Put the Guide in the ‘Cloud’

By Yosi Glick -- Multichannel News, 7/19/2010 12:01:00 AM

Television is suffering from a glass ceiling. No, I’m not talking about opportunities for women or the depth of customers’ pockets. I’m talking about architecture.

The glass ceiling is the architecture behind the typical TV interactive programming guide. Current architecture involves preloading all needed data to the set-top box. The data is then funneled straight to the user interface. This data feed allows for a few basic features in the interface, such as grouping by channel or sorting alphabetically.

Because the set-top box has limited memory, there is little or no scope for introducing new features that would require additional data. As a result, the possible set of features is highly constricted, especially in terms of discovery (e.g., search/browse, similar titles) and personalized recommendations.

When it comes to developing and introducing innovations into the TV guide, the architecture poses an obstacle. For example, given the set-top box’s memory, it is impossible to preload five similar titles and all their attributes for every title in the catalog. In this model, there is no viable way to offer customers one of the most basic, familiar discovery options: the ability to find titles similar to one they’ve seen and enjoyed. As a result of the architecture, the TV guide remains a generic, noninteractive data feed.

For a way out of this impasse, TV operators might take a look at leading Internet-content providers like Amazon and Netflix. The architecture of these services is not based on preloaded data feeds, of course. Can you imagine browsing on Amazon without any server interaction?

Internet services like Amazon help their customers choose what to buy by combining their data with a smart engine. The engine generates the data that is appropriate to the customer, such as recommendations based on what she or he is currently looking at or based on his or her consumption history or product ratings. This data is then fed to the user interface.

In other words, the interactivity with the server enables a personalized user experience in which customers are shown the data that is most relevant to them. By contrast, the television’s data-feed architecture leaves customers to make sense of the generic data by themselves.

Today, the average TV viewer is faced with hundreds of channels, thousands of on-demand titles, and perhaps even more content on a DVR. The choice is overwhelming. Moreover, with on-demand programming growing faster than any other type of content, channelsurfing is increasingly obsolete as a way for customers to find content they feel like watching now. Customers need easy-touse discovery features in order to enjoy, rather than be intimidated by, the abundance of choice. In this context, it is highly problematic that, due to their underlying architecture, current TV guides can offer only limited discovery and recommendation features.

Television needs a new model — you might call it interactive architecture. Rather than preloading a generic set of data, this architecture would involve constant, ongoing interactions with the server, to supply the data relevant to each user at any point in time. Bypassing the limitations of the set-top box memory, this architecture would allow for a versatile set of discovery features and a high level of personalization. In this model, both the engine and the data would be integral to creating a high quality, satisfying user experience.

Rethinking the TV guide requires rethinking the architecture. The next generation of TV guides is likely to be usercentric, presenting each user with a view of the “universe” of content options that is uniquely suited to his/her mood and personal tastes. And the change in the TV guide will begin with the architecture.

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Yosi Glick is co-founder and president of Jinni, a video search company with offices in Israel and Portland, Ore.