by Simon Firth
When most technology researchers design a new product or
service, they have a tech-savvy user in mind.
Not so HP Labs’ Jim Rowson.
“The guy with a sleeveless T-shirt, a beer in one
hand and a remote in the other,” says Rowson, “that’s
my user.”
Rowson has been thinking about the future of television.
Along with a small team of fellow researchers in the HP Consumer
Applications and Systems Lab, he’s been asking how
the TV viewing experience might become highly personalized
to match a viewer’s interests.
But Rowson and his colleagues also want such an experience
to require nothing more complicated of its users than pressing
a few buttons on a TV remote to make it work.
“For the purposes of the research,” Rowson explains, “we
took an extreme position." For example, the team decided
not to put a menu on the TV screen.
Despite such self-imposed limitations -- and in some ways
because of them -- Rowson’s group has come up with
an elegant design for a simple but highly personalized television
experience customized to viewers' tastes.
Television today is just about the opposite of personalized.
Even cable TV, which offers its subscribers a multitude of
channels, doesn’t let them determine what goes on to
those channels. Viewers must find something to watch from
the schedule they are offered, rather than having a schedule
that offers only what they’d like to see.
Digital recording devices such as TiVo move a little way
towards a custom experience by predicting what shows you
might enjoy and automatically recording them for you.
But to watch those programs, a viewer must go into the machines'
menu systems and pick the shows out, one at a time. That’s
a far more active experience than the HP research team thinks
most people want when they watch TV.
Like TiVo and similar devices, the researchers' proposed
new service would use a digital hard drive and automatic,
personalized recording, but it wouldn’t require that
you go and find each show it has stored.
Instead, it would offer you a string of shows that it predicts
you will like bundled into a single customized ‘channel.’
If you started watching a show and didn’t like it,
you’d simply click past it with your remote control
to view the next.
Every subscriber to such a customized TV service could have
a number of custom channels, Rowson suggests. If you like
sports, news and nature shows, for example, the service would
provide you with a channel that features personalized picks
for you in each content category.
Cable TV subscribers may be offered anywhere up to 500 channels,
says Rowson, but typically they will only watch a dozen or
so channels regularly. “Since that’s the case,” he
argues, “let’s just make it a dozen they actually
care about.”
When you skipped a show on one of your personal channels,
the HP customized TV service would take note.
“This is how we learn your preferences,” Rowson
explains. “If you’re always skipping a show,
we won’t offer it to you any more.”
Those remote control skips — what Rowson calls ‘show
surfing’ — could also be matched against the
skips of the entire community of customized TV users. The
system would then figure out whom you most resemble in your
viewing preferences and use that information to decide what
else to record and offer you.
The service could also offer new custom channels based on
your viewing. If you watch a lot of world soccer on your
sports channel, for instance, it might offer you a Real Madrid
channel or even one dedicated to David Beckham.
The HP team believes that all this personalization could
happen with little effort by users. They envision providing
TV viewers with a simple system they operate using only five
buttons on a remote: two to surf up and down through the
channels, two to surf back and forward through the shows
on a particular channel, and one to click okay to accept
a new channel when it is offered.
Researchers also see the potential for offering individual,
custom television shows on particular channels that are made
up from clips that the service assembles for the viewer.
One such show might be a compendium of morning news, for
example, tailored to your commute, or a sports show that
gathers clips of your favorite teams from all over.
The system would use digital editing technology to design
shows that retain a professional look, Rowson suggests. “There
would be a narrative structure to such a show,” he
explains, “and it would make decent transitions from
one clip to another.”
That part of the project has benefited from a close relationship
the team built up with the new Interactive Media Division
at the University of Southern California’s Film School.
The team is also collaborating with other groups within HP
Labs. Data-mining researchers, for example, helped develop
the algorithms behind the collaborative filter that is at
the heart of the system’s ‘recommendation engine.’
So far, customized TV exists mostly as a system design,
although Jim Rowson and his team are currently building a
test system to more fully explore the reactions that the
technology might provoke in its users.
In the future, though, they see the service potentially
operating as a subscription offering, like cable TV, possibly
with advertising targeted to individual interests.
Before then, the team has some significant technical and
economic problems to explore. It isn’t yet clear, for
example, that the system really will be able to make effective
viewing recommendations simply by observing a user’s
clicking habits. Getting all the players in the TV industry
to work together to make the service a reality would also
be a monumental task, Rowson acknowledges.
“We’re looking at this from the customer’s
point of view,” he notes, “but there are implications
on patterns of content distribution, and on the way that
material is recorded and referenced — things that go
all the way back to the studio.”
But he also believes this could be the way to make TV highly
personalized while retaining the low-stress experience people
expect.
“When we show this idea to consumers,” Rowson
says, “they say, ‘Yeah! I don’t want to
argue with my television. I just want to watch TV.'”
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