The Answer to On-Screen Keyboards: Your Cellphone?
Colin Dixon, Senior Partner, Advisory
March 15, 2010
One of the most heinous things about TV interfaces is the ubiquitous on-screen keyboard. I hate the things and will do almost anything to avoid using them. Hunting-and-pecking the letters with the arrow keys is just tedious and almost inevitably sends me running for my laptop.
While at the TV of Tomorrow Show this month in San Francisco, ActiveVideo Networks showed me a demo that gives me hope that the on-screen keyboard could become a thing of the past. While demoing the new AV HD interface for me one of the presenters grabbed an iPhone and started typing using its on-screen keyboard. I was amazed to see those key-presses show up on the TV screen in real-time. Now, I know this doesn’t sound like a big deal, but let me explain.
The iPhone wasn’t using infrared or RF to talk to the TV. It was using wireless Internet to talk to a computer in Virginia. So, how were these key-presses ending up affecting the picture on the TV? To understand that you need to understand how ActiveVideo’s system works.
AV Networks “Cloud TV” system is based on a very thin TV client. All the applications, like the TV Guide and onDemand client, run in the PayTV provider’s headend. The TV client just forwards the TV remote control key-presses through the TV network to the headend.
For example, if you are looking at the TV Guide that application is actually running in the AV system in the headend. The picture you see of the guide on your TV screen is actually being broadcast to you as your own special TV channel. As you press the arrow keys to move around on the screen those key-presses are sent to the headend. The AV machine running the guide receives those key-presses, moves the cursor in the picture, converts the picture to a TV “channel” and transmits that channel back to you. It’s a little bit like a remote session on a computer. When someone else takes over your computer they see your screen and can control your computer using their keyboard and mouse. The key-presses and mouse movements are sent over the Internet to your computer, the screen image is sent back.
Using this approach you can see how the remote control key-presses could actually be coming from something other than the TV remote; an iPhone, for example. All a customer needs to do is associate their iPhone with the TV they want to control. Once that’s done, key-presses and cursor movements can come from either the iPhone or the TV remote. Even though the iPhone key-presses are routed over the Internet via Virginia, the process happens so fast it’s just like the guide is running locally on an STB under the TV.
Cool stuff with a very clear customer benefit! Let’s hope AV rolls this out soon!
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