Making a great TV production is hard. There is a steep learning curve and it did cost a lot of money just to start - way beyond the means of most people who are interested. But of course technology and digitalisation has changed all that.
Now you easily make you own TV studio.
I have been playing with Mogulus for a while and am very impressed by what you can do in a browser. Last week I came across Boinx TV and that really brought it home how far this has come.What a great proposition - make your own channel and get it online.
Even if you are not going to produce your own show, you learn an awful amount about how it actually is done by just playing around.
Of course I’d love to see the clubs and the national association here embrace tools like Boinx and Mogulus. So stay tuned!
The NYT write up is favourable and I think this points the way to finally bringing voice recognition mainstream. I used to use ViaVoice on the PC but it was just too much hassle. The iPhone app once again shows the importance of context.
I think it’ll be great for footy fans too. I’d like to just say “who are Man Utd. playing on Sunday” and see the fixture list as a result. Or even better beat some of the football nuts who have amazing trivia stored in their skulls.
Who did Dynamo Moscow play on their 1945 tour of the UK and what were the results? - just one second while I whip out the old iPhone….
I imagine one day we will be able to navigate content archives using an interface that looks like Oblong. They call it a “spatial operating environment”, very haptic and looks fascinating. It seems to take the touch screen approach of Jeff Han and adds something from Cooliris.
By the looks of the video, you need a diploma from the Marcel Marceau mime school to operate it.
This is an amazing video of a BBC augmented reality project called “Band in your hand“. It is apparently real and actually worked. There`s a blog post from the BBC Radio Labs with some links to other augmented reality demos and projects.
It`s easy to see a version with a football angle, but turn it around so the people who actually do attend get something special. Imagine you are lucky enough to get to Moscow to see the 2008 final on Wednesday 21st. When you get your ticket and travel documents you hold up a special UEFA flyer to your webcam and get a neat and exclusive intro film from whatever team you support and Mr Putin (why not, it`s fantasy time).
Clubs could do it for season ticket holders. The FA`s could of course do it for people who don`t get tickets to sold out internationals and cup finals.
And no doubt kids will be demanding this kind of thing for their birthday party invites in a couple of years.
So there I am watching Manchester United play Barca in the Champions League semi final. It’s half time and the ads roll. Ford have done a good job lately, changed the emphasis in their CL ads, they are more fun and focus on people rather than stars. Then the new Nike ad starts.
I think it’s the best ad I’ve seen on TV. After seeing it the first time I had a big smile on my face, a definite wow effect! It gets you right into the action and is more like a first person console game than a conventional advertisement. It’s rare nowadays for an ad to be a talking point but most people I know watching the game on TV mentioned the Nike ad.
No doubt it cost a lot to make and they’ve paid a lot to run it on the networks. It has also racked up over 1.3 million views on Youtube. Tim Street puts that into a dollar perspective and shows the big money is still going to Television. I’d like to know how many people have linked to it or used the link tools in Youtube. That would give a fuller picture and that amount of views must mean great word-of-mouth marketing.
For me it works because:
It tells a great story
It’s immersive - you really are there in the action
It’s aspirational - who hasn’t dreamt of being there, this could be me!
There’s a link to our own experience - either from playing or from FIFA 08 type of games
I went straight to Nike.com after the game and watched it again. It is indeed a great ad. I think it can inspire us to make user interfaces and services that give you that engaging and immersive feeling. Maybe we just need all the team with a playercam and an rfid to tell us how fast they are running and what their heart rate is.
One interesting detail, the ad was done through the 72andsunny agency in Amsterdam and directed by Guy Ritchie who will no doubt be taking a keen interest in the Champions League final on the 21st. With him being shacked up with Madonna I can’t knock his taste in women, but Chelsea?
NewTeeVee have a post on a great mashup idea from Dipity. Adding the element of time into navigation, not just sorting results by date but displaying them on an actual timeline that the user controls. The timeline has a cognitive model we all understand very easily.
I searched for the current Norwegian Champions SK Brann and spent some idle time looking at the pride of Bergen in action.
Like the previous post it shows the emergence of novel and desirable ways to navigate rich content, another type of navimation. I’m not sure how the videos are arranged, could be views or popularity. If this was coupled to the league table it could be very interesting. There’s some rights questions related to the content that need to be addressed at some stage.
If you’re not a hard core fan it can often be intimidating to join a discussion about the team. You just don’t know enough. After I moved to Oslo I started supporting the local team Vålerenga. Steeped in proud history and with a lot of classic moments you absolutely should know about. Not me. The same it true for Manchester United, I’ve grown more attached to them over the years but feel I lack a lot of the history. Here’s where the web really helps and I hope over time all this information will also be on the mobile platform.
First you look up the club’s own site. Then you look at the Wikipedia for a great overview. The fan club’s own site is often a maze - hard core fans deep in discussion topics that I have no meaning or insight into. But here you can learn the words to all the songs if you don’t want to look like a prawn sandwich type of supporter.
What is interesting from a user experience perspective is the development in the presentation of content. Take the team listing for Vålerenga. Vital information you should know something about. It’s a static layout, does the job, I can match names and numbers to faces but it’s not very exciting.
Uefa build on this with a richer presentation of the team gallery in euro2008. Nicer, more user interaction with some options to change the layout. A big step up, Uefa do this very well as I’ve written before.
Piclens - A giant leap forward
The guys behind this app must have been inspired by the Matrix and Minority Report. When I first saw Piclens it was a real Wow! moment. Holy Moly Batman this is good! The video below doesn’t really do it credit. You should install Piclens yourself for the full screen effect and to feel the control you have over the motion graphics. In terms of user experience Piclens represents a very interesting solution to navigating and browsing complex data spaces. I’ll write more on that in future posts.
I searched YouTube with Piclens for Rosenborg and ended up using far more time than I had planned. It’s a really nice interface to their archive - I’m staying clear of the obvious rights issues here, this is just an article about user experience. I watched recent videos but also stumbled upon classics from the past such as a young looking Iversen and their famous manager Nils Arne Eggen.
There is a commercial aspect to this as well as the dwell time in the interface is probably quite long and opens for a lot of brand exposure for advertisers.
Piclens is simply stunning. I really hope clubs can integrate it into their video archives and their image galleries. It’ll make learning about your favourite team pleasurable not just an intimidating chore.
I use Piclens on a MacBook Pro that also has the touchpad enabled so there’s a haptic element to the experience too. I guess we’ll be seeing something like Jeff Han’s multitouch wizzardry in the consumer space in a couple of years. I wonder how you could use the Perceptive Pixel screen for footie?
Finding out who is playing who, when they are doing it and the eventual results, often means a trawl through various pages of a site. It’s usually text based with the layout in tables that feel like they haven’t changed much since Mosaic. It’s not exactly gripping.
UEFA’s approach moves things up a notch and presents the European football leagues in a way that is visually pleasing and simple to navigate. It feels more like a TV graphic or something that you would expect in a console game such as FIFA 08. I am convinced this is the way to go to deliver compelling and engaging football services.
Matchcentre top level view of all European leagues by date.
Using the calendar as a navigation layer is an excellent idea for football. Selecting a date and then a league brings up the fixtures or results from that day and there’s a tab for the table/standings. This image shows the Norwegian Tippeligaen.
Overall it works very well. The interaction and usability designers have done a fine job, it’s a showcase. I actually enjoy using this and it lets me get an idea of what is going on in other leagues that I normally would never think about or had no previous interest in. For the bigger leagues the Macthcentre also has more details such as team line ups and major events.
I know the online betting companies such as BetFair,Norsk Tipping and Eurobet give you a very detailed list of events and results, but their presentation is more clay-station than the Matchcentre’s Playstation. I do hope they improve it by adding more motion graphics, but right now it’s the best thing out there for those interested in the fixtures and results for European Football.
I imagine there is an awful lot of business generated by fans traveling to see their team play. Event companies specialise in this and it´s a growing segment. The experience can be huge, there is the travel itself, usually meeting some other like minded fans, the whole matchday event and the travel home again in glory or in sorrow. A quick search on Flickr shows how much is actually posted from match day.
But I think there is a lot more that can be done to make the fans feel special.
Recently I went to see the two quarter final games of the Champions League played on consecutive days at Anfield and Old Trafford. We travelled on Tuesday morning from Oslo. The plane was packed. From what I could see most of the passengers were there for the games. There was plenty of team shirts, scarfs, beer bellies and all the talk seemed to be about the fixtures or memories of other trips.
This must happen with predictable regularity. Football fans flying to a big game. Did the airline, in this case SAS, make anything special out of it? No. Could they? Yes. Should they? Definitely! If they start to take the themes of new marketing thinking seriously then they have to look at giving niche groups like travelling fans something extra. Many of the fans are normally business travellers and used to getting well looked after but going to a match is a different context.
What would have worked for me? A simple announcement from the Captain relating to the games, something similar from the cabin crew. There was even a TV commentator on board who was willing to do his pundit job en route over the intercom. It would have created a positive feeling towards SAS and made the flight memorable. Southwest Airlines are supposed to be very good at this so I am sure it can be done.
There´s a lot of business in keeping the traveling fans happy and loyal. There´s a lot that can be done with web and mobile to add value to the travel. I´ll be coming back to this topic soon.
