The ‘TV key’: one click to the tube: It’s all about simplicity and revenue generation

It’s obvious, it’s not new and it’s at the forefront of the latest major, consumer-oriented innovation.
Phone keys dedicated to a single functionality, such as mobile TV, may see increased use in the near-term to ensure that consumers have a simple, unambiguous path to the latest entertainment to reach the handset.
The dedicated key also reflects the degree to which handset vendors often work to please their carrier clients, in part to provide simple access to revenue-generating services, which at least one analyst said flatly lies at the heart of carriers’ formulae for handset subsidies.
The latest example of this hardware design element can be found in two phones announced at the International Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, destined for Verizon Wireless’ upcoming mobile TV service. The Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. SCH-u620 and the LG Electronics Co. Ltd. LX9400 both provide a dedicated key, or “hard button,” with an icon composed of a slightly horizontal box with rabbit ears.
(It is somewhat ironic that while this icon apparently is a universally recognized sign for “television,” today only cavemen and other techno-refugees actually use rabbit ears. Now the icon appears on the latest technology, along with a retractable, single TV antenna.)
Of course, dedicated keys on the handset are also used to access or control music, imaging and other functionalities such as push-to-talk. Now that mobile TV is upon us, the hard button is a natural.
Ease-of-use for the consumer and revenue generation for the carrier is indeed the driver, said Muzib Khan, a Samsung vice president for product management and engineering.
“Now that mobile TV is important and new, we should highlight it,” Khan said.
The concept is a simple extension of the principle that most-used applications should appear at the top of a scroll-down menu, according to Khan. Often when a user powers on a phone, menu choices and cursors will be pre-positioned to highlight revenue-generating services, he said.
One other notable aspect to Samsung’s TV phone for Verizon Wireless, according to Khan: “We wanted to be sure this device is not viewed as different from a regular (mobile) phone,” he said. “That’s an important distinction. You do not need a big, ugly, clumsy thing. People will buy the device to communicate by voice and data. They probably will talk more than they use the TV.”
For their part, carriers emphasize that meeting the needs of the consumer is the first consideration on their road to revenue generation. What’s good for the customer is good for the carrier and, thus, good for the handset vendor.
“The button takes you directly to the channel guide, which allows you to select the show you want to watch,” said Verizon Wireless spokeswoman Brenda Raney, in an e-mail exchange. “You can scroll from that point to a show, click OK and you’re looking at the selected show.
“Adoption levels are higher when the service is easy to use,” Raney continued, “but more importantly it serves the needs and the expectations of a customer if a new technology can help a customer enhance their lifestyle.”
Would the dedicated TV key allow a user to sign up for service?
“We have not announced details regarding sign-up for the service,” Raney said, “but the way the phones were demonstrated at CES, sign-up was not part of the option on the phones.”
If there’s a nascent trend anywhere here, it may be reflected in Apple Inc.’s iPhone, which presents all functionalities via icons on a large touch screen.
“The best example of the ease-of-use issue is the iPhone, which reflects a desire to expose certain services on its home page,” said Avi Greengart, handset analyst at Current Analysis. “It’s logical to assume that consumers can only use applications they can find. Hard buttons expose the service to consumers.”
(Greengart pointed out that two kinds of hard buttons typically crop up: one accesses a handset feature, the other accesses carrier services. Another option is user-programmable buttons.)
“From a hardware design perspective, whatever the standout feature is, that gets a hard button,” Greengart said.
Should there be a rush among handset vendors to embrace this approach, already in use by various mobile handset makers, particularly in the smartphone space, “hard buttons” may give way to “soft buttons”-though the quaint TV icon may well prove to be a lasting image.
In the meantime, given the limited “real estate” on the handset, dedicated keys often are limited to emphasize the handset’s primary feature-whether it’s mobile TV, music or imaging-in the voice-plus-one model that some analysts believe will dominate over the Swiss Army knife, all-in-one model. Too many dedicated keys and confusion reasserts itself, ease-of-use advantages vanish.
Meanwhile, the fewer the clicks a consumer makes to access a revenue-generating application, the more a handset vendor endears their product to a prospective carrier client, according to Bill Ray, analyst with ARC Chart.
“The subsidy angle isn’t complicated,” Ray said. “It’s about demonstrating how the handset can make more money for the network operator.”