Hopefully, from Chapters 1–5 you’ve got some idea of where interactive television production is now. Of course, the industry is so fast moving that parts of this book will be out of date even before the ink is dry. That’s the nature of the beast. There are ways to keep up, nevertheless. One is to sign up to iTV news services, like those from BroadbandBananas and Interactive TV Today. The other is to talk to people at the cutting edge about where they think things are going. Here’s a sample of thoughts from three people heavily involved in making the future of iTV happen.

Must-Have Interactive Television

Scott Gronmark, head of interactive television, BBC New Media.

One of the pleasures of being involved in interactive television for the past four years has been listening to predictions delivered with all the certainty of Old Testament prophecy. Here are some of my favourites:

• ‘Web-on-television is the future – which means you won’t have to build any of those horribly complicated broadcast applications any longer’ (new media strategist).

• ‘If the content’s good enough, viewers won’t mind waiting 30 seconds for a page to download’ (teletext executive).

• ‘Television is going to be one part of the experience you get from that screen in the corner of the living room, and probably a relatively minor part of the overall mix’ (countless web executives).

Here’s my chief prediction: linear television will remain, overwhelmingly, the reason people sit down in front of that screen in the corner of the sitting room. The majority of their time in front of it will consist of watching television without interactivity. But interactivity will become absolutely intertwined with the viewing experience, as viewers increasingly use buddy chat, chat forums and play-along quizzes, register votes, catch up on the latest sport and weather news via text and graphics and video, watch the Olympic event they’re really interested in, donate to a charity, get some revision tips, check local cinema listings, do some banking, order their weekly shopping, send an email, whatever.

But if there aren’t great programmes available, they won’t be sitting in front of the television in the first place. And if the interactive television industry doesn’t face this fact, using interactive services will remain a minority activity.

The interactive television we have in 2003 doesn’t have to exist in the United Kingdom. We could kill it stone dead and there would be some disappointed games players, gamblers and sport fans, but no great public outcry. As a somewhat ad hoc collection of services, it’s in the nice-to-have rather than must-have category. By 2005, ceasing interactivity on television would genuinely disappoint a lot of viewers, who will have begun to rely on it as a means of communication, shopping, entertainment and enlightenment; indeed, some types of programmes will seem strangely bare without an enhanced element. By 2007, getting rid of interactive television will seem as inconceivable as pulling the plug on the web would now. But to reach that state of ‘must-have-ness’, we, as an industry, need to concentrate on the following:

• Create horses for courses: as a medium, interactive television has barely begun to crawl. But a number of big events, including Wimbledon, Big Brother, Walking with Beasts and Test the Nation have all, in their individual ways, thrown light on the big question: ‘What do viewers want from interactivity?’ Rather than endlessly repeating these early formats, we need to keep experimenting by creating new formats. The richness – and unexpectedness – of these pioneering services certainly grabbed the public’s attention; visually, they represented a leap forward for television, something evidently new and exciting. But I’m convinced that the future will be more about finding which facets of interactivity genuinely enhance each genre, and concentrating on those aspects. Just as choosing different camera angles hasn’t proved a winner with football fans (highlights and alternative audio seem to be more popular), so interactive viewers will eventually grow tired of ‘smorgasbord’ menus offering a bewildering variety of choices.

• Create the virtual water cooler experience: when there were only a handful of channels and no web to surf, talking about television was a major feature of our lives. But now, if a programme has engaged or enraged you on television the night before, the chance of finding someone to discuss it with has lessened. We need to provide viewers with the opportunity to enthuse, complain, affect and influence programmes by talking to programme makers, other viewers, or their friends via discussion forums or chat rooms. This process will also help redefine the relationship between the programme maker and the audience – imagine how many viewers might be willing to make their views felt if they could do it without moving from their sofa, via the handset, immediately after the programme.

• Create an effective call to action – or get rid of it: only around 20 per cent of viewers react to the red icon in the top right-hand corner of their screen by pressing the red key on their handset. I predict this figure will drop and lead to some industry panic. By 2007 there might very well be no call to action. Interactivity will be seen as part of the programme and viewers will be expected to act positively to get rid of the enhanced element. If this can’t be achieved, then the industry will have come up with an effective call to action that tells you exactly what you’ll get when you press the red key. Too often, it’s a lucky (or unlucky) dip, with the red key occasionally calling up a menu that seems irrelevant to the programme being watched. By 2007 interacting will no longer be seen as a separate activity from watching television.

• Create programmes for interactivity: currently, almost all interactivity is an afterthought. In other words, we add play-along quizzes to existing formats, take existing audio and video feeds and make them available behind existing sports programming. By 2007 there will be programmes that exist because of interactivity. There will still be linear equivalents that can be enjoyed without interactivity, but full enjoyment of the programme will require access to interactive functionality. The Playstation generation is used to making a difference to what happens on the television screen.

As for 24/7 services – interactive television that isn’t attached to a linear programme – these will come into their own by 2007. The majority of on-screen shopping, banking, ticket-booking and charity-donating will be done via the television screen as opposed to the personal computer, and messaging of all kinds will be a major feature of the television. Why? Convenience. Some critics point to early failures in some of these areas – but surely that’s the point of experiments; they don’t all work. Walled garden areas may not have proved successful, but 24/7 services that contain a heavy local information element and allow for extensive viewer input have a big future.

© British Broadcasting Corporation 2002

A Social Future

Ian Pearson, futurologist, BTexact Technologies. BTexact Technologies helps businesses and organisations get the most from communications technology.

Television was one of the great success stories of the twentieth century. It took decades before it was clear what people wanted from it, as it gradually became less of a formal platform and more an entertainment medium. What will the first decade of the twenty-first century bring?

Current technology limits affordable screen area to typically 1 per cent of the field of view, and to just audiovisual stimulation. We are quite some way from the Star Trek holodeck with fully convincing full sensory immersion. Large flat screens will soon hang on our living room walls, though budget constraints will mean most homes will still have screens less than a metre across for some time. Visual immersion is unlikely outside of goggles until after 2020, by which time we will hopefully be able to afford a small room with fully polymer-screen-lined walls and maybe 3D, with the appropriate bandwidth to drive them with acceptable resolution. In this room, we will be able to escape into our fantasy world, just like Captain Picard.

Polymer screens may eventually win out, but the battle will be fought in various niches between a wide range of screen technologies, with plasma and bonded LCD panels being the two strongest current contenders. Screens that are primarily television screens will have many other uses, especially if they hang on walls. They can act as virtual fish tanks, displays for electronic paintings downloaded from galleries around the world, virtual windows showing real-time views out onto a Bahamas beach, or act as life-size video communications panels to allow people to share a cup of coffee across the oceans.

But whatever the display technology, digital television will certainly be the norm soon, and has already captured much of the market. On the back of digitisation, interactivity, indexing, choice of view and commentary, associated information, and video capture and manipulation will make television more interesting. All of these add some flexibility and information depth, but the biggest advantage of making television digital in the long term will be its integration into the computer world. The arguments over whether computers will be integrated into televisions or vice versa are mostly over. Both have happened as costs have fallen. For example, both are used to watch DVDs.

What is less clear is what will happen next. With digital television set-top boxes having high computing capability, providing internet access, games, email, home shopping and information, what is the incentive for a home without a conventional computer to buy one? By contrast, homes with computers and televisions with their sophisticated set-top boxes may still use their computers for the more computery things and televisions for watching television. There may be a strong cultural split in the market.

Interestingly, although most advances in digital technology have been driven by improving computer technology, one of the most significant changes for the internet may come from the television world. Digital video recorders are maturing into home media servers, and these will act as a massive data store for all information appliances in the home, especially television and computer equipment. These machines will happily record television programmes from satellite and terrestrial television networks, but are just as capable of being fed by DVDs or local networks. As DVD capacity increases (holographic or fluorescent disks may hold up to half a terabyte of data!), they will be an attractive alternative distribution medium for television. With smart filters and profiling emerging rapidly, the home media server will be able to provide most of the pages that the user wants to access, so thus will greatly speed up access time. They will have so much storage capacity that they can easily hold most of the really useful and relevant stuff for each of the household members. Real-time internet traffic might be reduced so much by such local caching that its performance increases markedly, so the few sites that change rapidly can easily be accessed quickly too. Such storage-based networking is already being developed. Caches may be filled by using spare network capacity as well as periodic updates on ultra-high-capacity disks, on the front of internet magazines. Half a terabyte is a lot of web pages.

Indeed, it is likely that the internet and television will simply converge, with television being just another internet service, with all the search facilities, indexing, chat forums and, most importantly, worldwide access to any channel (obviously subject to local laws, subscriptions and so on). This will open up the global television market while giving people what they want, rather than just what happens to be shown on a few local channels. Computer agents will be able to organise passive viewing to our taste, acting as assemblers for virtual channels. The agent may appear to the viewer as a friendly face with a friendly personality behind it, which may also have responsibility for non-television tasks too, such as shopping around. With sufficient intelligence, the agent itself may become part of the entertainment, playing live music that it writes in real time, or taking us on a guided teletravel expedition. With adequate indexing and sufficient computer intelligence, it will one day be possible for agents to assemble customised programmes on a particular theme that may not previously have existed.

With an infinite number of potential channels, it will be possible to sit and watch traffic jams in your local town, or remotely sit in at a council meeting, as well as watching any of the many coffee percolators on the internet. Remotely accessing video cameras has many trivial uses, but also allows more useful activities such as allowing parents to check on their children at playgroup. Certainly, community television is likely to grow.

Surprisingly perhaps, computer games are rapidly becoming a spectator activity just like sport and we may see all the same trappings becoming associated with them, such as premier leagues and so on. Watching other everyday activities has already proven successful television viewing in the many real-life docusoaps, and these will evolve well into the internet and digital television.

However, what these mostly point to is that people are content. When we have catered for our basic survival needs, socialising is the next most important human activity and is the primary driver for many platforms. The internet was originally constructed to allow sharing of scientific information. When it matures we will find that the bulk of human use is socialisation. Whether machines talking to machines will dominate even over this remains to be seen.

Power to the People

Andrew Curry, director, The Henley Centre. The Henley Centre is one of Europe’s leading strategic marketing consultancies.

In the mid-1990s, I was running an interactive television channel for a cable company in London. One of my tasks was to help broadcasters and television producers understand how interactive programmes were made. They involved more participation, I would explain, but you had to hand over to the viewer some of the control over the programme. After one such session, an experienced producer explained that he expected viewers to watch the programme he’d made in the order that he’d made it. I’d already learnt, as I recruited people into the world of interactive television, that it could take anything from two to six months for them to let go of the idea that they were in charge.

This matters even more now than it did then because we can now see that the 50-year wave in which television was the dominant cultural force is coming to an end. People are still watching, but for the first time, certainly in the United Kingdom, the viewing figures are starting to fall. The energy of invention has moved elsewhere, to the internet and to mobile technologies. As people’s media lives are saturated by ever more content, television is being pushed to the edges; the television set is on but people are listening, not watching. There is no shame in this (radio has survived a similar transition) but there is a serious implication, for few of the television industry’s business models are designed for ambient consumption, with the exception perhaps of MTV and TNT Cartoon Network.

Michael Grade, the former chief executive of the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 Television, once said that ‘television is either an event or a habit’. At a moment when the habit is becoming less habitual, interactive television emerges as one of the few propositions that may, at least, make the event more eventful. Against this backdrop, the value of interactive television is that it can make rich experiences richer.

The Henley Centre has identified a trend that is common among much contemporary consumer behaviour: ‘elaboration’ versus ‘streamlining’. The same customer, or viewer, can want each at different times and in different circumstances. So on one day we may drop in to the local convenience store to grab a ready meal on the way home; on another we may linger in the delicatessen trying to decide which of 11 olive oils is right for our special salad dressing. So it will be with interactive television.

At the elaborated end of the spectrum is the football match with the instant replay, the extra camera angles and the modest gambling opportunity, and the music show with the karaoke option. Both are high commitment programmes where the viewer welcomes the opportunity to deepen their commitment. The ‘play-along’ game show comes into the same category.

At the streamlined end of the spectrum comes the news programme where you can always pick up the headlines and the top three stories, and the sports application which delivers you tailored football results to spare you the effort of going into digital text; the equivalent of the ready meal delivered to the door.

There is a hybrid version. On narrative programmes such as Big Brother or Pop Idol, the interactivity (‘cast your vote’) is streamlined but the emotional experience is elaborated; the shared experience of everyone’s individual interactive moments is the narrative.

All of this, of course, speaks of interactive television that is about enriching the viewers’ experience around specific programmes. There is a wealth of possibility here that goes far beyond these examples, which utilises the capacities of the settop box for personalisation. Nonetheless, these models are still about the broadcaster delivering more, which fits best with broadcasters’ traditional delivery model. The next decade will put into the hands of viewers new equipment that will give them more say.

By 2007, the personal video recorder (PVR) should be capable of storing the equivalent of 300 hours or more of video for no more than the cost of the rather limited boxes of 2002. By then we may also have escaped from the trap of thinking of them as video recorders; after all, a hard drive which can store that much video can hold an awful lot more of anything else.

At the simplest level, this gives the broadcaster the opportunity to extend the life of the programme into the home, and extend its range beyond the viewer into their social network. Games played through the television will be far richer experiences than the current digital games, with frameworks downloaded in the background, or overnight. Some will be based on television formats. The future equivalent of Walking with Dinosaurs will download, to those who want it, a whole resource to enable viewers to reconstruct (or deconstruct) dinosaurs and programmes alike in their own time.

It is, though, only a small step from there to making the technology your own. Whatever the manufacturers try to do, there are considerable opportunities for playing with broadcasters’ content, or rolling it in with your own material and ideas. The day of the video jockey who scratches, samples and remixes other people’s content is about to escape from the avant-garde into the sitting room. In such an environment, new applications will quickly emerge.

The second development will be that set-top boxes will increasingly be connected to the network. This offers the same potential for forwarding content as is afforded by the internet. As the American futurist Watts Wacker has described it, ‘The future is you’re watching Casablanca and you remember your best friend who you went to see Casablanca with 14 times and instead of calling him up and leaving him a message you send him 30 seconds of your favourite scene of the movie.’

Already we know that one of the most popular applications on the ill-fated ONnet service – an internet to the television proposition – was the ability to send television stills to friends via the internet.

Of course, such usage is likely to be in breach of the United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the European Union’s Copyright Directive. It even challenges our notions of fair use. Lawyers will certainly be involved. But none of this will prevent it from happening.

And broadcasters will hate it. They are among the last of the twentieth century corporations, built on the Fordist model of command and control. Almost everyone else has learnt by now that tapping into the enthusiasms and the connectivity of their customers is the best single way of re-energising their relationship with them. So the battle for interactivity is rather more than a question of whether the technology works or whether people will use it. The technology will get there; we know that people use it. It is a question of whether broadcasters can let go of enough of their traditional models of programme making to let interactivity work for them, or whether they will instead settle for the long slow slide into ambient irrelevance.

This Book in 30 Seconds …

It was the philosopher Eric Hoffer who said that the best way to predict the future is to have the power to shape it. With interactive television, this power is with the viewers and with the people who will produce interactive television services for them. If you are already involved with interactive television production, I hope this book has given you some food for thought. If you are looking at the industry, I hope this book has tempted you to get involved. Either way, start shaping that future.