Barry is of course correct, the ‘skip-intro’ idea was a very poor and purely creative idea, which served to put people off Flash sites, but that kind of gratuitous nonsense is well and truely gone from todays Flash sites and applications. We have become more professional and better developers and we have learned from our mistakes.

But the OSP is not about gratuitous eye candy, not about drop shadows, not about aesthetics for the sake of over zealous creatives. It’s about giving EVERYONE a consistent and intuitive user experience. If you’ve all got an iPhone, and I suspect most of you have, then you’ll have experienced exactly what I’m talking about.

Yes Barry, the command line is indeed powerful…if you’re a programmer or a geek, but as these only represent the tiniest preportion of the market place that these companies are trying to sell to, I think having a consistent and intuitively usable interface will make them A LOT more money, and clearly they think so to. And ultimately that means we can make every device equally as sexy to interact with. No exceptions. The world at large will always choose great usability over great functionality. After all, it doesn’t matter how incredible the functionality is if most people can’t use it.

On my TV, I don’t want to use command line. I want an “engaging experience” that adds functionality. Right now, my set-top box’s menus are boring and have no added functionality at all. While this box is connected to the internet, it doesn’t use that functionality at all. I want my video on demand service to directly connect to IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes and give me their ratings and reviews. That’s the sort of experience I am looking for which is far from the “skip intro”-experience that you fear.

so where’s the buy-in? where’s the compelling reason for them to join.

your blog post sounds like “build it and they will come” – but that’s dangerous. Eye candy with no substance is pointless – and as has been found with “skip intro”, counter-productive. don’t give us animations and drop shadows for no reason.

“If I switch on my digital TV set-top box at home, it?s far from a rich ?engaging? user experience. The interface is dull and dead slow with no connectivity to online information and communities.”

what’s more important? the functionality or the “engagement”? Using the command line to perform tasks is a woeful ?engaging? user experience … but it’s incredibly powerful.

in other words, the best user experiance is one you don’t notice: “it just works”

eh, my 2c.

You are right that market penetration will take some time. However, one of the goals of the OSP is to have a runtime that can be update OTA instead of having to flash your device firmware.

I cannot agree on your point that Microsoft MediaCenter and Apple FrontRow have a high penetration. They may have some market penetration in some regions but certainly not in Europe where I am based. Again… We can’t twist any manufacturers arm to sign up for the OSP.