January is a month of resolutions, but also of predictions - and
mine is that 2012 is going to be the year that TV-optimised
websites will take off. Yes, optimisation is still important and
your website will remain the centre piece of digital life, but the
allure of a HD-quality, video-powered presence on the most-used
household device will be hard to resist.
The early signs
There are three tell-tale signs that contributed to our
prediction - the same that enabled the rise of the mobile-optimised
website:
General availability of hardware
A quick look in any
retailer
'
s
website testifies that all new TV sets are web-enabled. It
might
take
a
while to reach Freeview-level critical mass, but the trend is
clearly moving beyond the early adopters. Even if smart TV's are
slow to catch up, many households can 'see' the web on their TVs
through set-top boxes and game consoles.
Industry manoeuvres in the dark
Technology giants are already on the move to take over the TV
experience. For starters, there's Google TV, relaunched last year after
a poor start in 2010. Leveraging the popularity Chrome and Android
is likely to yield results. Look out for a headline acquisition
this year, a subject which Eric Schmidt artfully dodged in a
recent video interview.
And then there's Apple. In 2011 we saw the
death of FrontRow in OSX Lion and a
Mac Mini without a DVD drive. It's clear to me that Apple does
not want you to plug your Mac Mini to your telly, and my guess is
that there is an iPad-style relaunch of Apple TV coming up.
Development platform
This is a tricky one which should be an easy one. HTML5 is the
lingua franca of network applications, if companies didn't think
that proprietary toolkit is a way to lock people into their
ecosystem. One encouraging sign is that Google TV runs a version of
Chrome. I can only hope that Apple will follow suit and include
a TV-friendly Safari in the next generation of Apple TV.
So what to do now?
My guess is that demand for TV-optmised websites will probably
kick off around May, after Google acquires Hulu, the new Apple-TV
is out and
Microsoft figures out that Media Centre is not an aside
but a main feature of Windows 8.
Grow is preparing the ground now. We are striking deals with
video production and streaming partners and tuning our design for
the 10-foot UI
(User Interface). We like to stay ahead of the curve and this
is going to be a good one. If you think likewise, we'd love to hear from you. Grow are a web design
company based in Oxford and we love working locally!
