Can Verizon dominate interactive TV?

“The important data point is that 2008 was the tipping point in that the vast majority of TV viewing is done with multiple people in front of the screen, and a lot of the single-person viewing is more and more migrating to a computer screen,” Ambeault said. “It just keeps coming back in larger and larger volumes from secondary research that the principle reason to consume video through a TV screen is the social aspect of it. So you focus your use cases on that.”

The Twitter prototype is one way of enriching the core TV experience with social networking, Ambeault said. “When you tune to that address, you say, ‘Give me the Twitter feed associated with this show,’ and you use that to enrich that core experience,” he said. “We look at the social networking type of interactivity as an extremely powerful discovery tool.”
For the demos, Verizon used canned status information, but it’s possible to enable TV viewers to do a one-click update of their Twitter or Facebook status to note what programs they are watching and become part of a social networking event associated with the program.

“Those are the use cases we were demonstrating, but that may or may not be the ultimate implementation,” Ambeault said. The current widget experience could be enhanced by enabling consumers to send alerts to each other, he said. “I can tell my mom I just put new pictures of the baby up, and she can access the Facebook widget and see that album,” Ambeault said. “That would be an auxiliary or extension to the TV experience.”

One thing Verizon doesn’t want to do is recreate the computer experience with its interactive TV applications. In its beta testing of the ESPN fantasy football application, for example, the reaction was very negative to a complicated process that let consumers manage their teams and team rosters from the TV remote.

“That has been the challenge of the framework is to keep it within the four arrows and ‘OK’ button,” Ambeault said. “We are not trying to recreate the computer. When we introduced our first pass at fantasy football, it was, for all intents and purposes, everything you can do on a Web page, and it tested so poorly. The ultimate thing we shipped this fall was, for all intents and purposes, read-only. The negative feedback on ‘I can’t bench a player and put a new player in my lineup’ was barely audible compared to what we got from customers trying to do and manage an experience with the four arrows and OK.”

“We have to keep in mind, as you are doing these things, that there is a computer in the house, and it has a set of purposes,” Ambeault said. “Convergence doesn’t have to mean recreating one thing on another screen.” 

Coming tomorrow: How Verizon is using the EBIF and DVD formats to create new kinds of interactive services.