United Pan-Global Communications
"DaVinci" iTV-Project
International Broadband consumer
Interfaces + Services
for Commercial and Civic content
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
This year Interactive Television hits it big!
... for the 12th -or- 13th time.
Form and Function initially contracted under e-City Holdings to develop several MacroMedia Director prototypes that follow a creative story-line exploring iTV features like video-on-demand, on-line banking,and using government services. 
We stitched together a compelling executive elevator pitch that addressed civic mandates and commercial telecommunication interests for e-City to develop for UPC. The largest cable provider in Holland charged with a broadband digital upgrade collectively known as the DaVinci Project. UPC was mandated and subsidized by the Dutch government to extend interactive broadband cable to every home and the effort to establish a technology path was under the Texas Instruments standard, called DaVinci, and under their pioneering banner a number of technology manufacturers, OEM's and Internet startup companies rallied around this de-facto name.
The DaVinci prototype had to conform to restrictive development platform specs for deployable realism. 
There simply were no systems to test with - not even the MicroSoft team had them for a long period. The virtual development kit from MicroSoft WinCE + WebTV was buggy and prone to crashing - even while idle... we had some specs and assurances that this was important to everyone involved and new test-beds would arrive - someday.
User Case Studies were fine to make a point, 
but the e-City iTV Production Department imposed a strict adherence to No Smoke and No Mirrors ruleset based on what actual, repeatable, demonstrable functionality could be mimicked with the beta alpha hardware and software provided ... by different vendors.
What follows are several use-case storyboards we used to map out function and clarify actual use dynamics as closely as possible.
|
JPEG files were a luxury we learned to do without.
What you see seems almost archaic looking look back, but it was no easy task for the team to coax functionality, let alone performance, out of these experimental systems. Our design team noticed some trends in Netherlands sign-age and information displays and turned the system's heavy reliance on blocks of solid color and text-oriented content into a hidden strength: it was in keeping with Dutch expectations around modern information design from concert billboards to information kiosks. To an American eye there is a decided lack of white-space in Dutch design, wheras they see wasted space. They also fill in the acrage of text with vibrant colors and scenes blasting through like it's a cut-out. It's an acquired taste.
Think of it as a kinder-gentler Blip-vert, if you've seen Max Headroom.
|
The aesthetics required by the extremely rigid technical situation did not allow for Flash 4 of the day {nor even version 3}, sometimes Flash 2.0 worked {mostly not-so much}. No ShockWave, JavaScript, or any number of interactive delivery systems we think of as standard. Not even animating GIFs. The only things that worked were 1.0 Cascading Style Sheets of the most basic sort of HTML colors - although I'll grant that WebTV ran in thousands of color mode on the screen each graphic needed to float in it's own 8-bit palette.
On bitmaps; rectangular regions was all one got along with intolerant and exacting dimensional issues and molasses-slow whole-region bitmaps often overloading the brittle system. We avoided them wherever possible.
We did get Flash gradient washes to show up towards the end - a significant graphic element - but too late in the day to apply to deliverables.
We worked for almost a year on a virtual PC running the MicroSoft client and only got to see hardware a bit over a month before ship date.
|
It's worth reflecting on the state of STB art 2000 A.D.
A competion among development platforms put three vendors, WebTV, Liberate and OpenTV, vying for UPC's love and e-City would be expected to conform to the chosen winner. All were in development and crashed regularly but WebTV had the most stable code base running on any set-top box {STB} found in the country. WebTV had the worthwhile feature that it directly addressed the widest number of industry standard internet development tools - essential to tap into the wellspring of web-based content available. This was vital to any business model our team could forsee since no corporation nor bureaucracy can expect to have at-ready the Next Big Thing primed and pumped from behind their fortified Walled Garden suddenly groaning from the shear press of anxious crowds shedding money from their pockets. Incubating quality on-line services would take worthwhile time and attention, but people already have reasons to post messages and otherwise check each other out: tapping into this was key. We threw in our lot with WebTV.
It was a new thing, this web-centric iTV thing, yet broadcast executives expected "experts" to whip up cheap, ready-made solutions like their shops spool cable for linemen - it just wasn't going to happen. The dirty little secret nobody grappled with was the DaVinci plan was incapable of using a mouse or any pointing device of any kind. This system required tab-logic to navigate, like an invisible spreadsheet grid across the screen using keyboard/remote-control cursor keys: witness the rise of the repetitive-stress "thumb-itus."
Now, compare the flick of a wrist sends your computer focus across the screen via mouse and you understand one aspect of the challenges facing most iTV developers. To shift focus one hits the Right-Arrow, and Right-Arrow again, and again, each time nudging the cursor a toward the target. This was hard to believe even then. Unforgivable now - look at what the iPhone does for input devices. 
The square boundaries of Pong contain a perfect metaphor for the minimalist inward-facing world of the Walled Garden. The public expects Flash-driven interactivity with THX sound in their living room - it's on their mobile phones these days after all - but the Big Operators song-and-dance the cheap tunes with a next-generation Pong machine. You can see Quake -or- Halo/Xbox playing in yon store window and you shake your head at what these big companies offer: quarter-century old technology grafted into expensive underpowered heat-sinks.
Is it any wonder the world yawns outside the gates of the corporate Walled Garden and wanders down to the public park where they can see some jugglers and balloon clowns right there on the sidewalk? Free?
Sigh...
You can't tell someone making piles of cash that they are doing something wrong - and have them listen.
|
e-City was an agile outside group of video and computer executives that could address facets and factors ever-so-slow-moving corporate giants are unable to meet - especially European ones. e-City became an interactive design hot-house setup to rapidly develop solutions the larger UPC "mothership" was unable to visualize, let alone deploy alone. Lucrative monopoly concessions and expansion options were to be granted to the vendors that could meet the relatively aggressive timetable established. What they were asking for was reasonable: voice and text messaging, email, bulletin boards and spontaneous group formations, web surfing, access to government services - especially forms ... unfortunately, this was almost nowhere to be found among the UPC roadmaps were became familiar with and there was no way to meet their objectives - if they ever expected to achieve this at all.
YET, this was what local, regional & national governments expected - and paid for. Our system accounted for this and expected an intersection of commerce and community. We thought we would be saving the day, but that is another story.
People already have reasons to post messages and otherwise check each other out: tapping into this was key to making a rapidly adoptable method easy for people to slip into their lives. Again, building a system populated by the people using that system. Public input of information I/O is key and easy publishing tools in this Internet Age means HTML web pages. When this project began only WebTV took this HTML standard to heart and even it was partial to closed networks and pre-digested services.
We had every intention and incentive to bust this model wide open.
|
Incubating quality on-line services takes time and attention.
This is the hairline crack running up the side of the Walled Garden foretells it's doom. For a while AOL managed to harness the energy of fan/moderators to hold off the free-range internet cesspools - but eventually everyone needs to wade in the muck because one man's toxic poison is another's rare vaccine cure. The trick of it is to harness public repositories, collections, lists - not private databases to find relevance: look at Google -vs- Encyclopedia Britannica.
This is ultimately where the UPC system at Kabelweg still needs to go and time has proven us accurate.
In the end Form and Function {by any other name} lead the first 3rd party development team to conform broadband WebTV - and to the European DVB standard at that. From around the globe a world-class team was assembled, many uniquely qualified in art and communication, some with with hands-on with preceding iTV systems and with all their sage wisdom many serious pitfalls were avoided. The hard working crew of e-City allowed early delivery of an EPROM burned working STB client to UPC in the summer 2000.
Three days ahead of schedule, Cha-CHING!
It was a crazy time, it was the best of times...
Already fate has blown a few of us off the radar with a few more deliberately flying below the radar.
SHOUT-OUT: If you come across this, "bell me."
e-City/UPC crew:
John North - Executive Producer
Jonathan Gibson - Director of iTV
Peter Mitchell - iTV Development
Yoo Lee - Project Management
Alister Pillow - Lead Programmer
Richard Collins - Programmer
Michael Shur - Web Tech
Bronwyn Lapham - Databases
John Fowler - Web Designer
Alex Shur - Corporate Design
Kekone - Art Direction
PLUS David Biedny, Christina Fredericks, Sabisha, Sigga, Jan van Berg, David Ottina, Robert Joseph, Stuart Sharpe ...
|
PS...
so what's ailing iTV?
One inherently crippling and ongoing problem with most interactive tv system roll-outs is the fatal collision between blithely opposing forces: The Telcos & Cable Ops who only think of spending pennies for a STB -vs- the Consuming Public grown used to Pentium chips, snappy 3d graphics ...and oh, one of those newfangled mouse-thangs.
For deeper analysis call and we'll set up an appointment.