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Consumers are connecting an increasing number and variety of devices to the home network, mainly to gain access to broadband connectivity but increasingly for applications such as media sharing. In this paper we identify new user needs in the areas of remote control and dual screen applications and consider them in terms of existing deployed technologies.

We discuss the particular needs of disabled people where television remote control is concerned, and present a new approach in which media devices implement a standard API that exposes their internal functionality for inspection and control by other devices on the home network. Such controlling devices can include personal assistance technology, the users of which currently lack a means of interacting effectively with their TVs and other media devices. We describe the full benefits of this approach as a means of further improving the remote control experience for both able-bodied and disabled users. We also describe its capability for improving the quality of dual screen experiences: by adding remote control elements to the application on the secondary device, and by providing a low-cost, high accuracy means of synchronising the experience between the devices. We have developed "Universal Control"; an experimental web API that implements this new approach, and with which we have implemented prototypes that demonstrate the benefits of our approach in all the scenarios described above. These include accessible remote controls for a range of disabled users, and some radical dual screen experiences that exploit precise inter-device synchronisation. We present an overview of the API, and describe and demonstrate our prototypes.