The Home Media Station - An Emerging Class of Home Infotainment Appliances

by Konstantinos Chorianopoulos

The term ‘Home Media Station’ (HMS hereafter) stands for an emerging class of television-centric appliances used for information and mainly entertainment —usually referred to as infotainment— purposes. This category (Wallich 2002) encompasses devices that range from video game consoles (Sony PS2, Microsoft XBox), mp3 juke-boxes (HP dec100), set-top boxes (Nokia Mediamaster), digital video editors (JVC HM-HDS1), digital video recorders (TiVo, ReplayTV), to combinations of the above (Nokia Mediaterminal, Digeo Moxi Media Center).

In general, a home media station is an appliance that connects to the television and hi-fi equipment, coupled with broadband reception and probably feedback connection, for the provision of advanced audiovisual services, in a relaxed, non-productivity oriented setting. The television is central to the HMS experience because it is used either to display visual content or to portray an advanced user interface for manipulating media content that may not be visual.

The roots of the HMS can be traced back to the early visions of the CD-ROM, home multimedia, video games and interactive television industries. The latter one is a technical development that has been promised for a long time ago, but never achieved a successful commercial materialization. Reasons for failure are attributed to immature technology, high costs and mainly to information technology driven features coupled with user interface design inspired by the personal computer practice (Carey 1997).

It has also been widely evident, in our literature review, that the approach followed by the majority of scientific publications is mainly PC-centric and most times implicitly focused on the work environment. Differences between the two environments and strategies for resolution of the issues have been noted by academics and practitioners (Brouwer-Janse et al. 1992, Mountford et al. 1992, Herigstad and Wichansky 1998) and are being summarized by Nielsen 1997.

Nevertheless, the application of HCI principles to the design case of the HMS has been driven more by entrepreneurial spirit —such as TiVo's— or media giant interactive TV trials —such as Time Warner's Future Service Network— than by methodological, published and widely available academic research.

Traditional usability engineering techniques measure successful task completion, efficiency and error rate, parameters that are usually correlated positively with user satisfaction. Most notable among the recent findings about the HMS class of devices is the realization that users’ subjective satisfaction is at odds with performance metrics. In a usability test of three video skipping interfaces (two commercial and one novel), users preferred the interface that required more time, clicks and had the highest error rate (Drucker et al. 2002). Users reasoned their choice on the basis of how fun and relaxing an interface was.

In our opinion, the promise of interactive television is currently fulfilled subliminally through the emergence of the Home Media Station class of home infotainment appliances. Read more, in our special section about the emergence of the Home Media Station.

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