It's no secret that so-called smart TVs rarely live up to their name. Most sets basically just give you regular old TV and shoehorn in YouTube and Netflix as an afterthought. There's room for improvement with those streaming services, too. Netflix, based on its beginnings as a Blockbuster competitor, still forces viewers to pick a single title out of thousands every time they fire it up. It's daunting.
Clearly, TV is in need of some fresh thinking--especially in terms of UI. The folks at Smart Design agree. The firm, best known for giving birth to the beloved kitchenware brand OXO, recently cooked up a concept for the Smart TV of their dreams, combining the breadth of streaming video with the simplicity of regular old TV.
The concept, dubbed VEO TV, is built around a simple idea we explored just last week: old-school, linear channels are a great way to watch TV. Where things get smart is in how those channels are programmed. Instead of relying on broadcasters to pick what's on, VEO curates content from myriad sources based on who's watching, using face recognition to sense who's in the room and adjusting what it's serving up accordingly. When a second person plunks down on the couch, their profiles are automatically cross-referenced to populate a channel with things they might both be interested in.
>Where things get smart is in how those channels are programmed.
Smart Design thinks there's a sweet spot at around 8 channels, combining some of the idle agency of channel surfing with the under-the-hood personalization you get with, say, the Netflix recommendation engine. VEO's channels are time-aware, so you're likely to get the news in the morning, say, and a popcorn action movie after dark. The system could sprinkle random content in throughout, leaving room for the serendipitous discovery that you get with TV today.
VEO is designed to be operated with a smartphone, not out of a desire for a more sophisticated set of controls so much as a way to reduce the amount of menus needed on the big screen. In other words, it's designs so that your TV will look and feel like a TV--not a computer.
The solution was based on months of research into how people were watching TV today. The one big takeaway from talking to viewers, according to Heather Martin, Smart Design's Director of Interaction? "There's so much content pushed at people, but it's being pushed in the wrong way."
According to Nate Giraitis, Associate Director of Insights and Strategy, it comes down to "where the onus of the decision lies." With old school channels, you just sit back and watch. With on-demand video, you're left to make all those choices. The result? All too often, viewers are paralyzed by the surfeit of options they're presented with. We press the "power" button, and instead of getting entertainment, we're faced with a responsibility.
As Martin sees it, that's a departure from the TV experience we've always known. "The idea that you have to give people huge amounts of choice is the antithesis of TV watching," she explains. "Linear TV is experiential from the moment you turn it on."
Pushing the responsibility of curation to viewers introduces another problem: On Netflix, everyone's aspirational. During their research, Smart Design found that people don't fill their queues with b-movies and cable junk. Instead, they flag foreign movies and documentaries and all the other brainy content they think they should be consuming. Giving the viewer the responsibility of picking their content creates a schism between what people want to watch and what they want to want to watch. It leaves no room for that tentpole TV use-case: vegging out in front of some mindless, guilty pleasure.
In sum, VEO offers a compelling vision for what a truly smart Smart TV should be, bringing together the diverse content and algorithmic recommendations of today's streaming video services with the idiot-proof ease of channels and curated, linear programming. The more you look at today's robust streaming services and supercharged, app-ified interfaces, Giraitis says, the less they seem like the right way forward. "You realize there are so many elements of the old school TV experience that were just right."
