scte PRESENTS
TV to IP - The Capacity Challenge Panel 3: Capacity & Usability
He argued that many lessons have been forgotten. Early digital UIs evolved towards familiar, multi-path navigation (numbers, zap, mini-guide, full EPG). Modern streaming UIs often narrow users to a single discovery path and prioritise what the service wants viewers to watch, raising friction levels for everyone – not just older audiences. Account set-up and sign-in flows (profiles, codes, passwords) are another barrier on TVs, where typing is painful. Remote control design echoed the same cycle: attempts to “simplify” by stripping buttons frequently made things harder, before operators re-added essentials like number keys, transport controls and clear channel/volume differentiation. On reliability, Nock reminded the room that broadcast isn’t flawless either: DTT is affected by weather, site alignment, trees and even birds on masts; satellite has rain fade. IP has its own Achilles’ heel in UK homes: Wi-Fi propagation through brick and concrete, plus mediocre placement or hiding of routers. He contrasted near- universal 30Mbps line-speed availability with spotty in-home delivery. Latency drew debate. While many consumers tolerate delay, live sports plus social media can make 6-10 seconds feel disruptive, and device-to-device desync within the home is noticeable. Targets around 8 seconds glass-to-glass were cited as reasonable. Walsh cautioned that, in a world where fans already juggle multiple paid services, persistent delay and friction could push some towards piracy – making latency a churn and rights-holder issue as much as a tech metric. Overall, the panel urged a usability agenda that blends broadcast reliability with IP flexibility, reduces user “costs”, respects familiar behaviours, and smoothes discovery and sign-in—meeting viewers where they are, on any device and network.
Our new technology can sometimes leave viewers behind by removing the familiar.
Ampere Analysis’s Hannah Walsh framed “usability” in video as an end-to-end experience, not just a speed test.
According to the analyst, in the UK fibre is set to overtake cable before the end of the year, but many homes still depend on DSL. That matters because time spent has shifted decisively to streaming: subscription OTT has led the way since 2022, while BVOD like iPlayer and ITVX, and free social video now rivals broadcast TV for minutes watched. Device habits are split by age: 18-24s split viewing roughly between smart phones and smart TVs (with frequent second- screen overlap), while 55-64s still prefer traditional TV sets, migrating to smart TVs as they replace their hardware. Walsh proposed thinking about “capacity” as the viewer’s capacity, expressed as four costs: effort (how hard it is to reach content), financial (subscriptions, broadband, equipment, data), technical (how much the home network and devices are made to do) and experiential (buffering, crashes, quality drops vs broadcast). These show up as fragmentation (inconsistent UIs and search), home-network weaknesses (patchy Wi-Fi, underpowered routers, neighbour interference), inequality (gigabit fibre vs DSL or capped mobile data) and complexity (HDMI juggling, multiple passwords, constant updates). Potential remedies include: smarter integration (cross-platform discovery and universal guides), better in-app optimisation to adapt to varying networks without harming perceived quality, “hybrid resilience” that pairs broadcast with IP for scale, reliability and inclusion, and designing for everyone – solutions that work for the least tech-savvy as well as early adopters.
Consultant Ian Nock traced a usability arc from fiddly analogue tuning dials to today’s “computers with fantastic screens”.
TV to IP: Open Session
The closing discussion focused on the future of digital television, particularly the transition from DTT to IP-based
Volume 47 No.4 DECEMBER 2025
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