ubuntu-tv team mailing list archive

[Bruno Girin <brunogirin@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 03/01/12 14:50, Ian Santopietro wrote:
> I don't think channels will play a huge bearing on TV in the future. 
> Channels simply don't make any sense anymore to anyone except cable 
> companies. People will want to subscribe to a TV show and watch only 
> the shows they want, rwather than pay for an entire channel and only 
> four or five out of all of the shows each channel offers.

I agree with you that TV on demand of that sort is probably the future. 
But it needs to be as easy to use as today's live TV, where the 
simplicity of switching the box on and then pressing a number on the 
remote is all you have to do. This comes back to the original comment 
made by Thomas Söderberg about his folks finding MythTV difficult to use 
compared to a TV. The idea is to minimise the time and the number of 
interactions between switching the device on and being sat in the sofa 
watching the show you want.

> This sort of behaviour is already present. No one in my house watches 
> live TV anymore. Instead we have the shows we want to watch set up to 
> record, and we watch them after they get recorded. This may be a bit 
> extreme of a case, but I'm pretty sure most people with DVR equipment 
> do this at least a little bit. It makes more sense for these people to 
> simply purchase the show they want, then watch them as new episodes 
> become available, rather than paying for an entire channel.

I don't doubt that this behaviour is already present in a lot of 
households but as technology savvy users, we have to remember that we 
are by nature early adopters of tech so what we find simple and 
intuitive to use (such as Ubuntu) may be bewildering for others.

Anyway, if supporting live TV is a show stopper in terms of complexity, 
then I agree we shouldn't pursue this. But that doesn't preclude 
thinking hard about the user interface to make sure that its interaction 
model is as simple as the live TV interaction model. For example, one 
aspect of Unity that works extremely well and that would make complete 
sense for a TV is the use of the numerical key shortcuts (Super+0-9) to 
launch an application. By re-using that concept to enable users to 
quickly select a show when they first start UbuntuTV can give you a 
similar interaction model as live TV.

> As for interfacing with cable, it wouldn't be very hard to create a 
> simple DVR program and use that for recording from an input feed.

Possibly, I can't comment as I don't know what it would involve but my 
experience is that each time I hear the phrase "it shouldn't be too hard 
to..." in technology, it usually ends up being a major endeavour, which 
obviously doesn't prevent me from saying this on a regular basis :-)

Cheers,

Bruno