A few months ago I’ve been guest of the Telco TV Summit.

The aim of my speech, titled like this post and based on my experience with Bulldog Broadband in the UK, was showing how user-centered design can effectively lead an IPTV interface development, in order to bring some of the Internet potential into the television box.

The starting point is necessarily the Internet. A medium? A technology? Every definition would be reductive. Instead, let’s give a look at the sketch Tim Berners-Lee conceived the hypertext with. It’s displayed at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and appears so ingenious in its (relative) simplicity.

Doesn’t it look somehow like Doc Brown’s flux capacitor chart, the one he draws in 1955 after clashing against the toilet? Unforgettable!   But let’s remain focused…

The Internet has changed our lives because it allows users to customize, interact, build relationships. Everybody is the main character in the world-wide-web, because can build up his personal way of collecting, managing and enjoying unlimited content and amazing tools.

On the other hand, television is the typical passive medium. In front of the small screen we’re all spectators, ads viewers, recipients of a programme schedule that somebody else has defined for all of us.

The great advantage of traditional TV? Being prompt, immediate, outrageously easy-to-use. The real challenge for IPTV? Delivering the unlimited Internet potential onto the TV screen, without losing that easiness. Interactivity would be eventually available for everyone!

Consider the basic customer, threatened by these computers that send information throughout the world. Then give him a remote control. He’ll suddenly feel confident, and will gradually get ready to discover new amazing possibilities, as long as you provide them through a great user-experience.

Very soon he’ll play a movie whenever he wants, check the weather forecasts, share photographs and thoughts… And he’ll build his own TV schedule, as easily as I manage my iGoogle personal page.