IPTV World Forum: How important is the user interface?

CHICAGO - Jeff Campbell, general manager of cable operator Express High-Speed Internet, was one of the few faces of the cable industry at the IPTV World Forum this week in Chicago. As the minority in attendance, he wasn’t afraid to champion the minority view, either. While most were eager to praise the value of a user interface-lift, Campbell maintained that the UI is not a deal-breaker for consumers. Rather, they care more about having control over the content they watch and when, he said. If a subpar interface gets them to that point, so be it.

“The reality is the customer wants to be able to control what they watch and when they want to watch it,” Campbell said on a panel session today. “There are improved ways to do it, and Apple and TiVo do it well, but if I want to watch [a show] on Tuesday at 10 p.m., that is what really has value to me as a busy professional and a parent. Breaking free of that paradigm is at least as desirable as having a sleek interface. We don’t want to get too concerned on the user interface, as long as there is freedom.”

Campbell said the industry will be able to meet this goal of an on-demand world by releasing content in windows and getting the often-inflexible programmers on board. To keep up, his cable company, Express, is looking at going all-IP, as he said most in the cable industry are. It affords them the flexibility to compete with both the telcos and other cable operators. Most of the pain in deployment has come, he said, from the middleware and the set-top box, where the money is made. These are the immature areas, whereas the back office and OSS are not posing significant challenges.

While Edmond Shapiro, vice president of project delivery for the Americas at NDS, agreed on the value of on-demand content, he did not dismiss the importance of UI to the end consumer. From his point of view, the entire packaging is the most important feature. “If you don’t have to get up off your seat, that will take precedence,” he said.

Shapiro’s point of view was that a hybrid viewing experience offering both on-demand and linear broadcast TV will almost always dominate. “There is a value and cost to immediacy,” he said. The social aspects of being the first to know and discuss a live event will not go away.

Karen Cook-Hellberg, solutions manager at Ericsson, agreed that normal, broadcast TV won’t go anywhere, but rather be enabled through the trend towards on-demand.