Combining cell phone and TV UI support for internet video

As mobile phones grow increasingly sophisticated and are open to third-party applications and services, they can be used for both productivity and entertainment. If the screen is large enough, they are a convenient platform for viewing Internet-based video. They can also serve as a device to coordinate the storing and forwarding of video, both throughout and from the home. That is to say, a mobile device can be made to communicate directly with a home-based video devices, such as a networked TV. These innovations are all due to the flexibility of Web 2.0 technologies, which which interconnects the User Interfaces (UIs) appearing on the cell phone, PC and TV.

Below is a screen shot showing an Active-TV Technology UI for YouTube video.

In collaboration with CoreCodec, Active-TV Technology is developing mobie phone applications to coordinate the viewing of of video suitable for networked-enabled TVs. CoreCodec is known for its CorePlayer, which supports “multimedia content on your desktop, mobile phone, portable media player, PDA, GPS, or convergence device”. CorePlayer is widely used across the cell phone industry.

Here are more cell phone screen images of the Lua-based prototype for YouTube. A number of cell phones now support YouTube video and these early developments are just a proof-of-concept of this new technology.

The next step is to show how the phone, TV and PC UIs can interoperate to support social networking, sharing, navigating, organizing and discovering video and audio entertainment, from both Internet-broadcast and conventional-broadcast TV media.

Here is a link to a BBC-Microsoft TV example, shown in the YouTube window below, where social networking and instant messaging features are combined to enable video recommendations. Further prototypes will be available soon.


Daniel Mann