This book is for anyone interested in getting a general understanding of interactive television and how to produce it. You will find it useful if:
You already work in new media or television (whether in design, production, marketing, business development, human resources, programming, engineering or any other area). The book will give you a clear idea of how your skills and experience could fit in with the practice of interactive television and how interactive television could support your existing projects.
If you are a company director, lecturer or student. You’ll get enough down-to-earth information to draw your own conclusions about the commercial and cultural importance of the medium.
If you are about to become involved in the production of new or existing interactive television (iTV) services or have an interactive television idea. You’ll get an introduction to the end-to-end processes required to make things happen – plus numerous examples of existing services to stimulate your creative thinking.
If you are interested purely in the engineering and electronics of interactive television, in detailed country-by-country market projections or in academic analysis, other books will serve you better.
This book covers each of the elements required to understand the production of most interactive television programmes or services:
Chapter 1 answers the question ‘what is interactive television?’
Chapter 2 covers the technology. The material can be understood by anyone: a PhD in electronic engineering is not required.
Chapter 3 outlines how companies have made money and delivered benefits with interactive television. The need to provide a return to investors is at the heart of every interactive television development (even publicly funded projects measure success against something – or should do).
Chapter 4 takes a close-up look at the tools and processes that can be used to produce the best possible services, on time and to budget. This includes an outline of the people required to get a project off the ground and a way to go about doing it.
Chapter 5 looks at the most important people in the interactive television business – the viewers. The best examples of interactive television are designed with the viewers in mind at all times: the ones that are not invariably fail.
Finally, in Chapter 6, industry experts look to the future, predicting how interactive television is likely to develop through to 2007.
The book takes a practical, production-based approach, based on my hands-on experience of building interactive television services – and based on the knowledge and experience of a number of the United Kingdom’s leading interactive television producers. To maintain the flow, detailed references for research reports and surveys are not listed. However, there is a general summary of sources at the back of the book.
You can pick and choose sections that interest you or throw yourself into the book from beginning to end. Either way, you may find it useful to spend two minutes glancing over all the ‘Chapter in 30 seconds …’ summaries, which are located at the beginning of each chapter. This will give you a quick overview of interactive television production and the structure of the book – and perhaps enough information to bluff meetings or discussions on interactive television at work or college!
On the web site, www.InteractiveTelevisionProduction.com, there are pages of links designed to help with common iTV questions and issues. There are also entertaining quizzes for each chapter, so you can test your knowledge of some of the concepts introduced in the book.