Digital tv in New Zealand - playing catch-up

Here I was thinking of scenarios for using a website or widget to log into your PVR (hard disk TV recorder) remotely to set up and record programs away from home.. 'oops i forgot to set it to record Scrubs and at training tonight. I'll miss it'.

Ice TV in Australia already did, and have a Yahoo widget, and even an i-touch app.

Drool.. Want!

Ice TV in Australia have recently won the right to keep their EPG listings despite efforts by one of Australia's commercial TV stations. Its a case of the music industry again, the TV stations fear TIVO and PVRS as they are still stuck in the rut of on air ads that tehy fear people will fast forward or skip over.

Rather than adapt, they are fighting it. One TV station purchased the rights to distribute TIVO in Australia and killing ad skip functions. A veritable TIVO-tatorship is being created.

Hopefully we'll see Freeview introduce these innovations around its upcoming PVR offering..

One day too hopefully we'll see TV stations let people access programmes when they want, how they want to and not in a linear path. e.g. log in, get last weeks episodes of Dr Who you missed.

Broadcaster to content provider.. make the leap.. c'mon

I'm tempted to move back just for this.. almost...

Uncanny valley - an everyday things post

A cola company came up with this bus campaign recently. It features cut out decals of rugby players 'waiting' for the bus as part of the overall campaign. It was quite topical but eerily striking in some situations. It reminded me on the uncanny valley effect: that puts people on edge when confronted with something close to a person but without the normal non verbal cues that we process unconsciously. e.g. "Hey you're not a talking corpse so I won't panic".

There is one on a bus shelter next to my drive way. When I back my car out, especially at night, my peripheral vision and hind brain tells me there was someone at the bus stop. Apparently your brain can't distinguish a picture of a person from a real one and throws the same switches, which seems to be what happens when I'm backing out.

I keep thinking there's a large person just next to the car, flight/fight reaction kicks in before I consciously realise its just a cut out.

Even though I knew it was there, each time i was focused on backing the car out it slipped my mind. Thusly, I kept getting fooled each time. There's a lot to be said for task focus and distraction for getting attention. You can work with these forces and make your websites more effective or work against it.