3D and Enhanced TV – Part 2

So the TV of Tomorrow (TVOT)  show back in March is also known as “Tracy’s thing”, since Tracy Swedlow is the brains and force behind it since the inception of InteractiveTV Today over a decade ago, and many of us who attend this event (there were quite a few hundred this year) have known each other since we first started mingling and collaborating during the AFI Enhanced Television Workshop (which became the AFI Digital Lab); there is a sort of fraternity feeling amongst us, and so many of these folks are now running the Interactive Television departments in their repsective companies today.

So many good things were shown — so much discussion to be had that is really educated opinions in this space– that I’m going to list out what some highlights were to me.:

• Much of the conversation would turn to talking about monetization, of course.  During the “Augmented Reality Meets TV” session, Chetan Damini, Director at acrossair said “Engagement with brands is a permanent engagement.  There is a huge ROI all due to the one time investment.”
• During the “Re-Inventing the TV Experience through IP and The Cloud” we heard “You’ll never do broad monetization here, it’s all about how many eyeballs you can get.”
• Concerns about bandwith was brought up, when Steve Reynolds, the SVP of Premises Technology at Comcast said “A trivia poll sort of experience pulls 150kbps, while something like sports scores is upwards of 400kbps. There has to be an allocation allowance.”
• EBIF was a HOT topic — Canoe Ventures is a major force behind it.
• Personally, I’m always enamored with input devices, and during the “Apps Stores and Widgets” session, Rachelle Zoffer, Director of Interactive TV and International Programming at Verizon FiOS TV talked about the Android app which allows the phone to be used as a TV remote and thereby allowing the use of the qwerty keyboard. NDS also has a smart phone remote.

There were a few sessions that approached talking about the ubiquity of media and displays and allowed for the definition of all these devices to become blurred; we’re going to be fading away the restrictiveness of content being confined to the device you originate a viewing of a tv show on.  And I do believe that the creation of engaging and yes, 3D interfaces, are going to assist in the intuitiveness of the experience, hand-in-hand with augmented reality.

The AFI program where so many of us met each other many moons ago does not exist anymore for a few reasons, but one big reason is that iptv and ETV is becoming a reality, slowly but surely.  That being said, I do hope you can make it to “Tracy’s thing” in 2011.

My musings on The Cable Show will be my next journal post.