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uk sky - Living TV Active |
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 Flextech's LivingTV has launched a new interactive portal to accompany its broadcasts on Sky Digital. The interactive portal provides a comprehensive range of services including horoscopes, competitions and even psychic readings.
The core horoscope service is attractive, easy to use and also free - although extended forecasts are available via calling a premium rate telephony number at 60 pence per minute. The service also offers a 'Love Match' service where viewers can test their compatibility with their partner by comparing star signs. This requires the box to dial up to retrieve the content with a call charge of 25p.
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Created by Living's parent Flextech working in association with developer DITG, the portal has an attractive design, however the same circular button design and colour scheme is used across all the different services in the portal making them a little hard to distinguish. The design and colour scheme might be suited to Horoscopes, but it isn't really suited to the competition that is also included in this portal.
Once in the service, viewers can continue to watch their favourite programmes whilst interacting courtesy of a video window in the top right hand part of the screen, however the text window below the video is far too small, this is a pity, since this is where the main content is presented. In all honesty its barely enough for a couple of sentences meaning that the viewer has to constantly scroll through the text, this is annoying and makes it difficult to read at a normal rhythm.
Also, unusually for an application these days even simple text content takes quite a while to load, which would suggest either limited available bandwidth to carousel the data often enough, or poor performance of DITG's X-Browser. Since this is the first version of this application, its likely these issues will be corrected over time but it is noticeable.
Another noticeable feature of the application is the comprehensive viewer data it captures when viewers enter the competition. Although answering the multiple choice question is fairly simple, the viewer is then required to provide their name, title, date of birth, sex and address. Fortunately viewers are not required to enter their full address, only their postcode and house number, but the drawn out data entry is compounded by the way the application expects some data to be entered. Unlike most application, viewers cannot directly enter their date of birth using their remote number keys, but instead are required to toggle numbers using the up and down keys on the Sky remote. This actually slows down the process - and differs to the design of most other applications on the Sky platform.
LivingTV has found ratings success in paranormal based content and it is interesting that the service contains the ability for viewers to obtain psychic readings with a variety of testimonies from viewers on the value of the service. The psychics are profiled on screen, and viewers can either book a psychic for a specified time and set a text alert which lets them know when their chosen psychic is available, or they can call the first one available at a charge of £1.50 per minute. |
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