Today's Show: Al Gore recently won an Emmy Award for interactive television for his Current TV network. The network features a mix of professionally produced and viewer submitted content. It's almost like the Cable TV version of YouTube. Gore says that we live in a world where viewers want to be in control of their media. Whether the Current TV model is actually what one would call "Interactive TV" is probably debatable. Just because there's a network devoted to running home movies, like a 24 hour Funniest Home Videos, and I can see see the next Star Wars Kid video on Cable doesn't necessarily mean I'm in control, or I can interact with it, but evidently the Academy believes it is.
Whether or not it's actually interactive is probably irrelevant. What it brings up is the concept of Interactive TV. What exactly is it, are we there yet, and where is it going? It's been years since anyone has really talked about interactive TV. According to the reports in the mid to late nineties, we all should be able to shop for anything we want, just by clicking on a button on our Harmony remotes. See a commercial for something you like, just click the "buy now" button and it's all yours. Or maybe it looks good, but you'd like to know more about it, just click the "Learn more" button to get all the research, reviews, pictures, description, you need. All from the comfort of your own couch.
But it doesn't stop there. We should be able to control camera angles for live events right? Maybe move to the wide shot of a football game, instead of the zoomed in shot. Or maybe zoom in on the guitar player during his solo at the Grammy awards. We might want to go split screen with two different camera angles of the same play, to see the pitch, the swing, and the hit all at once. Or what about real time, on screen voting for American Idol. Why should we have to wait for the results of a bunch of phone calls, it should just be instantaneous. This was all promised in the Jetsons view of future TV. This is interactive TV. With the advent of DVRs and On Demand movies, we have some of what was promised, but not everything. So what happened?
We've all heard the "lean forward" and "lean back" analogies as they apply to TV versus traditional interactive media like the PC. If you haven't, the "lean forward" model describes an activity that you would be actively engaged in, using a computer, for example, is a lean forward activity. The "lean back" model describes an activity you would be passively involved in, as an observer. Watching television or a movie is traditionally a lean back type of thing. Interactive TV blends these two models. It makes the lean back TV viewing experience into a lean forward event. Perhaps people have resisted this change, or maybe we just don't have the technology to facilitate the ideas dreamed up a few years ago. Perhaps we'll see it eventually, just not yet.
One issue is the back channel requirement. To get the interaction back to the TV provider, there has to be a communication channel back from the viewer to the broadcaster. This is fairly straight forward in a Cable network, but doesn't work for over-the-air or satellite broadcasts. Those require a phone line or Internet connection for the back channel, adding a layer of complexity. And there's the issue of the actual pipe into the home. If any viewer can switch camera angles, lets say, that would mean every viewer is getting all the potential camera angles. This never would have been possible in the past. But with digital broadcasts, multi-casting and sub-channels, there might be a way to make this work. Of course only one of the camera angles would be in High Definition.
So DVRs, On Demand movies and set top boxes that allow Amazon or YouTube video downloads are probably the closest thing to Interactive TV right now. But all of those solutions let you control content, time shift it for example, but none let you Interact with it. The best solution for that right now is what they're calling two screen or synchronized TV solutions. It involves an interactive experience running on a PC on the Internet synchronized with a content broadcast for the TV. A synchronization of the lean forward and lean back worlds. It stand to reason that IPTV should be able to intellegently combine these two experiences. Maybe smarter set top boxes, or media center PCs, will find a way to synchronize them as well. Until then we can use the DVR to rewind and replay the last touchdown, we just can't switch to a different camera angle or buy a jersey just yet. Maybe someday.
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