Samsung announced this morning that it’s launching a contest in the U.S. to find innovative new apps for its connected TVs and Blu-ray players. Samsung will give away $500,000 to developers who come up with the best new TV apps.
Now, I think that I have this one in the bag! I have come up with the perfect TV ‘app’ – called a ‘cluster’. It is based on a video file that automatically starts when the previous one is finished. This type of video file could allow the TV industry to create ‘clusters’ of video files that play out continuously, in a line for people who don’t like having to press stop and start all the time.
I can’t be arsed to go choosing which ones to play, so we could get some clever people who know about content to decide which ones to play, and in which order. Different ‘clusters’ of video file could focus on different kinds of video content – for instance there could be a sport cluster or a history cluster or even a wider cluster of content that appeals to a more general audience. Each ‘cluster’ of content like this could even have its own brand. Sometimes this might be a simple numbering system (eg Cluster1, Cluster 2 from a single provider) or if it is a really cool cluster of content, we could give it a brand with a bit of personality – like ‘Bert’.
I am also conscious that a lot of the video files that I might like to play will be time sensitive or have a very short ‘shelf-life’. Therefore, the different clusters of video files could go out under some kind of time framework, so that at any part of the day I could click on the cluster of my choice and it would start playing the relevant video wherever it was in the time loop. (I would quite like to wind backwards in the video loop, or see a list of the video files that had played out previously if possible – but that might have to wait till version 2.0).
We could then allow anyone who makes media devices to develop an interface ‘app’ that presented all the content clusters in a particular order that makes sense to me as a customer. This would probably just have the clusters listed out with the most familiar / most used on page 1. With this system we could also offer consumers the ability to see which video files would be in any particular cluster later in the day, and give a bit of information about each of the video files that were being played out. A slightly more advanced system may have a system which allows us to pre-arrange for a video file on one of our favourite ‘clusters’ to be downloaded to some local storage.
Given that someone is going to have to fund this we will have to work out how the apps get paid for. My suggestion would be to use the gaps between the video files, to insert paid for video apps. I am sure that there are companies who would pay to insert a message between the video files? No, that would be pushing it……