The Digital Consultant: Television

Showing posts with label Television. Show all posts

Wednesday, 27 November 2013

If It Itches Don't Scratch It - Your TV's Watching

Best to resist the temptation to scratch that itchy place as you watch your favourite show on the box. What you get up to in front of your Smart TV may not be as private as you think.

According to a UK blogger, his LG Smart TV has a nasty habit of sending back unencrypted data and in the clear, to LG every time he changes channel.

Not that switching off "Collection of watching info" (it's set ON by default) in his settings did much good as his viewing data was still being sent back to LG's servers in a highly insecure fashion.

Source: DoctorBeet's Blog

Go to the company web site and they boast "LG Smart AD provides the express way for advertisers to engage with targeted audiences through multi device screens in global scale and in the most effective and innovative fashion." i.e. targeted advertising.

On the face of it it would seem that LG are in breach of the UK's strict UK Data Protection Act? One wonders how other countries are faring and if they are even aware of the nature of this risky data flow from their personal appliances.

According to a BBC report the blogger, Mr Huntley, "suggested that even if LG had never inspected the data, it could still pose a security risk as hackers could take advantage of the practice".

Buying a new television doesn't mean by default that you have agreed to be spied upon and neither it should.

With the Internet of Things upon us perhaps the best advice to give is 'better watch what you say to your toaster'!

Wednesday, 6 June 2012

Seeing The 'TV Light'

A large segment of the population don't bother too much about TV watching. They are often referred to as 'Light TV Viewers'.

31% of the18 to 49 age demographic spend an average of 39 minutes per day watching TV, so where can advertisers get better bang for their buck?

Google would have you believe that they and YouTube are better options for advert retention. TV by itself misses a whopping 63% of this target market, but with the addition of online there is a 27% increase in brand impression rate.

Friday, 27 August 2010

Ever Felt the Urge to Pinch Your TV?

There are some who believe television programming is akin to molding a cake of glutinous rice. Now the physical television experience is going the same way.

Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology has developed the world's first 3D television system that allows users to touch, pinch or poke images floating in front of them.

Senior scientist Norio Nakamura is reported as saying " You can have the sense of touch like poking a rubber ball or stretching a sticky rice cake".

Like many good ideas this one does not yet have any practical application as yet but it looks promising in the field of surgery and as an aid for the vision impaired,

Sunday, 27 June 2010

The Next Bing Thing

Image representing Bing as depicted in CrunchBase

Traditionalists amongst us tend to stick with Google search and I am one of these folks. However Bing is most definitely on the up; it already powers Facebook's search and will shortly do the same for Yahoo search.

Secondly Bing has had a spring renewal of interface design which is a lot more appealing and easier to navigate with the Quick Tabs feature.

Brian MacDonald, the Corporate Vice President of Bing indicated that they had decided to invest in the entertainment area, based on the findings of user research.

Music, gaming TV and movies have extensive offerings and a new portal for those who want to go direct. There are currently 5 million free plays in the music offering.

The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization (Theory in Practice)

Yusuf Mehdi, Bing's Senior Vice President explains: "As the content on the web has exploded, it has become difficult to navigate and find what you are looking for. In the field of entertainment, 76 percent of people use search to help find and navigate their entertainment options online, but only 10 percent say they have a trusted place to go.

So we see a great opportunity to help customers make important entertainment decisions -- from deciding what movie to buy or see, which TV shows to watch online or on your TV, what music to listen to, how to find and safely play your favorite casual games – Bing is making a first step today to help make entertainment on the web easy and fun, so you spend less time searching for entertainment and more time doing the stuff you love."

The business application of Bing is of greater interest and they have beefed up investment profiling. The much vaunted finance portal which is meant to be at this URL http://www.bing.com/finance is currently redirecting to the search engine front page which suggests that all is not well?

Bing General Manager Derrick Connell discusses the latest changes made to Bing's design and experience in this video.

I gave Bing a try when it was first launched and stopped using it shortly after. On the strength of these improvements I am willing to give it a second chance.

Monday, 7 June 2010

Steve Jobs Highlights Go To Market Problems With TV

Jobs talks about the problem with getting involved in television technology

Saturday, 5 June 2010

Two Billion YouTube Videos Viewed Daily

YouTube celebrates its fifth year with a record 2 billion video views per day; yes that's 'per day' not 'per month'.

As they are at pains to point out "that’s nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined."

Interestingly the site is ranked second in Saudi Arabia and fourth in the USA for traffic and according to Alexa, the greatest amount of viewing takes place from school.

Source: YouTube

The other interesting fact about YouTube is its symbiotic relationship with Facebook which delivers 10% of its unique visitors.

The next step in the evolution of YouTube will be to get into livestreaming with platforms such as Livestream already showing the way.

I am a great fan of Livestream and recommend that people sign up for a free account to get the feel of its studio and channel capabilties. The potential is for a far more professional media offering than an embedded YouTube video.

It is however worth while checking out YouTube's Channel 4

Saturday, 22 May 2010

The Jury's Out

And under the hood

So Google has announced its latest intitiative and potential money earner. The question is, do we need another set of boxes on the TV stand? I suspect not.

The quicker these technologies can be integrated into monitors at the point of manufacture the better.

What I do enjoy about Google is their constant quest for digital innovation, even though they are starting to sound like Steve Jobs in their presentation style and the hype is getting a little wearing.

Recent Endorsements

Wednesday, 27 November 2013

If It Itches Don't Scratch It - Your TV's Watching