Tuesday, June 24, 2014

An Ideal Television

There’s been a lot of talk about a television off late with lots of people saying how the television is loosing its value which is quite true. There are currently about a 150 channels that my Direct to home television provider offers to me at a monthly fee. Out of these only a few channels are of any use to me and out of those channels, I watch only 5-10 shows regularly. There’s just an incredible amount of choice being provided to me where all I need is a subscription to those 10 shows.

To top that, there’s no option to watch quality episodical internet videos like The Verge’s Top Shelf. And with an increasing amount of quality internet content being provided, not only for recreation but for learning new things. My video consumption is often more on the web than on my television.

There are a few television sets which claim to be “smart” but actually just include a bunch of apps with a crappy interface to allow you to browse this content. Then there was the Google TV, which attempted in making viewers interact with a TV like they would with a computer.

The thing is, when we watch television, we are just looking to consume content. We’re not looking for a very high-level of interaction with our TV Sets. We don’t want to attach a keyboard and start searching for our favourite shows.

For these and many more reasons the TV is broken. It needs a simple to use interface which provides all the video content we generally consume and yet keep the remote and gestures as simple as possible, so that viewing a TV is a fast experience.

Here’s a small flow chart on what an ideal TV should really have:

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