anti.masendav.com

Walled off gardens

I just finished testing a beta version of a VOD (Video-On-Demand) solution of my local Cable TV provider. In my mind an ideal Video-On-Demand solutions is the one where, when you happen to be bored and just want to watch a movie, you go and select something out of catalogue of tens of thousands of movie and then start watching it right away. Preferrably without any ad interruptions. Now, I know that you guys in US have Netflix and other similar services, but we here in Estonia are not that lucky. There aren’t really that many options besides video rental stores (with barely any selection) and of course DVD stores (be it brick-and-mortar store or an online one). So, I had really high hopes for that particular VOD application, but sadly it turned out to be a major disappointment.

Firstly, there is barely any movie selection as of right now. But this really is not that much of a problem, because the whole thing is still in beta stadium and movies can be added very easily later on once the platform is mature enough. It is also slow, but that too is forgivable in a beta version of the app.

In my eyes the major mistake they did was - the UI. You’re expected to browse the catalogue and make selections from your TV using your remote. White at the first glance it does not seem that bad of an idea - it really does not work out. Imagine a catalogue of lets say 50.000 titles, you’re looking for something - the remote control however does not have a full keyboard, so the developers opted for an on-screen keyboard. One where a keyboard is shown on screen and you’re expected to move around with arrow keys and select letters one by one. Of course, it is pretty much the only solution when your input device is a TV remote. But it also is seriously cumbersome. Then combine that kind of UI with navigating back and forth inside search results. And once you make a selection and “rent” the movie you have to start over beginning. But I want to have much more than that. I want to bookmark search results, I want to see recommendations from my friends, I want to see newly added movies in my RSS reader and I really can’t do any of that. By now it should be obvious what I’m aiming at here.

The biggest mistake is that the authors of that particular app built their own walled off garden for themselves. A completely new application, inside a seriously limited environment (TV + remote), an enviroment, that was never designed for jobs like this. All UI and UI elements have to be invented again there are no comfortable ways to control the UI and precisely because of that this thing will never work out well.

They are not the first ones either, there are numerous examples throughout the history. Why, again, do people keep making the same mistake over and over again?

Let me describe the ideal (or at least 100x times better) VOD solution. It would be a web application, the whole catalogue should be browseable online, I could read reviews inside both the catalogue and external sites, create favourites lists, get updates on new titles through an RSS reader and really to all those fun things that are possible inside the web application.

Then, after making the choice of what I want to see, I could pay for it right away. With my credit card or bank transfer (the latter works really well here in Estonia, it’s virtually instant and very secure) and only the last step of the VOD application should be inside my TV - the one where I can see my currently “rented” movies and view them. Everything else should be built as a web application. The web app could also be linked to an online DVD store, so for example if I happen to really like a particular movie or show I could order it on DVD with just a few clicks. The possibilites are endless.

And yet people choose the path of walling themselves off from the world wide web.