Hands on with People of Lava's Scandinavia Android TV: a glimpse into the future of TV

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Posted on 2 Jun 2010 at 18:00

The TV was turned on and we were greeted not with live TV, but with a home screen that had widgets for the weather, a clock and a calendar. Clicking to a second screen brings up a menu with a web browser, YouTube, Google Calendar, People of Lava’s App Store and the settings menu. This cannot be personalised at the moment, aside from downloading a different skin, but the company is looking into some of the suggestions we made to further improve the experience.

Svantesson explained that the home screen could be configured depending upon how the unit was sold. For example, if it was subsidised by a paid-for-TV service such as Sky or Virgin Media, it could include widgets for the latest news, new releases on Box Office, or even links to an e-commerce store which then take you to other areas of the broadcaster’s services.

It could also be changed by People of Lava with region-specific features, but users won’t be able to change an awful lot beyond the aforementioned skins. We’d like to see this changed, with personalised widgets, menus (promoting your favourite apps, or web pages), as well as the skins, to give users control of exactly what they want to see when they first turn their TV on. After all, the connected TV should be a user-focused experience, so the information presented needs to be useful and personal to the user (or users).

Unfortunately, live TV isn’t integrated into the "connected" aspects of the Scandinavia, so you’ll have to switch inputs to move from the Android operating environment. This isn’t a massive issue, but we would like to see better integration in the future. It’s something that People of Lava understands and wants to achieve, but it’ll have to wait until the second generation.