product • design • marketing • front-end engineering
Connected TV
Connected TV was born from the ashes of my previous product, Konfabulator. Take a platform that excels at cross-platform portability and use it to make a Smart TV platform.
A universal TV platform was a blank canvas for defining interactivity and standards. I built it around the concept of progressive disclosure while minimizing disruption to broadcast content.
The first step allowed a user to press a button on their remote to get a glimpse of important information. This mode focused on snippets running across the base of the screen, out of the way of live content. If a user wanted to see more information, pressing enter, their remote would pull up a more detailed sidebar view.
Lists, keyboards, our own auto-complete system based on n-grams, buttons, sliders, paginated text, you name it, our platform had everything needed to build a comprehensive app.
We ultimately launched on Samsung, LG, Sony, Vizio, Toshiba, Hisense, and TCL sets. Being the first Smart TV platform won us an Emmy Engineering Plaque to recognize launching and advancing the newfound market.
Later in the life of the Connected TV project, I began to focus on broadcast interactivity. Having the TV know what the user is watching and where they are in the show allowed us to present them with highly relevant content and advertising.
