YouView CEO Richard Halton on how the cloud and Alexa will change TV
Read the PCMag Article here here.
YouView's had a quiet but steady rise since its launch in 2012. Live in almost 3 million UK homes, the connected TV platform blended digital terrestrial TV with online catch up years before Freeview did, giving people a taste of the pay TV experience without needing a contract.
Well, in theory anyway; the majority of those 3m boxes are ones bundled with BT TV and TalkTalk TV packages, but if you wanted a contract free experience, there's nothing stopping you from getting a YouView box SIM free'.
Last week the company announced that updates to its various boxes would now be forked, with the likes of BT, TalkTalk and Plusnet taking a more hands-on role in terms of rolling out updates in tandem with the unbranded vanilla YouView hardware not unlike how Android updates are handled by Google and the various OEMs.
Before that, YouView announced that it was one of three worldwide TV platforms to collaborate with Amazon on Video Skills for its wildly popular voice assistant, Alexa and before that, the company had finished updating all set-top boxes to a new cloud-powered interface.
PC Mag UK caught up with YouView's CEO Richard Halton to see how the work with Amazon was progressing, ask how being able to talk to your TV might change things besides setting recordings, as well as expand on points he made in McMedia - new dogs learn old tricks?, republished here with permission.
We also talked about GDPR, what a cloud-powered UI means for us viewers and that age-old question when will Amazon Prime Video come to YouView?
One thing I wanted to ask you about off the bat is Alexa and your work with Amazon. It was announced a while ago and the potential for that to change everything is obviously massive. In your McMedia article, you talk about advertising and virtual partnerships. As well as Alexa letting people set recordings by essentially talking to their TV, will this help power things like recommendations?
Yes. If you start a step further back, and think about Alexa in the context of what YouView is, because I think that's probably relevant and it'll help you with your questions about what we put on the forums [about software updates across the YouView platform].
If you think about YouView as a connected TV platform and what it is, clearly from a consumer point of view, it's what you see on a TV screen, it's a user interface. But actually, with the next gen update, YouView's more powerfully a sort of back end. It's the cloud piece that's powerful and it's powerful for a couple of reasons. One is that we host the metadata that describes all of the content on the service, be that BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Netflix, BT, TalkTalk, Now TV that's an extraordinary repository of information about content in terms of titles, characters and so on.
That's been there since day one of YouView; it's now hosted in the cloud. That's powerful, because when you introduce new concepts like voice search, the first problem that most people have is, certainly with respect to TV, is Hang on, we don't have the metadata.' It's not easy to access. It's very hard to bring new interfaces into play.
So for us voice is a natural extension of what we do already, because it plays to our natural strengths, the fact that we have aggregated metadata sat behind everything.
From our point of view, how that then is populated on a UI, or any surface through voice, or whatever else is interesting, is constantly changing. But the infrastructure bit, the hard bit is done and up to date.
So this is really the icing on the cake, in terms of accessing content.
Yeah, and it sort of depends as to your view of how important voice is going to be. If you were at CES, you might have Google and Amazon fight a kind of media strategy where Google spent tens of millions of pounds on display advertising, just in Vegas, just over the five days of the show. The last display campaign we did for YouView was in the low single figure millions for a two month national campaign. And they managed to blow $30-40m in one week in one city!
It's a shame the power went out then
Exactly! So, they've clearly decided, this is an important battle between them and Amazon, they clearly believe that voice is important. Where we are on that, two or three years ago, I was quite negative about voice. It was something that I always thought was always a little bit over-hyped. It was actually when we played with the first Alexa device the whole team was like [snaps fingers] This is it. This is the game-changing moment.'
Whether that then becomes how five, ten or fifty percent of people control their TV experience is another thing, we'll have to wait and see.
If you're Google and Amazon, you're probably going to see this as the equivalent of the browser wars of the late 90s, you know there's going to be a Netscape, an AOL, a Yahoo, and it looks like they've decided that they're going to carve it up between the two of them. So strategically for us, it was important to go early with voice, because it does feel like a new frontier for control. Again, we've got the infrastructure that allows us to do it. And to your earlier point, actually it allows you to do some very cool things that are quite hard to do with a remote control and a shared screen, i.e. personalisation.
That's always been one of the problems facing broadcasters and content curators: Who is watching? You can have separate logins with Netflix, which is fine for a personal device, but TVs are generally not personal.
Sure. And logging in and out of profiles is sub-optimal. Who wants to log in to anything, even if it's just clicking a picture. And more often than not, there&
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YouView CEO Richard Halton on how the cloud and Alexa will change TV
