Author © : Astrid Dobbelaar, Drs.

Senior Interaction Designer / Communication Scientist

Philips Design, Eindhoven (NL)

e-mail: a.dobbelaar@design.philips.com

presentation W3C Workshop on "Television and the Web"

d.d. June 29-30 (Sophia-Antipolis, France)

Let’s start with the most obvious difference: TV and PC look different. Perhaps not so much on the outside but very much in their idiosyncrasies as a display device. They have a different screen resolution (resulting a.o. in differences concerning the visible part of a web page per screen), a different display method (non-interlaced vs. interlaced) and -last but not least - a completely different brightness level.

Anno 1998 it is hard to find a web-conscious person that is not conscious of the fact that the mapping of cyberspace onto the TV platform implies dealing with quite a lot of design-technical issues, since nowadays a lot of web-pages are designed not to fit the TV platform, because they are designed exclusively for PC.

Microsoft WebTV has managed to ‘tackle’ this problem by inventing a ‘WebTV server’; so entering the web via a WebTV client implies receiving web-pages via a closed system within which the server actually manipulates the designs in such a way that mostly they will look good on a TV - and also at the client side some adjustments are done. For the moment this is a very workable solution.

But what should one do in order to be able to approach web-pages via Television in a fully open system? Well, then one should from now on attune the design a bit to the TV platform; either by manually designing pages that are suitable for display on a TV device - but who is going to ‘adjust’ all pages already available on the web? - or by developing general servers that - when needed - do the work automatically, when detecting a TV-client /set-top-box. But in either case one should know what are the differences to be tackled. So let’s look at these differences one by one:

Solutions for this problem can be found in: being concise & consciously splitting the information into a rich hypertext (with many nodes); using short titles; using no excessive image sizes (max: 544x376 pixels); avoiding small text into images (16 points height is absolute minimum).

Solutions can be found in the use of special tags (<NOBR><NOBR>) to prevent hard line breaks based on computer screenwidth (in text, a series of images or other horizontal flow.), in taking the TV-safety area into account and, - when designing new pages - in producing designs that fit a TV screen, so designing for 'landscape' rather than 'portrait '. ( [ ] instead of [ ] )

Solutions can partly be found in automatic colour adjustment via reduction of highly saturated colours, especially for highly saturated backgrounds (most relevant for full colour red or white, because in AV-signal both will cause high screen distortion). But drastic adaptations like changing white backgrounds with dark text into the opposite is not without risk (non square pictures that are antialiassed to the background colour will look jagged).

When designing new websites, one should simply avoid the use of highly saturated colours (max colour value to be used: <200 out of 255) and transitions between highly saturated objects whenever possible. Of course, in this case, it’s better to choose on forehand for dark backgrounds with light texts in a good readable size (minimal 16 pts.).

In short: PC and TV have quite different 'technical' design requirements. In this section it looks like the TV ‘causes’ a lot of problems which a PC doesn’t have. But one should not forget that the PC has the benefit of ‘being the first cyberplatform’ and herewith of setting the standards c.q. making the ‘web design conventions’. And these conventions originate from written text, while the strength of TV is not in text but in moving images.

And what’s conventional should not per se be optimal...: should one still speak of designing ‘web-pages’ when the web becomes more and more multimedia, for example?

Tackling the technical design issues is a necessary, but certainly not a sufficient step for successfully 'televising' the web: so let's now look at the differences between (www@) TV vs. PC from the user point of view:

Experience with traditional media has shown that even media that at first sight show a lot of similarities, can - at a second glance - fulfil very different needs of users. In fact, these differences form the sole reason why they can co-exist! This is very much true for TV and PC (and I will come back to this in section three, where the 'market' issues are discussed). So let's now have a look on different usage of TV versus PC and try to analyse what the respective conventions could mean for the entrance of the web in the realm of TV:

First of all, there is 'the smell of the animal': whereas TV is typically a ‘shared’ medium, a PC is not - as the word personal computer already indicates; a PC is single user whereas a TV is multi-user.
The PC is typically a ‘work horse’, preferably NOT placed in the livingroom ( social, leisure ambience vs. work ambience).

As access to the web traditionally is via PC's, as a consequence a lot of its content is task-oriented; until recently - or even: up to now?! - the web was/is seen by most of the web-users as a huge and fascinating information source, rather than an 'entertainment environment'. And, of course, the web is also renowned for its two-way communication. A facility that would very well fit the TV environment. After all: chatting away together is very entertaining (especially when it is really 'chatting' rather than 'typing').

Very much related to the paragraph above is the fact that watching TV is typically a relaxed and reclined, more passive usage (receiving whatever the network brings = ‘receive-only’ mode...), while using a PC is much more active, sometimes even 'tense'… Web-browsing on your PC means actively ‘directing’ the computer to the ‘desired’ information places. Would people want to do the same on their TV? I doubt! I even doubt if they would want to visit al those information places available via the web. Why would they suddenly go for the information stuff? Isn't it true that in the traditional TV-broadcast world particular 'more heavy' genres (like art and cultural-informational programs) are heavily subsidised because the market principle of supply and demand doesn't work very well here? In general, I think that most of the people only want to do browsing effort if you get them really interested…

In section one it was stated that a TV can display only a limited amount of information because of the low resolution of the TV-screen. So why not increase this display resolution then? Well, that would not be of much help, since what really dictates the amount of information that can be displayed per screen is the traditional viewing distance we know for TV: Since watching TV is very much a shared activity (see above) a typical living room layout is the one that puts a TV in a corner somewhere, and all easy seats grouped in a circle around it. This as opposed to sitting with your PC in a corner of the room, with your nose on the screen and your back to the rest of the room…. So "in order to equalise the displays, a TV screen would need to increase in size and resolution at the same time - wall sized being the preferred size for accessing the typical computer screen load". (Bedard, 1996)

The remote position to the TV-display device has consequences for the interaction device: this cannot be a wired mouse (to be used on a table), so typically a TV is operated with a remote control: and manipulating interaction widgets with an RC / RC keyboard is much more difficult than with a mouse and 'normal' keyboard. So, given current input devices, the distance seriously limits user interaction possibilities. (Of course the interaction method might change in the future, but the social habit of wacthing TV from a distance is a very fundamental one).

historically grown a TV interface is ‘simple’. Everyone knows how to operate it, as opposed to a PC which causes a lot of users quite some 'techno-phobia' with it's system- and configuration problems. Moreover, everyone expects a TV to operate immediately and without any problems after pushing the 'power on' button. And one expects even more: what comes to us via a TV is expected to be multimedia by nature… So TV-users are spoiled! Impatient, used to high quality multimedia output and not used to any configuration hassle. When the web enters the realm of TV, everything it performs less than that will be criticised... (Off course this is a bit of an exaggeration, but there is certainly an element of truth in this reasoning.)

In order to overcome too long waiting times while browsing / retrieving info from the web, one could apply some tricks, e.g.:

• cashing of the most likely next information /page(s)... to load in background (like WebTV does);
• using images with size hints to reserve space for the image while loading a web-page (like WebTV), since once that space is reserved for the image, the rest of the page can be drawn and users can access text and links on a page before images have completed loading;
• using JPEG-images instead of GIFS (especially for photographic images; smaller & better result); re-using images in different pages of a site;
• when sending secure pages: transmitting all page resources that do not need to be securely transmitted (e.g. images) via normal connections.

To conclude this section: I hope the information provided above can convince you that the social usage characteristics of a PC and a TV are quite different and that the web-experience should become more 'TV-like' in order to make a successful start on this platform.

There's certainly a lot of work to be done in order to realise this all, since nowadays a lot of web-pages are mute, static and mainly text based. But there's hope: the coming of DHTML and Applications like Shockwave and Flash (Macromedia) has brought us some real nice 'multimedia-animation' on the web already. Yet it's still not the audiovisual experience we are used to on a TV. The improvements made in the area of AV-streaming and - streaming with - MPEG4 are very promising in this respect.

Let’s now look at the business side of the story. I do not aim at 'who makes an alliance with who' but at how the respective media are organised from the sender/service provider point of view. And also here a lot of differences are discernible. In order to explain the differences well, I should start with mentioning a similarity between PC and TV: both are media. And as such they are competitors to some extent. The answer on the question to what extent is dependent on the degree to which they are similar c.q. interchangeable. And, - as outlined above, but then from a user point of view - different media can have different characteristics, which result in different strengths and weaknesses.

Let's look at these differences from a business perspective and see what we can learn from that.

Traditionally the TV-broadcasting business is a very expensive, well organised and centralised enterprise:
TV-broadcasters are 'high profile' institutions, where highly trained professionals, expensive recording studio's and equipment concentrate in order to 'make a business together'. The huge costs involved in the TV-production process made the TV-broadcasting industry heavily dependent on financial funding.

TV-broadcast content is expensive, but in return service providers have committed themselves to deliver high quality; not only from a technical point of view (high quality AV material), but also content-wise. Generally broadcasters commit themselves to deliver a particular kind/flavour of content. Adding their name / 'brand' that content means for users that they have less work to do; they trust that the particular content has been screened by 'their' service provider.

With relation to the web-content (which nowadays we're used to being delivered by a PC) one can simply say that organisation-wise the opposite is true; the web is far from organised (not to say chaotic ;-) ), content can be created at low cost by in fact everyone that can do HTML or derive HTML from a word-processor, and as a result of that, often no-one can guarantee you if the content of a particular person/business you have never heard of before is trustworthy or not.

All media have the characteristic that economically spoken they operate in what 's called a 'dual product market'. This means that on the one hand their business is to sell content to audiences, while on the other hand they sell audiences to advertisers. Not every medium does this to the same extent - some are even fully un-commercial - but the pattern is quite general.

The concept of the market, the dual markets in which media participate in combination with the specific geographic markets in which competition takes place, is more or less decisive for how different media compete with each other. The degree of similarity (and so 'substitutability') of particular media forms the heart of this discussion.

So what can be said about this concerning the PC vs. the TV as a platform for the web? Well, I hope all information provided above can convince you that PC and TV are not exactly fulfilling the same function, so it is very likely that when the web 'goes TV' these basic differences in usage and benefit of use will more or less stay in place, despite the fact that cross-fertilisation will take place. So they might very well co-exist, using the web as a common resource, but not become fully overlapping.

And business-wise, may be exactly their reason for being! A good example in this respect is the magazine that can exist next to books because of the fact that on the one hand the publishing time for a magazine outruns the publishing time for a book by far, while on the other hand it is impossible to produce content material to produce an interesting book every week... Another good example was made by Jacob Nielsen, when he analysed TV vs. Movies, vs. theatre, in his Alertbox from February '97. Here Nielsen states that where TV has it's strength in the fact that it is in-home and able to show live-events and ongoing stories (like soaps), a movie rests much more on 'having a strong story' and an immersive display, while the strength of theatre is the excellence in dialogue (which in fact comes from the 'weakness' that while not being able to see facial expressions from a large distance one simply has to fully exploit the dialogue…).

A similar reasoning goes for the TV versus the PC as a platform for the web. The strengths and weaknesses from a user point of view are provided above.

Concerning the advertising part of the dual market the following can be said: TV can be seen as an enormous 'selling device': the high expenses for making TV content are often for a large extent covered by advertisement funding (in The Netherlands it's about fifty percent for public broadcasting, and for commercial broadcasters the number goes up to one hundred percent). Of course this has consequences for the content: presumably hardly or not because of censure, but rather because of indirect influence… Advertisers want broadcasters to provide them with particular audiences; not just watchers, but potential buyers is what they are after. So content should always 'suit a target group'.
If the web enters the realm of TV, it will almost certainly go more commercial and less 'democratic' and 'anarchistic' than it once started…

If there is one main conclusion to be drawn from this writing, it is that it is that understanding the design-technical differences between the PC and the TV as a platform for the Web is a necessary but not a sufficient prerequisite for a successful entrance of cyberspace into the realm of TV; understanding and dealing with the social and market differences is also very important in this respect.

If I should give one more conclusion, I would say that we are in the middle of the stream, and no one can see what we will really end up with… but in the mean time at Philips Design we try to shape the future a bit by experimenting with possible combinations of Web and TV.
And at this moment I can already say that from communication point of view, the entrance of the Web via a TV should certainly not be 'less' than from a PC - as long as it keeps in mind that it should be different in order to fully exploit it's strengths and find a place next to the one already occupied by the PC.

I hope the examples 'on show'' during the W3C workshop make clear that in our view web-access from the TV is really of a different nature compared with web access from a PC; it is more entertaining, more intertwined with TV content and it requires less intensive usage than Web access via a PC.

Autonomous Effects Inc. http://www.afx.com/Wtweak/hm000021.htm.

Hyundai: Bedard, K (1996). A look at the social aspects of television versus Personal Computers.

Nielsen, J. (Alertbox Feb.1, 1997). WebTV Usability Review .

Nielsen, J. (Alertbox Feb.15, 1997). TV Meets the Web.

Picard, R.G. (1989). Media Economics. California: Sage.

Schiller, D. (Dec. 1996). Internet Television: Net Makeover?.

Style Guidelines for WebTV. http://webtv.net/primetime/preview/technology.