The BBC has unveiled the Connected Red Button, a worthy successor to its established linear loops and streams, writes Julian Clover.
Old technologies never die, they just get reinvented, or maybe it’s the idea that gets the makeover? Red Button has been a part of our lives for the best part of 13 years. We’ve long since gone past the stage when the conference wag declares that they thought the Red Button on his remote switched everything off.
It has not all been completely plain sailing. Attempts to introduce Red Button advertising have been largely ineffective and it has been left to the BBC, and to a certain extent Sky, to be champion and cheerleader.
20 million viewers per month use the Red Button, a stat of almost Morecambe and Wise proportions.
The new Connected Red Button will bring an end to joining the weather forecast just in time to hear what the forecast is for the Shetland Islands on Thursday. It also means sports streams of Olympic proportions and a firm link to the iPlayer.
Plans for the new Connected Red Button, which launched this week on Virgin Media, don’t quite mean the end of the MHEG system. In any case MHEG was always a ‘terrestrial’ technology, Virgin’s own interpretation of Red Button used Liberate, and Sky built it on OpenTV.
Nevertheless, with the BBC having held talks with Samsung and LG about introducing the new feature to their connected TVs, it’s clear where the developers are going to be spending their time.
That said, Red Button has been with us for those 13 years, and analogue teletext only switched off in the UK a month ago.
With the Connected Red Button up and running it’s a bit of a mystery why the BBC actually needed all the grief that YouView brought them.
The big question must now be between the silos of connected TVs and the BBC’s expressed view that the public wants an experience that is akin to sitting down and watching television as they do now – who’d have thought it.
Already we’re seeing manufacturers bring things like Preference settings into a single portal, but the real question lies in how the viewer will use what they are presented.
It seems logical in the extreme that if your choice is to press the remote’s Red Button to get into catch-up TV, you would prefer to that to three or four button clicks that would get you to the manufacturer’s portal.
From there follows the question as to how long those portals will survive and I’d almost put money on MHEG outliving them.