After months of work, it’s finally here!

When we approached the design for the new interactive features on the iPad to support Game of Thrones, we had a couple of important goals in mind – most important of which were to keep it simple and ensure that the experience was unobtrusive. Our goal was to provide you with a beautiful experience watching this amazing show regardless of whether it’s a first viewing, or a second time through. Working closely with everyone at HBO, we’re excited at the results and hope everyone enjoys trying out the new features, and stay tuned because there’s more great stuff to come.

So make sure when you watch the premiere tonight, you check it out on your iPad and turn on the interactive features!

Game of Thrones Interactive Viewing Experience

It’s always nice when hard work pays off, so a heartfelt congratulations to my fellow teammates, and everyone else at HUGE who’s been a part of the HBO GO team!

Huge is proud to have been named a winner of Communication Arts’s 2012 Interactive Annual Award for the HBO GO mobile application. The awards honor the 35 best interactive projects of the year, and HBO GO was chosen by a panel of leading interactive media professionals as one of nine winners in the Entertainment category.

Visit Huge’s website for more info!

When we were tasked with bringing HBO GO to Xbox we were once again presented with the challenge of making a beautiful UI and UX that transcended the limits of a heavily templated platform. There were many challenges in how we mapped HBO GO’s information architecture to make sense in the Xbox environment, and a lot of time spent trying to push the edges of what was possible. Of course as with everything we design for HBO GO, the goal is to deliver a beautiful, elegant, refined experience that doesn’t sacrifice usability.

And now we are all excited to see the results of months of hard work with the release of the first teaser for HBO GO on Xbox! Hope everyone enjoys using it when it launches.

For years now we’ve talked about the promise of the so-called “second screen”, but what has been delivered to-date? Firstly, it’s interesting to think about how the terminology has changed over time. For a while there, all the excitement was about the “third screen,” the theory being that the computer was the second screen and mobile was the third screen. But with the birth of iOS devices and the changing landscape of media delivery, everything is now lumped into just the second screen.

Second screen experiences pose a number of challenges that span from the limits of technology to the limited imagination of content creators. Right now, second screen experiences tend to be f0cused on either wrapping social experiences around what you’re watching, or giving you access to some bonus content. But what else can we do? Can the second screen be utilized to truly revolutionize television as we know it? Can it define the future of storytelling?

The obvious uses of second screens are things like:

1) Sports. Give me access to all the extra data that I can geek out about. Let me manage my fantasy teams.

2) Watch with my friends. It’s a basic truth that media is inherently social, and every media company has experimented with ways to bring the watercooler into the living room.

3) Bonus and behind the scenes content. Self-explanatory.

But is this enough?

Imagine we were to create a TV show from scratch today. A truly “transmedia” TV show where we break all the rules about linear storytelling. A show that takes advantage of multicast capabilities so that everyone watching may have a different experience. What does TV start to look like?

Imagine being able to switch to parallel stories and follow different character POVs. Imagine being able to have your own image superimposed into a show so that _you_ become a character. The possibilities are limitless once creators embrace the idea that the second screen is more than just a place to do marketing.

To celebrate the holiday, we’ve partnered with an awesome charity, goods for good, to help vulnerable children and orphans across the world. It’s exciting to have them as our partner, and it’s a fantastic charity, so visit Reqoop now, download the app, and take some pics. Each pic you take will donate $1 to goods for good!