Integrating TV with the Online Experience

By Brooks Talley | November 5th, 2004

I’ve recently read a couple of interesting brainstorms about the future of TiVo, television, search engines, and the relationship between the three. Convergence has gone from a cheesy buzzword to a simple fact of life in a remarkably short time, and shows every sign of continuing to accelerate. With that in mind, here are a couple of good thoughts that seem like mere ideas today but could very well be product announcements tomorrow.

First, PVRblog suggests a means by which TiVo could allow websites to offer links so users could schedule recordings based on suggestions on the website. That is, my personal website might extol the virtues of a particular show, and offer a link so that fellow TiVo users could schedule it to record on their TiVo right from my site.

Next, Thomas Hawk muses on how TV content could make it into search engines via the crawling of closed-caption transcripts. From there, it’s not a huge leap back to PVRblog’s suggestion, and you get the ability to record a show based on, for instance, Google’s search results for some query.

Both ideas have a lot of merit; on the one hand, TiVo could be making a lot more of the fact that, despite appearances, TiVos are really general purpose computing devices that can and should be part of the home network and internet. On the other hand, there is a huge volume of real-world content out there that is simply not indexed online. Amazon has made some progress on indexing the contents of books, and Google’s touched on catalogs. The incorporation of TV into online indexes can’t be that far off.

However, there are significant technical hurdles, especially for any kind of live TV content. If you’ve ever been in a bar or airport and watched live TV with closed captioning, you’ve seen just how inaccurate closed captioning is. From wrong words to gobbledygook words, there is a lot of bad closed captioning content. Still, it’s better than nothing.

The thing both these ideas have in common is that they’re about incorporating metadata about TV programming into the Internet. Ultimately, it seems to me that content is content, and that the delivery mechanism doesn’t really matter. TV has already seen this, with broadcast, cable, and satellite all delivering more or less the same thing. Why not add the Internet as another delivery mechanism for TV content, or at least the metadata about the content.

Likewise, as PVRblog suggested, when you’re sitting in front of the computer looking up information about a particular prescription drug, it would make a ton of sense to be informed that there’s an upcoming TV show — be it news coverage, documentary, or exposé — about that same drug, and to be given the opportunity to schedule the recording of that show right from those search results.

And it’s not a one-way street. The traditional TV experience would be enhanced by incorporating Internet content. And not just the cheesy “enhanced TV” stuff that’s out today, which is basically ad-supported and offers little value to viewers.

As Alexander Grundner suggested to me, it’s easy to imagine a scenario where you’re watching a program on the History Channel, and it just touches on an event or person that you’d like to know more about. If any type of metadata or a full closed caption stream is present, it would be easy to query keywords via a Google TiVo or Google Windows Media Center plug-in that will allow users to search within the current program they are watching (or previously recorded or upcoming shows) and be able to jump to related segments or be offered online resource links for further information. It all comes down to having the metadata and the network and API connections between the different media delivery devices; once you’ve got those, a world of possibilities opens up.

It’s inevitable that we’ll see further integration of the television and Internet experiences, and that some people are going to make some real money off of that integration. With their strong brands and widespread consumer acceptance, TiVo and Google are both positioned well for the next stage of convergence. The only question is whether they’ll capitalize on those positions.