the rights to air certain Habs games in my local area, they are blocked out on NHL GameCenter for two days (see above, infuriating pic). What that means, then, is that if I forget to DVR the Versus game at my home, the footage is unavailable to me for 48 hours, even though I have paid to watch the game on two distinct platforms. And I don’t always remember to set a recording, given state of the art hockey schedule on the Versus site (so easy to read!). There is nowhere to go on Versus or on NHL GameCenter to watch the game while it is blacked out. This makes no sense. I can sort of understand blacking out the NHL GameCenter footage during live play (sort of), but once the game is over, the online version should be available to everyone who paid into it. In my opinion, the best way to grow the sport is to show more hockey, not less.

These media blackouts need to go the way of rabbit ear antennas. In an era of streaming online content, DVRs and smart, mobile media players, locking paying customers out of content for any length of time is silly. Someone needs to figure out a way to deliver out of market games in a timely manner so that “blackouts” become a thing of the past. These antiquated media restrictions show that cord cutting is far from a reality at this time. This is an issue facing technology and media companies, as well as the sports world.

Blackout rules were a bad idea when they were first conceived in an effort to make people go to the stadium and they are even more ludicrous now.

I love the vision of cord cutting.  I hate it’s reality.  In reality, other than for the technically savvy and people under the age of 25, cord cutting just makes TV-based entertainment really really hard.  For the rest of us, it’s simply easier to deal with the cable/sat companies we tend to dislike, remain grumpy, and watch anyway.  I originally posted the following as a long comment on this piece at NewTeeVee, then decided it was “blog-able”.  Read the original post first prior to my rebuttal, otherwise this makes little-to-no-sense…

Janko,

ps – happy new year, my resolution, again, is to blog more.  again.

photo source: Engadget. markup: JT

Over the past few months I’ve seen tons of speculation, demos, and implementations of companies building apps and technology to turn smartphones into remote controls.  Now I get the vision, and yes, for some folks, this is going to be a wonderful marriage of technologies.  But when I say “some” I mean few.  I just don’t think people are really thinking it through in an actual home with real people.

Here’s what I think is going to happen:

1. User downloads smart remote app to phone
2. User manages to get said app working
3. User controls TV with phone
4. User is psyched, declares new configuration as “hella cool”
5. One of the following occurs:
   1. Phone battery dies terribly rapidly due to persistent wifi connection.
   2. User takes remote control to bathroom during pivotal moment of show.
   3. Phone call during even more pivotal moment of show.
   4. etc
6. User goes back to using regular, reliable remote.

Sounds great on paper, but I think it’s one of those problems that people aren’t going to typically face until they actually run into issues like I describe above.  But once they do, the safe prediction I can make is they stop using it that way.  For more, here are the 9 reasons a smart phone makes for a dumb remote, in my latest column at Crave on CNET.

In part 2 of our series on how to make better ten foot user experiences for PC/TV/Internet convergence devices, we take a look at Boxee Box apps.  The Boxee downloadable app for Windows/Mac/Linux is pretty popular, and has apps from tons of different sources.  In the Boxee Box by D-Link (full disclosure: I have a professional relationship with them, which has nothing to do with this post), however, the usage model is probably going to be quite different than the computer-based download.  The user experience for the embedded environment, plus a remote with limited (though very cool) keyboard, and no mouse interaction, combined with a changing user demographic, means a different way to think about apps is required.  Hopefully a lot of app developers are realizing these differences, and beginning to update their apps in advance of the product launch this fall.  If not, here are some tips to help get you going!

1. Avoid Input Fields At All Costs
2. Create Consistent Remote Interaction
3. There is no Back Button
4. Make it Move!
5. Redirect for Account Creation
6. Include a “Sit Back and Watch” Mode
7. Your Boxee Box App CANNOT Be “Your Website Only Way Bigger”
8. Keep Your Menus Visible When Needed!
9. Your App Needs a Social Life
10. HD is Pretty

Click here for the details.

Click here for the Top 10 Tips to make a better Google TV Site.

Over at the Stage Two blog we’ve decided we’ll put up a lot more convergence/usability/experience advice blog posts.  First one went up today regarding 10 Essential Tips to Build Great Google TV Sites.  Kind of a funny start to the series, since I’m not a big proponent of the “1.0″ version of Google TV, but since it’s probably coming to market pretty soon, I felt the timing was relevant.  The reality check here is I’m seeing a *massive* repeat of the WebTV era, wherein companies made faux “ten foot versions” of their web sites, but didn’t actually re-orient or re-engineer them to be “TV versions”, which are two very different things…

Summary of the tips:

1. Avoid Input Fields
2. Incorporate Animated/Moving Backgrounds
3. No Tiny Fonts
4. Use The Entire Screen
5. Site Navigation Should Be Via Remote
6. Google TV CANNOT Be Your Website Only Way Bigger
7. Performance is Critical
8. Choose Colors Wisely
9. Do Assume the User Has a Computer
10. KISS: Keep it Social, Stupid

Click here for the details.

Lots of musing yesterday that the new Mac Mini is a “Apple TV in disguise.”  It’s not.  Here’s why:

Watch live video from Jeremy Toeman on Justin.tv

For context, one of the “grand visions of the future” is how people from around the world will be able to watch TV “together”. It’s a wonderful idea except that the visionaries behind it seem to forget the pragmatic realities of how people actually watch TV…

Watch live video from Jeremy Toeman on Justin.tv

Stories I referenced:

• Why Google TV As A Platform May Push Apple To Build Televisions
• Google TV: Good Idea, Poor Initial Execution (this is the article I misattributed to Harry McCracken on the podcast – should’ve been Avi Greengart)
• Steve Jobs: Google TV Will Go the Way of TiVo and Roku