Jumble of user interfaces

[Ecton]

Will sky put pressure on app developers to use a standard user interface controls. Skyglass is an a jumble  of buttons that need a variaty of user skills which should not be the case.  I other words make all apps uniform and easy.

[TimmyBGood]

@Ecton 

Given Sky is effectively smaller than most of those app owners, I'd suggest they have negligible leverage in that respect.

There's absolutely no likelihood that any major app is going to be redesigned to fit a Sky style just on Sky hardware, particularly as they all exist on multiple platforms globally and user familiarity / brand identity are key design principle

[GD1 · Accepted solution]

@Ecton  Sky can't force the likes of BBC. ITV, Ch4, CH5, UK Play, Apple, Netflix etc to have a uniformed app.

All broadcasters/streaming companies have control over their own apps and Sky cannot and should not dictate how they should look.

[MarkGoldsmith]

Yeah the app developers almost certainly  won't do that. They would want a standard UI for their app across all devices they support their app on. For example ItV would want the ItV X Ui experience to be the same across all platforms the app runs on.

[Padam_Padam]

@Ecton 

Sadly I don't think Sky will ever be able to have a uniform UI because they use standard web & server based versions of apps, rather than them being specifically written for the Glass/Stream hardware.  

If it's of any help, since I switched from Sky Stream to using an Apple TV 4K box for all our TV viewing, we've found that Apple tends to use its own player controls for most of the UK streaming apps, so the simple Siri remote which has a lot fewer buttons than the Sky remote, can control all the apps in pretty much an identical manner. Play/Pause/FF/RW all work the same with most apps and therefore helps makes them much quicker and easier to control. 

[Ecton]

How can you speak for the app owners?

[Ecton]

Should there be an industry standard or is this the demise of SkyGlass  or is it only for geeks

[GD1]

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@Ecton wrote:

How can you speak for the app owners?

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How can you think Sky has any pressure over the app owners?

[TimmyBGood]

@Ecton 

Sky is a small regional television platform serving rather fewer households across all its European territories combined than, for example, there are in California and Texas.  Even with Comcast behind them it's inconceivable that the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Disney will redesign their global-scale apps to suit a Sky interface: that just doesn't happen.

[MarkGoldsmith]

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@Ecton wrote:

How can you speak for the app owners?

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Mainly just using knowledge and experience. There would be quite a significant cost for an app owner to create a completely specialised version of an app with a different UI just to be run on Sky Glass and Sky Stream. The cost certainly wouldn't outweigh any benefit for the app owner, particularly how it would be a fairly small percentage of the app users who are using the Sky Entertainment OS version of the app. 

[A+JW]

Although I think it's unlikely we'll see unified app UIs, I think there is one big thing Sky could focus on to improve the UX. 

These apps are likely mostly or all web apps, they could provide a feature in the browser to replace the HTML video player with the Sky UI one. They'd of course need to have a bunch of functionality like supporting apps as breaks, but I think this would solve most of the issues and would likely be very little work for the app devs to incorporate and would provide a much more coherent and consistent system. 

This is similar to what Apple has achieved with their tvOS, their own player is so good the app developers tend to just use it even over their own. Channel 4, ITVX etc all use Apple's instead of their own so there is a evidence that this would be adopted if provided.