Sunday, September 23, 2007

The TV debate that isent happening with Miro

Good artical about why we are takeing a stand on the lean fowerd lean back TV non debate that is currently not takeing place: Time to resurrect lean-forward TV?

A churchman has some thoughts on and good quotes on the subject Lean forward or lean back?

We started out with a lean back approach with a simple playback app as the front end with Azureas with a RSS plug-in the background handling the torrent downloads. The viewer simply hit the on-button then the app scand the download directory and played the videos from a playlist it made up from template and the video metadata.

We had a beta version of this runing when along came first fireant which was very much to complex and geek centered, then PCF with BM and DP which with the promise of easily skinning the HTML interface. We put our development, which was having problems with complex sun based JAVA installs which Azureas needed, to one side and moved onto that project.

DP took a LOT longer and lost the easy skinning along the way - and is only now becoming useabel. However it is now very much a lean in interface, it seams the developers are ideologically reistent to the lean back interface which is key to get an ordence outside the current geek avontgard and early adopters/video blogers.

Of course both intefaces are they way to go - start out with leanback "oho look its TV on my laptop, and it just works" then this leads to lean in "oho how interesting the are all these options, the IS a whole other world out there" and back to leanback "Ok, lets just tune in relax".

What we have been planing to do for the last 3 years is described well here at Babelgum interestingly two early adopters have failed in this first brightcove - only lean in expirence/content and then joost prittey much a lean back approach/content - also Joost is failing as it could just be Telly - everything on it is crap just like telly...

Background info from wikipedia: interactive TV