This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThe Internet is gradually expanding to many new devices, in addition to its original
native environment that was the Personal Computer. This wave started with mobile
devices and as we enter the Internet of Things era, connectivity is possible from cars to
light switches. One of the first devices, to follow mobiles, is the Television.
Connectivity and two-way interaction on the TV device has in fact started even in the
first days of the medium, but had failed to make it widely available, due to technological
limitations of the past. Now, this has changed, with the Smart TV devices that can
utilize the fast internet connections that are available in most developed countries.
However, even though the technology and devices are now widely available there are
still challenges in order to make the vast Internet and web content available in the Smart
TVs. These challenges, have a familiar resemblance to what happened a few years ago,
when internet connectivity was introduced on the mobile phone. Although, it was
“feasible” to access any webpage from your mobile device, the experience for the user
was often very frustrating, due to many factors, that derived from the fact that the web
was designed for large screens and mice of the desktop computers, not the small touch
screens and limited hardware of the phone. Nonetheless, these obstacles were
successfully overcome, by introducing techniques and methodologies (e.g. Responsive
Web Design) to make the web more mobile-friendly and also work from the
manufacturers to improve their devices to this direction as well. The success of these
actions is now evident, since the access to the web from mobile devices has surpassed
the PC, and it is now a standard practice for every new website to be mobile-friendly.
In this research work, we will attempt to do one very significant step towards this
direction for the Smart TV. In other words, to discover what has to be done to make the
web more TV-friendly. To do this, we explore many different TV devices from several
manufacturers and see their similarities and differences. We explore numerous user
studies and surveys to discover what is the problem in the Web experience on the TV,
so that we can propose solutions to make web content TV-friendly. Based on these
findings, we design prototypes and put them to the test on different devices and userevaluation.
Finally, we propose a set of guidelines, that web designers can apply on
their websites to make them TV-friendly, in the hope to introduce the first step towards
a friendlier internet era for the TV
