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I'll admit that by 2018 I was pretty much done with picture-in-picture. That's why I wrote this article, probably one of the more passive-aggressive ones on this blog. It's worth a read now that you know that, because you'll detect the buried rage at having to answer questions about PIP for the three people in the world who seemed to care about it. Oops, there I go getting passive-aggressive again.

The promise of PIP

Picture-in-picture debuted in a lot of TV sets in the early '10s as manufacturers tried to get people to replace their 3-4 year old flatscreens. TV makers had gotten very rich very quickly thanks to new technology that everyone wanted, and PIP was one of the things they hoped to use to entice people to keep buying. They tried 3D, high refresh rates, HDR, and eventually 4K. Really, none of these things lit people up until they got cheap enough that they could be in base-model TVs.

With picture-in-picture, the thought was that you could watch two programs at the same time. Early 4K televisions allowed you to watch 4 programs at the same time. In the meantime, systems like DIRECTV's News Mix and DISH's Sports Bar mode let you do much the same thing.

DIRECTV's short infuatuation with picture-in-picture

Picture-in-Picture was a feature of DIRECTV's first Genie, which debuted in 2011. It wasn't the easiest thing to use, and like many "fringe" features of the DIRECTV DVR, it didn't gain many followers. It's not surprising, because PIP wasn't very popular anywhere. There's one reason.



See, it turns out that people didn't want to watch two programs on the same screen. They just wanted to watch two screens at the same time.

The big misstep

It really seems like TV makers didn't realize the impact that smartphones would have on daily life. In the space of about two years, people stopped trying to get information from their computers, TVs, or newspapers and started getting it all from their phones. That meant a lot of the fancy features cooked up by those TV makers weren't needed. Some, like 3D, actually made it impossible to use your phone at the same time.

Today, if you want to watch two things at the same time, you just open the second thing on your phone. You probably do this every day and you don't think about it. The second thing is private to you and doesn't disturb others in the room. Picture-in-picture made the experience worse for everyone.

TV manufacturers responded almost immediately by taking PIP out of TVs. DIRECTV did the same, removing the feature as soon as it had a new generation of hardware. By the time I wrote that article, there were only a handful of folks who even remembered the feature. Of course, like many other pieces of technology that came and went, there were diehards who simply didn't understand why their favorite feature wasn't being carried forward

The strategy doesn't change

There's always going to be a new set of features that come in, and it's going to require some features getting left behind. If every TV and device had every feature that had ever been invented, they would be too expensive and too hard to use. There will always be a need to streamline, focus, and improve the experience for as many people as possible. For those who are left behind when a feature is phased out, it's a transition. But, sad to say, it's one we all must make.

The post THROWBACK THURSDAY: When picture-in-picture was still (almost) a thing appeared first on The Solid Signal Blog.

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