Does interactive TV need a new interface?

One of the bigger concerns about interactive TV is the user interface, and specifically how to enable consumers to navigate a growing volume of content and to interact with that content without making the process so complex that it generates more frustration than satisfaction.

Efforts to add keyboards to the TV viewing experience have generally failed – remember WebTV? – and service providers such as Verizon and Cox Communications have specifically designed their interactive services so consumers only need their TV remote’s four navigation buttons - -up, down, left, right – and the “okay” or “select” button generally found at the center of the remote.

That’s an approach that frustrates Dan Simpkins, founder and chief executive officer of Hillcrest Labs, which specifically designed a free-space mouse for interactive TV – similar to the Nintendo Wii device that it preceded and against which Hillcrest has filed patent infringement claims – to enable a new breed of TV services.

“The up-down-left-right remote control was an excellent tool when the primary thing you were doing was changing channels,” Simpkins said. “But it was invented 50 years ago, and its primary mission was turning the TV on or off, changing the volume and changing the channel. For those fairly infrequent events, it was efficient. As the number of functions increased, manufacturers added more buttons and then the general purpose up-down-left-right buttons to create a general-purpose user interface. If you look at things from an efficiency standpoint, this is not a very efficient tool. If tools are not very efficient, only a limited number of actions can be done with that tool.”

Simpkins believes that adding a mouse device to Interactive TV can have the same impact that Apple had when it added a mouse to its early PCs, something Microsoft later duplicated with Windows. “Steve Jobs took the risk of putting a  more efficient interface for doing interactivity on the computer – the mouse –  and it opened up a whole set of applications that weren’t possible before,” Simpkins said. “When you put an interface on that is efficient and easy to use, you can unleash a revolution.”

That revolution could include a TV-based app store similar to the one created for the iPhone that would give consumers easy access to a variety of products, services and content, Simpkins said. The challenge is getting service providers to try something new.

“They are worried that if they create a new interface method, that the bulk of the consumers won’t be able to use it,” Simpkins said. “We have put [the Hillcrest remote] in people’s hands to let them point, and we know that, no matter the age – five years old or 85 years old – people followed what they instinctively knew. But we have not yet crossed the chasm where the bulk of the industry has recognized that will happen very quickly.”