Teaching Intel to love the television

Abstract

Over the last decade, as Intel Corporation has successively sought to expand its business into consumer electronics adjacencies, it envisioned a spectrum of screens in homes that could serve as interchangeable front-ends to a relatively standard computational back-end. From this perspective, televisions, set top boxes, and other CE devices are fraternal twins to Intel's traditional competency, silicon solutions for the PC. In this video, the authors discuss how Intel's User Experience Group has steered the company to accept the television for what it truly is, a fundamentally different device, experience, and ecosystem than the PC. Drawing on ethnographic research data from 21 countries, collected over three years, they detail how teaching Intel to love the television has meant driving consumer-centric perspectives of the role, place, and meaning of television in global homes into Intel's Digital Home Group's strategy and platform roadmaps. This has meant abandoning the idea that “a screen is just a screen,” and that interactive, connected, and smart televisions will be PCs disguised to blend with living room aesthetics. Show more