IPTV Development Diary
magneticNorth
Diary 2: Lumin
With our new name approved by all and ready to go, the next stage was to begin designs. In developing our brief our core criteria was to see how far we could creatively push the boundaries as to how news could be presented. At first we created a look and feel to illustrate our initial thinking for how the app would look. And, as our creatures began to take shape and the Lumin world started to evolve, it quickly became apparent that we had made a distinct move away from the straight design commonly applied to most news offerings!
Although we all loved our cute creatures, one issue we had to consider was how to present ‘bad’ news stories, and the potential discrepancy between the visual treatment and the content it represents. To address this we designed a Lumin that had a more subdued appearance and which would be included should a story be deemed of a sensitive nature.
With the look and feel complete we then produced design templates for each of the key screens as per the wireframes included within the functional spec.
We then moved into the prototype development stage and began to look into the implementation of our proposed functionality where there were a number of areas that offered challenges:
Content quality
We had decided early on that for the purposes of the prototype we would take content from YouTube, as integrating with BBC systems could prove problematic and time consuming. However, it was very difficult to ensure the quality of the content returned. Searching for news often brought back unrelated and outdated videos.
We considered limiting our search to specific news channels, however these were often of poor quality and didn’t provide the breadth of content we were looking for, this option would have also required an amount of editorial management for which resource was not available. In answer to this we made the decision to hard code a number of videos specifically selected for our agreed pre-determined journey through the prototype.
Sourcing tags
As the prototype developed and our thinking evolved it was felt that offering Lumin categories based on dynamically generated current topics would soon render them useless as stories became ‘old news’ and the tags no longer generated new content. We considered including a generic ‘Hot Topic’ option to the categories but then we ran into the second issue... we couldn't find any good sources for trending news topics, apart from Twitter which was too US-centric for our purposes.
Animations
One thing we had in mind from the beginning was how to incorporate animations whilst maintaining an acceptable performance on the YouView box. Currently the rendering capability of the box means that Flash can struggle to run at a typical frame rate, which can lead to animation run times becoming lengthened and looking like they are running too slowly.
With this in mind we modified all of our animations to run on a timer independent of the frame rate Flash was achieving and to cut down on processing we removed those that we felt were a nice to have and weren’t inherent to the user experience.
The current version of the box also didn't cope very well with animating text, so as our app featured a few areas where we would need to scroll or fade text we used some code to convert text fields into bitmaps before running any kind of animation on these.
UI
When testing our app on the box we discovered some of the buttons that made up the interface were lying outside the safe area so some adjustments were made to ensure everything would be fully visible on screen.
We also made some adjustments to the UI so as to emphasise what was currently selected. Initially we had included coloured states for the buttons, however after playing around with the app on screen we felt that when only two buttons were visible it could be confusing to correctly interpret which state was the highlight, as an alternative to this we included an outline to clearly show the selected button or screen element.
Video playback
At the time of testing video playback on the box was notoriously poor and we made a number of attempts before successfully getting our videos to work. At first we tried to use the YouTube embedded player, but this only resulted in a black screen. The next attempt was to use local video files and a custom player in case it had been a problem with the box streaming Flash video, but to no avail.
After further experimentation we finally got video playing by encoding videos with an older codec and at a fairly low bit rate. Although videos now played, the performance was still poor, and after further investigation it turned out this was due to the box’s audio playback, so as a final tweak for the prototype we encoded the videos with no audio stream as well.
With the app now working on the box and the project complete, we feel that our development of the Lumin prototype allowed us to gain a valuable understanding of developing for IPTV. Both technically and conceptually we encountered a number of challenges that provided a great insight into the capabilities of the box, the considerations required when producing a creative news offering and how to create engaging interfaces for TV.
magneticNorth
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