What is still a broadcast, passive, linear, entertainment viewing experience for millions of people around the world, television is now becoming an on-demand, participatory, non-linear, infotainment, advertising targeted, broadband, two-way communications platform. When fully realized on a mass scale (Note: This will require that digital terrestrial signal technology becomes standardized around the world, an occurrence still steeped in tremendous controversy), our current experience of television will drastically transform. For the first time, possibly, TV can become something a viewer can control and use for information and communications. At some point in the future, viewers at home may have their own mini-ITV production studio in their living rooms. If that happens, television will not remain a passive delivery vehicle for programming solely from the networks.

In these early stages, in a fully-integrated ITV environment today, a viewer will be able to read more about the topics presented during a show at the time she or he scheduled the show to play back or broadcast; download and store related media files or special interactive documentation for later viewing or perusal; purchase goods associated with a program; share, in context and in real-time, their knowledge or interpretations about the broadcast through various communications applications; use banking, betting, or video-on-demand applications; and finally, participate in competitive or cooperative group activities in association with video content. This is just a beginning.

Those producing ITV shows and applications, eventually, will soon discover that not one, but hundreds, thousands, or even millions of viewer interest groups will form around the context of shows - each with a different perspective, agenda, and style of communications. Ultimately, this will encourage and eventually require television producers to create shows that consider the shared group communications dynamic experience (possibly for many related groups independently at once) and not the individual or the mass audience solely as a viewer unit. Community or public television in other words will, potentially, - at last - emerge when ITV technologies make video and data content a platform for discussion and participation.

On the other hand, cable and satellite media providers/operators, also called Multiple System Operators (MSOs), are hoping the public will want and pay for basic ITV services such as "wallled-garden" information and Internet portals, video-on-demand, or banking services only. That may be true in the near term, but for mainly the older generation. Will today's and future content, technology, and business developers envision something more powerful and creative for this new medium? One can hope.

Lingering Questions

Content developers will want to familiarize themselves with these tectonic changes in order to work within them or from without. Lingering questions remain for producers not currently exploring ITV at this time. For example, will this new high-tech form of television make production work more difficult to produce and expensive to fund? Should one bother to explore these new methods and opportunities for interactive content now? As of 2000, there is still great speculation about whether ITV will financially and technologically succeed and, if so, in what form? Other important questions continue to gnaw away at ITV optimists such as: Do people really want to interact with their TV in the long run? Will ITV be a novelty and then cease to be of interest? Will people pay the price for advanced services to support it? Will something new (e.g. peer to peer videotainment) emerge to take its place sooner rather than later? Will technologies continue to appear to improve the speed at which data and video travels through networks? And finally, how will highly targeted advertising, issues of privacy, and the ability to impose filtering technologies on content affect the integrity of available content? Only by aggressively participating now in the development of this industry and inventing new content projects can producers and technologists expect to have their own strong influence on the course of its evolution.

WHAT IS INTERACTIVE TELEVISION?

How It Looks and Feels

InteractiveTV is, essentially, video programming which incorporates some style of interactivity - be it with data on video, graphics on video, video within video, or retrieving video programming and possibly recording it on a digital hard disk drive for further use. To the viewer, "enhancements" appear as graphical and sometimes purely informational elements on the screen overlaying (some technologies actually incorporate the data enhancements in the video MPEG stream such as HyperVideo). Often these are opaquely colored and cover the broadcast in part or are transparent or semi-transparent. Specific reoccurring elements are icons, banners, labels, menus, interface structures, open text fields in which you can insert your email address, forms to fill out in order to buy a product, or commands to retrieve and manage video streams and graphics on a relevant Web page. Interactive or accessible information data, of course, is the most important new addition to the television landscape.

If the producer has done her or his job adequately, these enhancements will be part of the television program. In some cases, the viewer may want to access information that is irrelevant to the current programming such as news, stocks, scores, weather, and so on. To understand what these graphical elements look like, visualize the way semi-transparent banners with statistics printed on them during basketball games, car racing, or golf tournaments appear on TV now. During a recent broadcast of the Milwaukee 250 car race, for instance, semi-transparent graphical boxes appeared from time to time featuring information about which drivers were in the lead, their backgrounds, racing factoids, speed statistics, the commentator speaking, and other informational tidbits. These producers were clearly aware that audiences are hungering for more supportive data in their entertainment programming and copped an interactive television approach. Good for them.

Three more long-standing examples of ITV-like video programming include the data boxes or elements that appear in the corner of the TV screen during music videos on MTV or when a gameplayer sets up a Nintendo, PlayStation, or Sega console experience. Here, the player navigates graphical or textual elements with a keyboard or joy stick to select the difficulties of the game or learn about its rules. A final good example, but slightly different, is the old analog TV Guide Channel, (a scrolling TV listings service) still carried on many cable and DBS systems today. Although not interactive at all, this guide demonstrates a type of interface interactiveTV technologies will exploit. Here, the video screen is reduced to one corner of the screen while the viewer browses or watches a data schedule go by. Rather rudimentary in its creativity, an interactive digital one now exists; although, many complain about is rigidity. Many MSOs have deployed electronic programming guides (EPGs) in association with TV Guide or Gemstar (these companies have now merged, of course). [Note: This is one of the most hotly contested areas of ITV development. Due to the fact that EPGs are easily becomming the portal application to the new television experience, many companies are trying to develop their own versions of the EPG outside of Gemstar's purview. At this time, Gemstar controls many of the patents surrounding this technology and vigorously pursues litigation. In the future, producers and even the individual viewer may be able to design and build their own quickly live. If this occurs, adoption of ITV will explode. One such company which has devleoped this technology is iSurfTV.]

Concerning the navigation of such ITV platforms as the EPG, viewers use buttons on the remote control to tab from place to place, type commands or words with a wireless keyboard, or use a PC-like roaming mouse resident on the keyboard. In the United Kingdom and in Europe, remote controls (also called "handsets" there), and wireless keyboards aggressively exploit primary-colored buttons (red, green, yellow, blue) called "Fast Keys." These simple buttons provide consistent navigational infrastructure - something U.S. manufacturers have yet to exploit. In the future, we may also see voice commands via one's remote control or cell phone, speaker-driven commands for sound-sensitive TVs, touch screens on consumer televisions, lab devices for more complex interaction, and more.