IPTV Development Diary
magneticNorth
Diary 1
Our brief was to devise and build an IPTV app prototype whose core function was to deliver news in an innovative way. This being our second project for this platform, we were confident we could come up with something useful and engaging that worked well with the new technology.
Our first approach was to think about how this new medium could compliment and enhance the way we already consume news content through our TVs. One factor that arose was personalisation and we were in agreement that that’s what our app should offer; to be able to choose what type of news you wanted became the foundation of our solution. So how does that fit with the novel features of IPTV? Just providing a way to filter news categories would simply be refactoring the functionality of a typical news website and we wanted to go much further than that.
Knowing that each IPTV box would be connected to the web with a unique IP address spawned a raft of ideas surrounding the personalisation aspect, the culmination of which was that you, the user, could create a set of creatures, give them each special instructions about the type of news you wanted and then send them off to go and do the digging. These news preferences mixed with your unique IP address would also inform other characteristics of your creatures such as their shape and colour and what you would end up with is a distinct troop of news ‘agents’ working on gathering and presenting only the news that you are interested in.
With this idea in mind, the next step was to write it up and make it concrete. We wrote a concept outline and sent it over to the client for consideration. Once we’d heard that the client was happy with the direction in which we were heading, we moved on to produce a functional specification. This outlined each aspect of the prototype in detail, what the user journey would be and how each section would work. A set of wireframes were drawn up to illustrate how the user interface could be presented along with a list of user stories for each key screen describing what the user could achieve. For example, for the selection screen the user stories were, “As a user I can see all of my news creatures at once, I can select a creature and view the content it has found and I can add a new creature to my collection”.
A list of risks and assumptions was also included to cover issues such as a reliance on third party API availability and a lack of content moderation. We would be using YouTube as a data source so every measure to avoid inappropriate content would have to be taken. Since the IPTV platform only supports content delivery via Adobe Flash Player, it was stated in the specification that the Adobe Flash authoring tool would be used to produce the prototype.
Once the functional specification was complete and approved by the client, the only thing left to do before we moved into the design phase was to think of a good name for our app. We needed something that was contemporary and reflected the app’s function. We kicked around a number of names, including NewsAgents, Osmosis and News Tank but in the end we settled on one that we thought was perfect....
...Lumin.
magneticNorth
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