QWERTY Keyboards and Living Room Remotes

The QWERTY keyboard seems to be making its way to living room remotes these days. I would assume the two needs driving this are "TV apps" and the increasing challenge of finding content on these systems.

The push for TV manufacturers to provide web connected application/widget platforms has made text input a barrier to entry (app authentication etc). The rush is probably driven more by a desire for feature parity from consumer electronics companies than actual customer needs. If you have spent time with these widget platforms, they tend to be lackluster, something akin to a dumbed down mobile app. Forcing mobile interaction models into the 10 foot experience is like forcing a square peg into a round hole. Sure you can hammer it in there with a remote that looks like a phone (at least they have familiarity going for them), but is it really the right place to start when pushing the connected living room forward?

The other reason that these keyboards are cropping up is simply for reasons of findability. Things like Boxee bring the fire hose of web content to the living-room and there has to be a way to cut through to what you want without drilling down through levels of hierarchy and long scrolling lists. Anyone who has tried to type out a movie name with a D-pad like the one on AppleTV knows it s a total pain in the ass. What happened to sitting back and vegging out? Are the days of passive lazy consumption over?

While it makes practical sense to bring QWERTY to the all of the boxes sitting in your living room I can't help but feel like its a bit of a short-term bandaid. Technology like voice recognition and gestural interfaces will eventually burry the remote control as we know it. Will the slide out keyboard remote be its last incarnation? Make these remotes any more robust and it just starts looking like a damn iPod Touch... then from a customer perspective you have to wonder why it needs to exist at all?