Before the Experience Lab, [Genevieve Bell] was working with the Digital Home team; a job she jokes that she got because of her criticism of Intel’s ill-fated Viiv platform; while Intel engineers were promising to “unleash the PC in your TV” she was pointing out that people already had a screen in their living room and they didn’t want it to behave anything like a PC.
“We put up with things in PCs that we would never put up with in a TV. Imagine the first time the TV told you it needed a new driver or the first time your Tivo said it needed to defragment before you could record a programme – or the first time your TV blue screened!”
Instead, she says, Intel should have been asking “What is the essence of TV that people love so much? What is it that’s so compelling that we still organise our day, our time and our furniture around it?” The very un-PC answer is that “People love TV because it’s not complicated. It’s one button to a story they care about.”