Have I seen this before?
Before TV schedules disappear completely, there’s a breed of TV channels that have built their schedules around predictability.
Audiences know that at 7pm on More4 they’ll be an episode of Grand Designs. And an hour later they’ll be an episode of Top Gear on Dave. These schedules feel unchanging: the only certain things in life are death, taxes and Jeremy Clarkson shouting ‘Power’ at 8pm.
However, this type of schedule breeds fatigue: have I seen this episode before? God no, not the boring team build on a housing estate in Birmingham. Again.
Is there anything that my TV could do to help me out this situation? At this point I could of course just run to the shop and buy a PVR, yet a hard disc full of Jeremy would be more than I could bear. One solution would be to update the on-screen TV guide. Here’s a copy of an existing guide:
Whist the description does provide a nudge as to whether I’ve seen a show before, the on-screen guide could do so much more. Have I seen this before? Did I watch all of it? When?
Here’s a quick sketch of a on-screen guide that aims to solve these problems:
The dot shows whether you’ve seen the program before (an outline), watched a portion of it (half full, as demonstrated) or not seen it (fully coloured in). The guide also shows when you’ve watched it and how much you’ve seen.
In the future you could also add in the ability to rate a program. However, this sketch is an answer to a short term problem only. How long before the iPlayer and on-demand kill the schedule completely?
See also:
About the author
Isaac is an interaction designer who understands how to develop a service idea and make it real.
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Comments (3)
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Responses (0)
What happens if you start watching a programme and then switch to another one halfway and then switch back (as I often do). Will such a sketch/programme be able to keep track?!!
Anjali
February 10, 2009
at 3:14 pm
It definitely should. Though the granularity should be set so that it doesn’t keep track if you’ve only switched away for a moment when the ad break is on.
isaac
February 10, 2009
at 3:24 pm
Seems like you got round to blogging about this quicker than I did after our conversation last week.
As I said then, a lot of the problems with these TV-based interfaces is the tedious amount of time it takes to flip through the options and the pages of information. On BT Vision, for example, you have to scroll through an entire page of movies on demand to get to the next screen rather and flipping screen by screen. And there’s that slight few milliseconds delay between hitting the button and it registering with the TV – frustrating.
Where’s the web interface linked to my BT Vision box which allows me control over what I want recording (either singularly or series) and also ‘bookmark’ movies that I want to watch. I’d be able to flip through pages of information in an interface which could exhibit a much higher degree of granularity than the TV can offer – not mentioning the speed.
It seems a lot of the learning from the web over the last 10 years hasn’t transferred to interactive TV on-demand.
Simon
February 10, 2009
at 6:11 pm