Tag: television

  • What’s on TV? The Internet

    The confluence of web and TV has been a topic of discussion for quite sometime now. The initial version of Web TV- with a set top box and keyboard, didn’t work out well, but that hasn’t stopped the next generation from making attempts, and with all the components required for access built into the TV now, things are showing some promise.

    Yahoo’s TV widgets, with Flickr, news, finance etc integrated onscreen in Samsung TVs had created quite a stir at the CES 2009 event earlier this year. Yahoo and Intel have also co-developed a range of products that lets users access pages and tools while watching a program – around 20 widgets (scaled down versions) from the NYT to MySpace and Twitter. Yahoo will also release a toolkit for developers to make new content.Yahoo is not the only player here. Netflix has tied up with LG for a new line of broadband high-def TVs with Netflix built in to it. More on that here.  Verismo Networks has a PoD device – VuNow that can stream web content onto your TV without a PC or connections. (via Bangalore Inc) On another front, there are gaming consoles and DVD players etc with built in broadband access abilities.

    Meanwhile, the convergence is happening on the reverse direction too. With the net becoming a competition to TV channels as a source of entertainment, the reverse is also happening as a lot of television content is now finding its way into the net, legally. 🙂 Comcast, Time Warner Cable etc are now entering the fray with a two fold objective – to take more content online, and make the TV experience more web like. Closer to home, Star TV had tied up with nautanki.tv earlier this year to watch shows online. A couple of months back, the Times Audience Network added Big Adda as a video content partner. More about that here. Hmm, Bigflix + Big Adda?

    It is also interesting to see web based entities going beyond their current territories. Portals, like Sulekha creating Web TV. Internet video site Hulu getting into social networking. Will expand on that in a bit.

    Meanwhile, television content (shows) have started using social media to add a layer to their interactivity. MTV recently announced plans to launch a show that will also include real-time conversations taken from Facebook and Twitter, allowing users to interact with the show as it airs.  Users will be able to upload videos (their favourites and even self generated ones) through a RockYou application.(via TC) Mad Men’s tryst with Twitter, though fan generated is also a case study.

    An interesting concept I came across on TC – Delivery Agent, which helps TV networks make use of their content by being an online marketplace for products and merchandise that are seen on television shows. It pays the network a royalty for this. According to the TC article, they have gone step further by checking the index of products scheduled to appear on the show, before the show airs, and then approach the brands concerned to buy an ad package. It seems like a win-win-win concept. With even a partially enabled web on TV, this concept could be easily integrated and made into real time purchases. Absolutely measurable for brands. Imagine saans – bahu saris, wedding costumes and even office and casual wear that can be bought online. The Jassi look, or the more recent Ballika Vadhu look, anyone? 😉

    TVLoop, which started out as a Facebook app that allowed users to have view TV show episodes on their profile , has now gotten itself a website of its own.If you comment on an episode of the show on TVLoop.com, TVLoop users on Facebook or any other social network can reply directly from their respective site. (via Mashable) The Hulu social network I mentioned earlier encourages Hulu users to connect with one another and share their video preferences. The new features are expected to help Hulu better track viewing preferences, which helps further target ads. It also helps monitor conversations around videos and therefore provides more data on viewer behaviour. In both cases, the key take out is collective feedback – on content, ads served etc. From tweaking storylines and characters to embedding products better, having conversations around them and making purchase decisions easier, there is tremendous potential.

    Web on TV, TV on web, web TV and social networking, TV and social networking, at the end of it, the point is about content on demand- across platforms, a rapid increase in interactivity, and the potential to increase the relevance of a product/service to consumers and encourage purchase almost instantly.  In an era when vanilla product placements are becoming increasingly unpopular with viewers, this content integration across platforms could be the kind of tonic that’s needed for a system that currently thrives on sponsored (and usually non related, random) advertising and  insipid product placements. From the other side, the web’s current major advertising mechanism – contextual advertising just got more content to play with, and this could spawn an entire new way of advertising.

    As for me, I’m waiting for the time when I can watch the YouTube videos, Flickr photos and Twitter updates and the TV news on the same screen, and then real time reality TV, when I use my Twitter handle to eliminate participants and generally decide their fate 😉

    until next time, users, from publishers on the web to broadcast producers

  • Making it Really Simple

    Forrester has a new study ‘What’s holding RSS back?’ According to the report, RSS usage is at 11%, and most people don’t use it because they can’t see its relevance in their lives. You can get some good snapshots of the report here.

    Now, I realise that because of the contents of this blog, a lot of readers (at least about 40 odd ) understand RSS. For those who don’t I’ll attempt a bit of evangelism, at the end of this post. Meanwhile, Mashable has an interesting take on the report. While I agree that the usage might be much higher and that most sites have it in some form or the other, they don’t necessarily have the user consciously utilising it. Facebook’s news feed is a typical example. So, I would side with this view on the geekiness of RSS. I started subscribing to feeds only about a year back, and gave an RSS feed for my blog much later. So, I can identify with the intimidation some might feel with regards to feeds and RSS and subscribing… On an aside, if you asked people in India about RSS, we’d most likely have strong opinions on it, but that’s only because there’s a Hindu nationalist party by that name. 😉

    However, the best tangential take on this report that I read happens to be here. In addition to a take on the entire subject, this post points out that newspapers could have a great role in making RSS mainstream. This is because newspapers have always been aggregators and have learnt the art of packaging the commodity called ‘news’. The packaging results from an understanding of the consumer’s needs. This is all the more interesting since a new PWC study says that traditional media has about 5 years left, before the death clock kicks in (varies for different markets) I’m wondering though, whether this role would be  equally applicable to other traditional media – radio and TV. While newspapers might start out as favourites, increasing fragmentation could redefine media preferences. TV, for example, could provide all that the newspaper’s online version does, and add a visual angle to it. The difference between reading about Chandrayaan (India’s lunar mission) and watching it. Do you think that once news becomes a commodity (as it has online) TV has a competitive advantage over newspapers? (among traditional media players) Or is it going to be a pure play new media player like say, Instablogs, who will steal their thunder?

    until next time, subscribe 🙂

    and now, for some

    RSS Evangelism

    Why would you need RSS?

    When you started browsing around the net, you would have liked a few sites and you could track them daily to see if there was something interesting. Over time, the number of favourites grew and sometimes you’re missing on good content because you forgot to check. Even if you didn’t forget, it would be a pain to keep checking all the while. What if you could have a tool that would alert you when your favourite site was updated?

    Yeah?

    Yeah. These tools are called readers. It can be web based or desktop based. For now, I’ll stick to the web based type. There are several sites which offer this service (its for free). Pageflakes, Yahoo, and the example I’m going to use – Google Reader.

    So how do we start?

    Click on this link which will open a new window – Google Reader. If you have an existing GMail account, you can use that, else you’d have to create a Google account first. Once you login for the first time, Google has a fairly good tutorial on how to use it. But I’ll still do a bit of explanation. How does Google know which are the sites you need to get updates about? You have to connect your fave sites with Google, so that it picks up the updates from there. This is called subscription.

    How do you do that?

    On the left panel of your Reader page, you’ll see a button ‘Add Subscription’. Here’s where you need to enter the url of your favourite site. Shameless that I am, I shall use the example of this blog. The url is www.manuscrypts.com/brants . Once you type it and press enter, the ‘feed’ of this blog gets added to your reader. You can see it on the left. And the next time you log in, it will have the number of  new updates in brackets.

    Sometimes you would come across a blog, like it, but would be too lazy to log in to the reader or remember the site. Most sites now would have a button that looks like this or a variation of this (like the button on top of this page), or even this . Click on the button, and then you would see an ‘Add to Google’, ‘Subscribe with Google’ or Click on this, and it would take you to a page that gives you a choice between Homepage and Reader. Since we’ve set this up on Reader, click that and you’ll be asked to log in. See, it pays not to be lazy 😉   So, keep adding sites and checking your Reader regularly. You can do many things lime sharing some items with your GMail friends (using the share button at the end of each post) , organising your favorite sites into folders like say, Personal Blogs’,  ‘brands’, ‘social media’ etc.  It might look like a big deal or a difficult thing to do now, but trust me, it will add a whole new dimension to your browsing and time management. In case you get stuck, shoot me a mail – manuscrypts @ gmail dot com, and I’ll help you out. 🙂

  • Those Days

    while coming to the office today, i saw a group of schoolkids, having a picnic in the park nearby, all of them looked so happy and were definitely having fun…. they r enjoying the simple pleasures in life, which i think, as they grow older , they will forget to do, like i , and i can say for a majority, like we, have forgotten…its so ironic that when we should be having the best days of our life, we dont have time for it…..and when we do have the time, we can only sit and dream about those days……when we could have done it, but didnt…today, when i dont get enough sleep, i think about my childhood, when i could have slept, hell, people even asked me to go and sleep, but i didnt coz i wanted to play more, or watch tv…now i can watch tv whenever i want, but most of the time, i have only enough time to catch up on sleep….oh the irony of it…..
    enough of irony, some sweet talk now, did u know that the government has set minimum limits on the amount of cocoa content in a thing for it to be marketed as chocolate.and in case u need help in your sweet talk, check out this article, you might get a helping hand.have been hearing this for quite some time now, that sanskrit is ideal for computer applications, heres another article that says so, and in case you feel like learning sanskrit, this might help.and as part of the tongue twister series, heres
    manuscrypts trivia
    Betty and Bob brought back blue balloons from the big bazaar. A big black bug bit a big black bear, made the big black bear bleed blood. Black bug’s blood. The blue bluebird blinks. The bootblack bought the black boot back.A box of biscuits, a batch of mixed biscuits. Brad’s big black bath brush broke.