On 23-Oct-2009, at 09:36, Andrew Pipes wrote:
Can you expand on that note about listings please Mo?
Do you want more date/time information about when a programme was
broadcast surfaced? Or a better interface for exploring back in time
instead of by letter/source? At the moment we're just trying to keep
it
as simple as is necessary.
The latter, although actual programme metadata is useful (because you
don’t necessarily know from a summary or title whether it’s the
episode of something you’re looking for, whereas you may well know
that you saw “last week’s” broadcast).
Primarily, it was the ability to browse by channel+day, both for
things which have already aired, and the upcoming programmes—much as
iPlayer tries to do (though iPlayer’s UX quite often bugs me in this
respect!)
e.g., if somebody says “did you see that documentary on More4 on
Tuesday about how right-wing extremism is making its way into parish
councils?”, it should be trivial to track down based on the available
information—at worst there are a limited number of programmes which
would have aired on More4 on Tuesday, so even if you don’t know the
title, it should be easy to find with the aid of listings tie-in.
Similarly, if you know a programme is airing at some point in the next
12 hours on a channel, being able to see (quite prominently) at a
glance whether it’s available/coming soon/will be up later+ETA is
quite useful.
I know it’s tricky when you pull in solely on-demand content, but
sheer “popularity” only goes so far as a useful metric for end-users.
More metadata! ;)
My expectation of a good aggregator is one which takes the best
aspects of iPlayer+4oD+ITV Player+etc (and by that I don’t just mean
the raw content!) and presents a unified view of that. TTT certainly
manages the latter, but my gut feeling is that it’s a more close fit
with YouTube’s fairly lightweight metadata than iPlayer’s (and
presumably 4oD’s) richness—and rather than using what’s available
wherever possible, it mostly seems to drag everything down to
YouTube’s level. I could be misreading it all—I haven’t explored
deeply, but then arguably I shouldn’t have to in order to get a good
idea of what it can do.
What I don’t get is… why is it separate from 4oD and a strictly
limited-budget experimental thing? Why not just have 4oD’s web
interface support multiple content streams? Political issues?
(Actually, given the YouTube deal, is this a prototype for what’s to
come?)
Er, hope that helps in some small way!
M.
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mo mcroberts
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