A few months ago I put together a post outlining the challenges with IPTV service offerings. The post is here.
One of the major challenges discussed was that when a subscriber has 50,000+ videos to choose from, a normal remote control and a TV screen didn’t provide enough navigation depth. Most subscribers would spend hours looking for a title and then not have enough time left in the evening to actually watch it.
Kinda reminds me of the old days at the video rental store, wandering around the store for hours before deciding on a film that I had already seen 4 times…..
One of the ideas I discussed was to use a smart interface like the “remote” application on the iPhone/iPod Touch to provide sophisticated navigation for an IPTV service offering. In reality any sort of touchscreen device would work if programmed properly to work with the service.
This prediction of mine was spot on (which is not normal for my predictions 
)!!!
Yesterday I received in the mail a new offer from T-Home, the consumer service arm of Deutsche Telekom, outlining the new T-Home Entertain Service which now comes with an iPhone application called “App Program Manager” which allows programming of the T-Home IPTV set-top-box. This allows not only navigation but remote programming of the hard-drive recorder inside of the set-top-box from anywhere where an iPhone gets a signal.
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