- From: Matt Hammond <matt.hammond@rd.bbc.co.uk>
- Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:50:38 -0000
- To: "Robin Berjon" <robin@berjon.com>, "Mark Watson" <watsonm@netflix.com>
- Cc: "public-device-apis@w3.org" <public-device-apis@w3.org>, "public-web-and-tv@w3.org" <public-web-and-tv@w3.org>, "Olivier Thereaux" <olivier.thereaux@bbc.co.uk>
On Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:23:42 -0000, Mark Watson <watsonm@netflix.com> wrote: >> In my experience from writing EPG apps though, I have to say that >> having some baseline search and metadata interoperability would be >> very, very nice. This doesn't have to be all-powerful (that's too hard >> a problem to solve) but at least some minimally common parts >> (navigating categories, simple full text search) helps a lot. > > In the interest of provoking debate, I'd say that I'm not sure the > concept of a universal "EPG" is valid in the "web&tv" world at all. > There is no "Electronic Web Guide" for the web. We have search engines, > but these are 'as thin as possible' to get you as fast as possible to > the site you want: they do not constrain sites to be described in some > particular metadata format, but there are tools for sites to describe > themselves to search engines if they wish. If you know what site you > want, you go can straight to that and, either way, the site then has > control of your user experience when you get there. ... > One can imagine the "discovery and security" layers of a UC API being > baked into the device, but once you've discovered a service you get a > link to a resource which is hosted by that service itself - i.e. > service-specific web app code on the device, enabling direct interaction > between service specific client and server rather than having that > interaction mediated by a standards-defined layer baked into the device. I believe the essence of the point you make is that the user experience should be controlled by the individual service. I think the model you describe is an interesting one and would not suggest forcing interaction to be mediated by a single route, especially for connected-TV internet delivered services. The TV seems, to me, to be becoming a hybrid device, with access to both broadcast and internet delivered services. At present there is no means of content discovery for users that cuts across all services available to it. A 'search engine' approach (as a possible solution to this) is going to have an uphill struggle: the available content and services may vary from one user's device/subscription to another or between the user and the search-engine; and in this model, that data may only be available from apps/services hosted on the TV itself. I would like to think that this might be an opportunity for us to do better :-) Matt -- | Matt Hammond | Research Engineer, BBC R&D, Centre House, London | http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/
Received on Wednesday, 23 March 2011 00:51:10 UTC