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

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!

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.

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.

The first was the dreaded “talk bubble” info box. Actually a more complicated task than you’d think given the fixed nature of these templates, but with some assistance from Roku, we ended up with something that’s both more elegant and refined, and “feels” like HBO.

Design wasn’t the only problem – we also had to figure out the best way to replicate the way we were organizing the content on HBO GO into something that made sense on Roku. This meant many tests of different IAs, each optimized for a different way to navigate through the content stack. In the end, we decided on one approach that mixed both flat and hierarchical ways to browse content, which I think makes the best of HBO’s content library as well as the way people navigate on Roku.

So I hope all of you HBO GO users out there enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed making it.

If you’ve been following such developments as CableLabs OpenCable or Tru2Way, or GoogleTV, or AppleTV, or Boxee, or a zillion other products that I could mention, then you’re probably just as confused as everyone else about where the world is going to go.

The problem? The MSO/MVPDs. The simple reality is that for at least the foreseeable future, the cable companies will continue to control the bulk of the content that you actually care about. And while this is clearly a problem for innovation because of their tight control over the technical ecosystem and limitations of their platforms, we’re at least starting to see the MSOs themselves start to play far more aggressively with tech – case in point such developments as Xfinity’s well-designed iPad app, or U-verse integration with XBOX.

But the unfortunate reality is that there is no content interoperability yet. CableCards and Tru2Way were supposed to solve the problem – opening up the cable system to allow consumer electronic companies to create cool products that had direct access to the cable stream. But, saving for TiVo, very few products ever hit the market. Instead, we’re seeing a rash of so-called “over-the-top” products that interact with the internet but cannot provide the most necessary function to be a killer app – the ability to interact with the content that I actually want to watch!

One fair argument that MSOs make is regarding the cost and complexity of customer service. As anyone with even a slight bit of tech talent knows, most people are pretty bad when it comes to tech support. I’ve certainly done my own share of tech support for friends and family, so I believe there is a legitimate concern to be made about how the carrier can effectively support customers who are using open systems.

The problem is that this argument isn’t new, and the Wireless carriers have already set a precedent. Until the iPhone, the carriers made the same arguments in maintaining their “walled gardens”. Of course that was really just a veiled excuse for their desire to totally control the content ecosystem, and therefore be able to charge for every service (on top of the data charges you’re already paying). And as we know from the Net Neutrality developments, nothing is changing in those regards. But, the dam broke. iPhone opened the floodgates for an ecosystem open to any developer, and showed it can be functional and successful for both consumers and carriers.

Google is attempting to do the same with GoogleTV, but the cable companies are a much harder nut to crack. Mostly because unlike the wireless business, customers don’t select from hardware choices. You have, for the most part, no choice what cable box you get and with what operating system it uses. Getting the cable companies to cede control will be a tremendously difficult task. Of course, it most likely will happen eventually, but how long from now?

Thankfully, seriously big CE manufactures are finally starting to push at the edges. But, once again, each is building their own operating systems with their own interfaces, once again creating a world of competing standards and making it difficult for entrepreneurs to get into the mix and energize the market. Sound familiar? For anyone who build mobile applications before the iPhone revolution, it was a nasty affair of creating about a zillion different app versions for every flavor of phone OS, screen size, etc. You’d end up building twenty version of BREW apps, twenty Java apps, etc. Hopefully the TV manufacturers will be smart, learn from the mobile industry, and skip over that annoying part.

I’ve long been impressed with companies like Boxee. Ever since they walked into my office at Viacom/MTVN years ago while they were in early beta and unknown by the world, I’ve thought they had a great sense of how to evolve the social experience of watching TV. Unfortunately, they too are hampered by their ability to incorporate premium content…

So let’s hope the new year and CES bring some great announcements, pushing forward the future of social and interactive TV.

So it’s not surprise that Google and Facebook are taking this war public in a major way.

When I was at Viacom, one of the major sticking points in negotiating a deal with Facebook was over this very issue. A major problem for any business is (or at least should be) how effective they can be with CRM. And whether you’re looking to improve recommendations, incorporate behavioral targeting, or simply learn more about your visitors to make your site better and more relevant, once a user decides that they want to be a part of your community, they are making an explicit statement of interest. At that point, there should be no reason why the site, with the permission of the user, shouldn’t be able to develop and store their own user profile without forcing the user to re-input all their data, especially in a case when a third-party system is working in concert with a first-party system, as is the case with most implementations of Facebook Connect. It’s as simple as asking the user, “do you give us permission to import your data from Facebook?”

Facebook objects to this, while at the same time declaring that they’re on the side of the user. But, if the user owns their own data, should it be their choice to determine whether or not they can export data from Facebook into any site of their choosing? Google made this mistake when they shut down Orkut and have now down a total about-face on the subject.

I’m a believer in data portability. I think we, as businesses, will have plenty of opportunities and ways to convince consumers to provide us with personal data so we can improve their experience, make offers more relevant, and generally remove the clutter. The burden is on us to keep giving them great reasons to come back. I’m convinced that as long as we – as content owners, creators, programmers, product developers, and business owners – continue creating great experiences, users will continue to share their personal info with us, and no single company should have the ability to take ownership of your identity without your choice.

I hope someday we’ll see that “export your data” function in Facebook.

This is a refrain I’ve certainly heard before. After spending a decade working in the music industry, prior to the last handful of years in broadcast media, the constant topic of conversation was how to get people to pay for something we’d previously given them for free. For the music industry, the answer was fairly simple in principle (and much harder in practice). The answer was to focus on service and quality, and basically get the entire industry to completely re-think everything they previously thought a record label was. Though it’s taken a long time, some progress has been made. Most notably the changing relationship between labels and artists so that it is simultaneously more equitable while giving the record labels better incentives to focus their energy on an artist. For most artists, and I was once of them, too, the problem is always one of mindshare. The label will only push a handful of acts, and how do you become one of those handful? It used to be mostly luck and who you knew (as if it wasn’t hard enough just to get a record contract, you also had to make sure you had the political alignment in the company in your favor). The new approach is to provide more equitable financial relationship between artists and labels, which would be a fantastic approach if labels could be trusted. But that’s another conversation for another time…

For Twitter, the solution is far less clear. The problem with Twitter is not that it’s free or that it’s programmed user behavior. In actuality, people already DO pay for the things Twitter give you for free. It’s called text messaging and you pay your mobile carrier for it every month. The problem is that Twitter as a service is not what I like to call a “purpose driven” service. It’s been driven by marketers and leveraged to excellent effect by celebrities, but for the average user, there is very little purpose or need for them to use Twitter. What would happen if suddenly they couldn’t “follow” Britney’s exploits on Twitter? Well, they’d simply get them from their favorite gossip blog who’ll happily repost, or a zillion other sources. And you already have a great way to send short messages to your friends…those aforementioned carrier provided text messages.

So will any social networks be able to charge customers? Probably not, unless they’re purpose driven. LinkedIn can charge users who have the goal of using LinkedIn to either find candidates for open positions, or those who are job hunting and want to leverage LinkedIn’s tools. And let’s not forget that dating sites are really not quite different from social networks, especially with the functionality that’s evolved to match sites like Facebook. So the problem comes when you build products that have no clear underlying “purpose” other than that of communicating with your friends. Good luck getting end users to pay. Pandora has certainly learning this lesson, with some counts putting their paid subscriber base at less than 1% of their users.