The Digital Compass: Technology To Tame The Tube

by Larry Lemm
Spring 1998

"Television can inform, it can educate, it can inspire. But only to the extent that it is used for these purposes-- otherwise it's only lights and wires in a box."
--Edward R. Murrow

Channel surfing: we've all done it. You sit silently, continually pressing buttons on the remote, hoping to find something on television made with a hint of intelligence. Unless it's your lucky day, these searches are often in vain. With the rapid expansion in the number of television channels, intelligent and purposeful surfing is more difficult than ever. With the imminent addition of the Internet to the mix, it is becoming nearly impossible to easily navigate all the information available on TV. You know that with hundreds of channels broadcasting around the clock and a million Web sites online, there has to be something worth watching. But what? when? where? Until you can find those answers, you are fated to either continue to channel surf or kill our televisions.

Now I'm not advocating household appliance violence, but if you don't want to kill the tube, and you aren't willing to join the legions of frustrated potatoes inhabiting the couch, then what can you do? Technology caused the navigation problem in the first place, why not let it solve it for you? Go out and get yourself a digital compass.

This compass doesn't exist as a single manifestation, but rather in the form of a number of new electronic search strategies that are either already available, or will be soon, that will allow you to navigate the sea of content and help you control what you watch on television. With the continuing convergence of the Internet and TV, it will become more and more important to be as selective as possible about what you watch, and more adept at getting it. By using these techniques, you can avoid the curse of the couch potato and become instead an empowered digital citizen who chooses to spend TV time wisely.

Spatial Navigation

The first technique is called spatial navigation. Spatial navigation allows you to interact with some visual representation, such as a map or 3D illustration, to find your way around. Some large grocery and department stores offer spatial navigation kiosks that can help you find the location of a specific item, for example. You select the item on a screen and the area of the store it's located in gets highlighted on a map. Spatial navigation via a 3D image is popular at several general interest Web sites, which depict a virtual community with graphic visual images of arcades, libraries, cafes, movie theaters, chat-houses, etc. You go to that area of the image to participate in that activity.

When it comes to TV viewing, you can think of spatial navigation as a way to move purposefully through a visual representation of what's on. In other words, random channel surfing would be like traveling through a very large city without a map. Using a traditional programming information source, such as a newspaper or TV listing magazine, where the programs are typically listed by time frame, would be like knowing where you are in the city, but not where you are going. Using an interactive electronic program guide or a Web-based TV listing service is spatial in nature and is a much more powerful way to navigate.

Using spatial navigation tools, for example, it is possible to organize and sort programming by any number of criteria, including theme, genre, content rating, quality rating, actor or director. If you like to watch action movies, for example, you can go to the "action movies" section of your "map" and see exactly what programs are on and when they air. Taking spatial navigation one step farther, it is then possible to program your VCR to record all those programs you've selected, so whenever you sit down to watch television, you are always watching something you've selected in advance. This concept is called "time-shifting," and it's a very powerful way to watch television.

The most fancy application of TV spatial navigation would be a 3D representation of this program map. Want to watch sports? Go to the stadium icon in your interface and select it. Looking for a movie? Select the theater icon. This exact application doesn't exist yet, but spatial navigation is here in the form of electronic program guides and TV Web sites, and using this method whenever possible greatly curtails random channel wandering.

Links

"On the future broadband networks, links will let you find answers to your questions as they occur to you, when you're interested...jumping any number of times from topic to topic and gathering video, audio, and text information from all over the world."
--Bill Gates The Road Ahead

The boundaries that separate Web sites and television programs are already becoming transparent. Across the country, test marketing of so-called "interactive television" is occurring on a wide scale. Additional programming content and data is carried in an unused portion of the existing TV signal to a computer, or sent via the Internet through a cable modem to the television, or sent as part of a digital satellite bit stream to the receiver box. Whatever the method, it means additional links to other options. If, for example, you are watching a program about cooking, you could choose an interactive link that would cause a copy of the recipe being made on the program be sent to you via e-mail. Interested in the knives being used to prepare the recipe in the program? Select the link to the cutlery store to have a product catalog mailed to you, or purchase them instantly online at a special discount. In the not-too-distant future, when your TV is wired to the Internet (through an Internet set-top box or PC/TV), you will be able to select links to download entire cooking programs directly to a hard drive that you can watch later. In this way, your VCR will become a sort of "video mailbox." You will also be able to select a link to a Web page that discusses how to cook with a certain exotic spice. Conversely, you will have the ability to link from a Web page about a particular cuisine or culture to a TV program being broadcast on the same subject. Whatever their application, interactive links greatly improve your ability to use your TV in an intelligent and constructive manner.

Queries

Next in the progression of power television searching techniques is the query. A query is a specific search of a broad program base designed to narrow selections to exactly what you want to watch. TV queries are similar in concept to using search engines on the Internet. In fact, most Web-based TV listing sites act as a database and already have fairly powerful query functions built in. In the future, electronic program guides will also have query functions built in. But how do you use them?

To again use the cooking show analogy, if you want to find out how to make a Beurre Blanc Sauce (which is a special cream sauce and is one of the harder sauces to perfect) you can use a query to search the listings and descriptions of all cooking shows. When a cooking show is scheduled that illustrates how to make a Beurre Blanc, you would know about it. You could then program your VCR to automatically record the show and use your PC or your Internet-enabled TV to visit the program's Web site to grab the recipe. If no television show is scheduled to show you how to make a Beurre Blanc, then you could run the query daily, weekly, or monthly until the query is satisfied. This type of standing query is also called a filter.

Filters

There are really two kinds of content filters. An example of the first is the television V-Chip, which monitors all incoming television signals and filters anything above a certain rating you tell it to block. These parental control filters are found in many new television sets and cable boxes, and in most direct broadcast satellite receivers. They require a password to override and work in conjunction with program rating information provided by broadcasters. Other examples are software products that work on the Internet and keep undesirable Web or newsgroup content from appearing on either the PC or TV screen.

Although it isn't in widespread use, a second and more powerful type of filter looks at all television programs and blocks out everything except those types of programs that you have specifically specified. For example, you could have a "cooking show" filter running that would allow only vegetarian cooking shows to come through, and block out any cooking programs that involve preparing a meat dish. To do this for all the programming you and your family want to watch, however, would require many filters running at once, and you would eventually have so many queries and filters you would need something to manage them.

Agents

"The best way to deal with a massive amount of available television is to not deal with it at all. Let an agent do that... My VCR of the future will say to me when I come home, 'Nicholas, I looked at five thousand hours of television while you were out and recorded six segments for you which total forty minutes."
--Nicholas Negroponte Being Digital

Eventually, managing all your queries will require the services of an interactive agent. The ultimate tool for power TV searching and viewing, an interactive agent is the integration of all the previously mentioned search techniques into an artificially intelligent personal secretary. Like a secretary, the agent will get to know you: what you like, what you wear, what your schedule is, who you talk to, what you watch, and so forth. Then it will take that knowledge and find all of the television programs that would interest you. The intelligent agent would learn what types of shows you like, whether it be network sitcoms, socially compelling documentaries, or independent films, and perform its own queries and filters to the mass of available television and Web-based programming.

The interactive agent will be able to sort through that near-infinite amount of information and give you a personalized day of television programming tailored to your viewing tastes. The agent will be able to go beyond using keywords to decide what you want to watch, and incorporate everything you look for or have previously shown an interest in, without you specifically telling the agent to look for these things. While these TV-based smart agents are still in development, their forerunners are already on the Internet in the form of Web sites that use intelligent agents to help you choose movies, VHS tapes, music, books, software or whatever.

The next level of intelligence for agents will be the incorporation of the information they know about your everyday life into the information they capture from television. For example, back to the cooking show, if the agent knew from your digital calendar you were planning a dinner party next week and that the menu included the Beurre Blanc sauce, it could have the VCR tape the show that demonstrates how to prepare the sauce.

Techniques like this might seem a little far-fetched, but they're really not very far off. The convergence of television programming, Internet information, and computer functionality is happening faster than anyone predicted just two years ago. To be able to stay afloat on these rugged seas of information, you are going to need to be able to do more than channel surf. Of course, on a lazy Sunday afternoon, you will always be able to turn the queries, filters, and agents off for awhile and enjoy a couple hours of random channel surfing. Everyone should be a couch potato once in a while.