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my new ‘Social TV’ experience

Posted by Riaz Ahmed May 25th, 2011

It’s smart and social…

So, over the (Royal) Easter break not only did I treat myself to lots of chocolate Easter eggs and even a Royal Wedding street party (thanks mum!), I went out and bought myself a new TV. Well it turns out that not only does my new Samsung D7000 produce crystal clear HD/3D output it’s also very smart and social…

Ok so it doesn’t suggest the next big IPO to invest in or go out and watch the football with me, but with a huge array of very cool and useful Internet-enabled features, my new Samsung TV, has not only made my viewing experience a whole lot more enriched but I think Samsung are on a journey that will make them stand out from not only the competition like Sony, but rival Internet TV services such as those provided by Google and Apple.

Connectivity and Streaming

With built-in Wi-Fi and a very easy set up process I was up and running within a few minutes. The first thing the TV did when it connected to my broadband Wi-Fi was to start updating itself…after the TV came on it instantly discovered my laptop which had ‘media share’ software installed. Media share software e.g. Windows Media Center, allows sharing of music, video and image files stored on your laptop to externally connected devices. This meant without further configuring or cabling I could view almost any media file from my laptop over Wi-Fi. Because the TV could support many different and newer media formats (MPEG4, Xvid, DivX, MKV, MP3, WMA, JPEG) none of my media files needed converting. Ok ok so lots of modern TV sets have this already so nothing new there, but wait it gets better…

Samsung Smart TV Hub (click for a larger image)

The ‘Hub’ Button

While unpacking the remote control, I noticed a button called hub, upon pressing it I was taken to the Samsung Smart TV Hub which is a portal to all the Samsung TV apps and features. Because I enjoy tweeting I immediately went to try out the TV Twitter app. But before I could load the app, I was taken to the ‘Register Services’ screen. This screen allowed me to create a single Samsung TV login account that would store my credentials for social networking TV services that were available such as: Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Google Talk, etc

Tweet tweet... the Samsung Smart TV Twitter App (click for a larger image)

Social TV…tweet and watch!

Once I finished registering and logging into the Twitter service, I immediately found myself immersed into the world of Twitter on my TV where I could start viewing tweets, replying to tweets and almost anything that a Twitter app for my laptop or phone could do. What I really liked about the experience was that I was able to switch from using the full-sized app to a real-time social interactive tv view to allow what Samsung calls a ‘Social TV’ experience. Whenever I wanted the ‘Social TV’ experience all I had to do was press the social button on the remote control and have instant access to my social networking services. What would be really cool would be integration with Windows Live Messenger 2011…but with Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Skype it will be interesting to see what will happen in this space…

Samsung Smart TV Social TV (click for a larger image)

Samsung TV Apps Store

The Samsung Smart TV Twitter app was very slick and I wanted to discover more….so the next TV app I tried out was the BBC iPlayer app, again this was also impressive and I was able to start watching BBC content with very few presses on my remote. The BBC iPlayer HD content was particularly impressive and the programme search worked well and fast. Oh and I would like to point out that I only have a 4MB broadband connection at home and all the streaming worked well with very few judders! Likewise while trying out the YouTube TV app I was very impressed how it worked so seamlessly well with the TV and made good use of the remote control buttons to navigate through the app. I wanted to see what other apps I could download for the TV so I went back to the Smart Hub and navigated to the Samsung apps widget. This took me to the very impressive Samsung Apps Store where I could search and download a variety of cool apps for the TV. I think the UK Samsung app store has about a 100 apps so far, with newer apps always popping up, like the recent Explore 3D App

Samsung Smart TV App Store (click for a larger image)

Two million Five million downloaded TV apps

In a January 2011 press release, Samsung stated that two million apps had been downloaded from the Samsung TV app store. The press release went on to say:

“Samsung reached the 2 million mark within a year of the launch of Samsung Apps and the number of apps downloaded has doubled since November, when it reached one million downloads.”

“After reaching one million downloads, consumers have downloaded an average of 100,000 applications every five days.”

The full press release can be found here

Update: as this article goes live, Samsung are reporting that they have passed 5 million app downloads

A TV SDK* for the developer community

Back in September last year, Samsung ran a competition for developers to build the best looking and most innovative Samsung TV app. The winners shared a pot of 500,000 euros and the voting public got a chance to win a new Samsung TV. These types of initiatives always encourage more and more developers to develop for your platform and now Samsung claim they have over 400 TV apps available in over 120 countries.

After a little bit of digging around, I found that to develop a Samsung Smart TV app, you need skills in JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Developing a Samsung TV Widget seemed quite straightforward; Liam Green-Hughes has a great write up on developing a “Hello World” app on his blog.

* SDK: software development kit

Full Internet browsing with Flash but not HTML5 yet!

Another very cool feature on my Samsung TV is that it has a built-in fully functional web browser. The browser is based on an adaptive version of Google Chrome. The browsing experience is quite good and the experience is enhanced even more so by a built-in pointer in the remote control which acts like a mouse. The menu items in browser are easily accessible by the remote control buttons and the browsers ability to play flash content was a very welcome feature. The only drawback was the browser’s inability to play HTML5 content, but I have read that HTML5 will be fully supported and available in the coming months.

Samsung Smart TV Web Browser (click for a larger image)

Search

A very useful and well thought-out feature of the TV is search. The search function can be accessed directly from the remote control or from the Smart Hub. When I searched for ‘Arsenal’, the search app started searching for all Arsenal related content from Facebook, YouTube, Websites, Samsung TV apps and even my own media library that was stored on my laptop.

Samsung Smart TV Universal Search (click for a larger image)

(credit for picture with Iron Man 2 search: http://www.samsung.com/us/article/the-wonder-of-samsung-smart-tvs)

A Google TV/Apple TV Killer?

Absolutely yes! If Samsung keep investing in TV app development and roll out feature-rich updates with new Internet based widgets, apps and services to the Smart Hub, I think Samsung television owners won’t need to purchase Apple TV or Google TV products. Last week, Samsung UK announced a deal with Channel Five about rolling out a Five on Demand app. These are exactly the type of deals Samsung will need to do to get consumers choosing Samsung over other rivals. The more content providers that sign up with Samsung the more appealing these sets will become to consumers.

Whilst talking about rivals, Sony, will be launching their Internet TV sets in June/July this year. They are offering Internet based features similar to that of Samsung but have one big advantage……..Sony can provide a huge amount of Sony owned content like Hollywood blockbusters and a massive music catalogue. Currently this is available through the Qriocity TV service but I can see this expanding and becoming very feature rich. The only drawback is that the new Sony HX TV’s are much more expensive than Samsung’s identical sets.

So yes, it is smart and social

Ok so it doesn’t suggest the next big IPO to invest in (smart) or go out and watch the football with me (social) but with an array of top notch Internet enabled features, services and lots of TV apps in development, surely Samsung are on a winner and this is certainly the year of the Internet TV — with social being at the heart of Samsung’s offering.

Thanks for reading!

Riaz Ahmed is the Head of Microsoft Development at LBi and can be found here @TheRealRiaz and here LinkedIn

Tags: apple, Apple TV, Facebook, Google, Google TV, Internet TV, Microsoft, samsung, Samsung Smart TV, Skype, social, social networks, Social TV, Streaming, Technology, Windows Live Messenger

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LBi and bigmouthmedia release their Innovations in Retail whitepaper

Posted by Adam Russell May 23rd, 2011

Today LBi and bigmouthmedia release their Innovations in Retail whitepaper, covering the impact of digital technologies on retailers in 2011. Full disclosure – I contributed towards the paper, but it is worth blogging about because it highlights how rapidly the internet is changing expectations within the retail sector. It also provides a really strong summary of some of the opportunities that exist for those able to rapidly innovate.

Just yesterday Apple celebrated their tenth year in retail with a store makeover that put the iPad 2 at the forefront of the shopping experience, acting as the product price label and spec sheets. What’s more, the iPad’s enable you to hail an Apple Specialist and compare products as well as enabling Apple to centrally update prices worldwide instantly. It isn’t an option yet it will be would be much of a surprise to see if the iPads offering ‘I want this!’ style social sharing, direct from a traditional retail environment.

Of course, the LBi and bigmouthmedia whitepaper contains plenty of talk about smart phones, tablet devices and internet connected TVs but what is interesting is that the paper steers clear of the standard ‘more people are buying stuff on a mobile’ vernacular and highlights some of the less obvious behaviours such technologies create amongst consumers.

I myself am what is now dubbed a ‘digital shoplifter’. I enjoy the ability to browse a real physical retail environment yet when I find something I want to buy my first reaction is to check the price online via my iPhone. If the price difference is greater than my perceived ‘instant gratification’ value, then I’ll just leave the shop and order online.

This clearly represents a challenge for bricks and mortar retailers, but it also suggests a shortcoming amongst online retailers too – they still are not able compete with the feeling of holding a product in your hands. And cruciually, outside of entertainments and media where digital downloads get you close enough, no-one can get delivery times down to zero. There will always be a desire to get things sooner!

Also as important for retail is the impact of technologies that bridge the physical and the digital. Much more than allowing consumers to pay for items by flashing their phones, the impact of mobile technology within a retail environment could be huge. Imagine offering users instant in store recommendations based on their online purchase habits or instant credit via QR or NFC (Near Field Communication) for checking in via social platforms.

Social media is also becoming hugely disruptive within retail, as the paper points out. The move towards customer service within a social environment will almost certainly have its winners and losers  - only by sharing customer service and support tasks with their most engaged customers will retailers truly get the most from social channels.

It is clear that consumers’ expectations are on the rise and that retailers will need to continue to search for ways to reward loyal, engaged customers with unique and surprising experiences. Take a look at the full paper to find out how – it is available for free online now.

Tags: apple, bigmouthmedia, innovation, innovations in retail, ipad, LBi, Lost Boys International, mobile, nfc, qr, research, retail, Social Media, white paper, whitepaper

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Preparing for the fourth age

Posted by Lorenzo Wood October 21st, 2010

Apple’s latest announcements show it continuing down the path we predicted back in January by bringing to the Mac desktop many iOS features including the app store and “full screen” apps. We have been discussing with some of our clients how apps represent a major change in public perception far beyond mobile, and what further changes are in store.

Sci-fi to software to sites — the three ages of public perception of computers

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the word “computer” entered public consciousness to mean a giant brain owned by corporations and governments and run by bespectacled men in white coats. Beginning in the late 1970s more people came across desktop computers (“microcomputers”) in a business context. Many of those were Apple IIs, Apple’s first commercial success that provided it with the money to create the original Mac. And many of those Apple IIs were bought to run the first spreadsheet program, VisiCalc. Understanding these new “computers” involved new words: programs, software, applications. These were the things that made computers useful.

From the mid-1990s there was an explosion in computer use, particularly at home, which roughly coincided with the explosion of public access to the Internet. As a result, for most of the public, almost everything important on computers was a Web site (1). As much as the industry invented new words (“portal”, “aggregator”, “(Web) application” and so on), for the general public everything was just a Web site.

“Site” as a metaphor

The word “site” is a metaphor in many languages. A site is a place: a building site, the site of an event. A site has some well-understood properties:

• It’s big
• It’s owned by someone else
• It exists somewhere else
• I visit it, then I leave
• I find my way around in it
• When I’m not there, other people are
• When I go there, It might be closed
• When I’m there, I’m not at home, so I’m on my guard
• When I’m there, I keep my kids where I can see them
• To visit it, I have to find its address

All of these apply to Web sites. A lucky choice of word, or determinism? Doesn’t matter: the digital world today is built on these perceptions.

The fourth age — the age of apps

Over the last two years we’ve seen a huge rise in the mobile Internet. As successful as it is, Apple’s iPhone does not account for this on its own. However, it has catalysed public perception, and we have seen well over a year of public expectation of mobile being driven by awareness of the iPhone and apps, regardless of the kind of phones people have. This has created a “rush to apps”, with every mobile manufacturer creating (or just re-naming) apps and app stores.

But this change is not limited to mobile.

“App” does not have real-world connotations like “site”. The mobile experience and Apple’s own marketing provide the anchor for public expectation. An app has properties such as:

• It’s small (obviously — it fits inside my phone; even the word is small)
• I put it there (so it’s mine)
• I can take it away
• I go to a store to get it
• Because it’s small, it doesn’t do very much
• It does what it does well so I choose to keep it
• I choose where to put it
• I can get at it easily
• It always works
• It’s fast
• I give it permission to be here

Why the rush to apps? Because these properties seem to resonate with the public.

As we noted in January, and as we’re continuing to see today, Apple’s model has a natural trajectory to the desktop. Last May Google announced its intention to introduce an app store into its Web browser, Chrome — in which the “apps”, it takes pains to point out, are just Web sites that you could visit in the traditional way.

Google’s move emphasises that this is not a technology turf war. The a-word is increasingly widespread, but understanding of how an app is delivered is not. Nor is it a battle of open vs. closed, as Chris Anderson’s Wired leader The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet. suggests.

What we are seeing is the early stages of a fourth age of public perception of computers, in which the high-level properties of apps shape more of people’s initial interactions with computing devices of all kinds.

What next steps along this path can we see?

What if my apps are the same, everywhere? Today, if I have an iPhone and an iPad I can put some of the same apps on both, and apps bought from the Mac app store are licensed for “all my personal Macs”. I put some care into the arrangement of those apps — how they’re grouped, which are more prominent. What happens when I can get at the same app collection from every device from tiny mobile to wall-sized TV? How much more care do I invest in curating that environment for myself? How much of it do I expose? What does it say about me?

What permission do my apps have to peek? There is much discussion about privacy on the Web and who owns data about whom. But apps are (perceptually, at least) “mine”, and I carry them with me. Does that give them more permission to react to my circumstances? Does how I place them in my environment communicate that permission? Does putting the eBay app on the same home screen as the Facebook app give the Facebook app permission to know what I’m buying and selling on eBay?

What if apps can participate in searches?. Part of the “Web site age” is an understanding of a search to mean putting a word or two into a search engine (which is a Web site) and getting some sites to look at. iOS includes Spotlight, with which I can search through mail messages, contacts, appointments and the names of my apps on the device. What if the apps I’ve chosen are invited to respond to searches too? Does my positioning of them confer different priority on the results? How do they deliver the results? Are they consolidated or do I need to look inside each app to see them. And if 85% of Web journeys today start with a (Web) search, what will such a change do to the dynamics of Web use?

Predicting which technologies will win and lose has always been very difficult. Underlying trends are much more stable. Many big companies over the last decade have been going through major changes to exploit the Web site age. We expect the changes to exploit the age of apps to be as fundamental.

1. Of course, “software” did not go away as a concept — the games market and the huge success of Microsoft Office are just two examples. This co-existence is a common pattern in the evolution of technology — David Egerton’s Shock Of The Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 is a good read on this subject.

Tags: app, apple, behaviour, Google, Lorenzo Wood, Opinion, society, Technology

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iPhone OS 4 — raising the bar again

Posted by Lorenzo Wood April 8th, 2010

Steve Jobs today announced the next generation of iPhone software. In the quality of execution — not just the length of its feature list — it keeps its lead in user experience. Apple would like you to believe that it’s the only game in town. It isn’t, but it does raise the bar again in many areas — increasingly not just in mobile. Advertising, in particular, gets a shot in the arm.

Steve Jobs did his customary keynote to launch the next generation of iPhone software — iPhone OS 4.0 — as a developer preview ahead of its end-user launch in the summer on the iPhone/iPod Touch and in the autumn on the iPad. There is a complete video on Apple’s Web site and, naturally, lots of coverage and analysis elsewhere on the Web (Engadget’s is geekily thorough).

It’s nice to see changes that address LBi’s key criteria for mobile usability:

• Discoverability — the ability for users to discover that something is possible (as distinct from the also important ability to figure out how to do something once you know that you can);
• Interruptibility — the ability to handle interruptions and changes of context with minimum disruption and overhead for the user; and
• Demonstrability— the ability for users to show (off to) others what they can do, in particular with little or no risk of failure and consequent embarrassment.

Discoverability has improved with new ways to make apps available. Allowing enterprises to send apps directly to iPhones they manage and allowing end users to gift apps to others removes barriers to awareness and trial, particularly for those less familiar or confident with buying and installing apps. The Game Center feature that provides some standardised underpinnings for social features in games (many of which are already provided in existing games by the developers themselves) also helps by introducing pop-up invitations.

Demonstrability and interruptibility are both improved by “multitasking”. The lack of multitasking has been high on the list of criticisms of the iPhone by fans of other platforms. In my view, it is also a major reason for the iPhone’s success — it’s so much easier to use that the (mostly slight) trade-off is worth it. The iPad (at launch) kept this simple idea and it certainly doesn’t detract from the seductive properties of the product in practice. As we predicted, therefore, Apple’s “multitasking” is an extension of its careful approach to the problem, the first step towards which was the introduction of push notifications. What iPhone OS 4.0 really offers for the majority of apps is very fast task switching — reducing the time and perceived effort of switching between apps by avoiding the need to go to the home screen first, and by encouraging developers to preserve complete state when not in focus. To this, they add some more specific services on top of push notifications — backgrounding for music (and a happy 13 million Pandora users); backgrounding for VoIP (happy Skype; less happy operators); location notifications. These changes allow multitasking while retaining good battery management and good foreground performance. They also keep extra load on the user to a minimum, so it looks to me like Steve’s claim that Apple has “nailed it” is pretty fair.

Interruptibility is also improved by the most important feature, iAds — Apple’s own in-app advertising mechanism. Mobile advertising isn’t new; nor is Steve’s claim that (on the iPhone, at least) that “search isn’t where it’s at… apps [are]”. What is new is the quality of the experience, which is arguably the best advertising experience on any device, mobile or not. Consider:

• If I touch an ad, I’m instantly immersed in it but my current state is visibly preserved. The whole app I was in slides quickly off the screen and the ad takes it over. Alarming? Not when you’ve experienced it a couple of times, because it’s consistent and robust and you’ll quickly gain confidence that it’s not going to disrupt what you’re doing.
• Dismissing an ad is trivial and instant. All I do is touch the top left corner and it’s gone — no hunting for a close box. Again, builds confidence to try ads. (1)
• Ads are rich — with full-screen video — and interactive. Built in HTML5, ads can include plenty of basic functionality — the demo included a simple game and a feature that exploited the accelerometer. And if ads have “taster” functionality built in…
• Ads can leave rich functionality on the device for later. This is a brilliant way to address interruptibility. I may spend a little time engaging with an ad, but sooner or later I’ll want to get back to what I was doing. By exploiting the new mechanism for delivering apps directly, ads can allow me painlessly and without interruption to leave an app on my device — all ready for me to use later on.

If you haven’t got a spare hour to watch the whole keynote, jump forward 44 minutes and watch for about 10.

A rising tide floats all boats — and drowns everyone who doesn’t have a boat

When the iPhone was launched, we said that it raised the bar for mobile user experience. This has been borne out by its success and by the way it has driven the mobile market as a whole (2). The new iPhone OS, and particularly iAds, push the bar up higher. This time though, the iPad has revealed Apple’s ambition to displace the 1970s interfaces of today’s Macs and PCs, so benchmarks are being set for experience on all digital channels.

In his keynote, Steve painted a picture of Apple dominance. He casually chose a “pretty good proxy” for market share in the form of mobile Web usage — where the iPhone dominates. This is a testament to the quality of the experience rather than evidence of penetration in most brands’ customer bases. For all the size of the opportunity in the Apple universe — which has grown bigger and more quickly than most expected — Apple is not the only game in town. Everyone is running to catch up. Handset makers, PC makers and operators all have multitouch and “apps” and some sort of “app store”. Microsoft and Google are pushing their own visions hard (look out for Microsoft’s announcement this Monday). (3)

How these experiences will be delivered to end users and who will be responsible is not clear. That they will come is a certainty, and today the iPad and iPhone OS 4.0 are the most tangible prototypes of what that future will be.

Notes:

(1) It wasn’t clear whether this feature is part of the iAd platform or whether the mocked-up ads shown in the demo are simply done this way by convention. If it’s the latter, it will serve Apple well to enforce the convention.

(2) People with every kind of phone are increasingly using the language of “apps”. Apps have effectively become the dominant concept for describing functionality on a mobile device, not least because the the computer-centric “site” has been so unimpressive for those that have tried it. We have seen expectations of the (largely not iPhone-owning) public for their mobile phones rise, particularly since Apple began its “there’s an app for that” TV campaign. For most people today, the way available to them to explore those possibilities is the mobile Web, which is why we see traffic to Web sites we monitor from all kinds of mobile devices is on the rise and why we say that 2010 is the year that many people will get their first impressions of brands on the mobile Web. Apps as experiences are here to stay, regardless of the technology used to deliver them — users don’t care.

(3) There is even an Android-powered television.

Tags: advertising, apple, ipad, iPhone, iphoneos, Lorenzo Wood, mobile, touch

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