June 5th, 2007
Seven screen shots: forthcoming Verizon FiOS TV Interactive Program Guide
Just this morning, cable television industry trade newspaper Multichannel News posted a link to a file that when opened, contains a Flash demo of features offered in Verizon’s forthcoming interactive media guide for its FiOS TV service.
The guide, which Verizon calls IMG (nice acronym for “image,” as well) will be tested in Fort Wayne quite soon, and will be deployed throughout the rest of the FIOS TV footprint by the end of this summer. Initial testing was performed in New Jersey earlier this year.
More info from the Multichannel News report:
The IMG features hierarchical, tabbed menus and a search function that spans TV channels, video-on-demand titles and digital-video-recorder recordings. The VOD section includes movie-poster art (also viewable in a list) and provides trailers for some titles.
For entering text, the IMG provides an on-screen keyboard, a scroll wheel or “cell-phone style” entry (using the letters on a number keypad). IMG includes interactive-TV applications, called Widgets, that offer weather and traffic reports based on ZIP code.
Verizon also claimed that the guide has very low latency, responding to a remote-control command in less than two-tenths of a second.
Other enhanced features for IMG are still in development, such as allowing viewers to rate programs and then providing personalized recommendations of TV shows.
I went in to the link and pulled out seven IMG screen grabs for you. That’s one at the top of this post. I’d bet you would like to see what six more of these grabs say about the FIOS TV IMG feature set.
Notice that the program guide can be split into a half screen, with the other half showing the selection itself.
Clicking on a listing evokes a center-tab program description.
Alphabetical program listings that can be triggered by keyword or alpha key entries.
You can even search for on-demand movies by actor. We have an Al Pacino fan here.
You can even peruse a list of available movies for watching via what might be termed “movie poster mode.”
Browse through your pictures, too, then click on one to show!
Pretty cool.
Hey, I’d love to hear from current FiOS TV subscribers. What do you think of this interactive program guide?
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
