Certain types of ITV programming are beginning to thrive in a commercial setting even in these early stages. Those are: EPGs, synchronized TV applications, and integrated interactiveTV programming such as interactive news, sports, 3D games and game shows, home shopping, court programs, weather channels, educational documentaries, and advertising. In the future it seems possible we may see new "content platforms" in distance learning, live town hall meetings, voting during political conventions, interactive situation comedies (remember "Fahrenheit 451"?), financial programs, and more documentaries, etc. Possibilities for types of content in an ITV environment are endless.

The most well-viewed and used example of ITV technology available to people today, as we mentioned earlier, is the EPG. EPGs are widely available on digital cable and DBS systems to millions, especially in the U.S. These EPGs appear interactively when one calls it to view by pushing a button (e.g. "Menu" or "Guide") on the remote control, or by some other method. Once it displays, the EPG allows the viewer to easily navigate or search for programming by time, theme, channel, and so on. Summaries of shows are often included. Those companies leading the development and deployment of EPGs include Gemstar, TV Guide, GIST, and now ReplayTV and TiVo. The last two have aggressively reinvented the concept of the EPG by coupling an online data service broadcast through the phone line to a set-top box with a recordable digital video hard disk drive. These units, called a DVR for "digital video recorder", are having a profound influence on the way the average person becomes familiar with and knows about the availability of such video-based interactive services.

Looking further, MSOs and set-top box makers are planning for that time when they can support EPGs and other types of interactive entertainment programming alongside digital voice streams. A realization of the "Video Phone" - promised to technophiles for decades - and now called "Video Telephony" - may prove to be a real content killer app. Producers and developers will want to think more about how to integrate video telephony into their programming as soon as it is feasible.

The Latest Technologies

A few important underlying ITV technologies have advanced in the marketplace that enable producers to "author once, broadcast everywhere", the professed goal of industry developers. Those are the HTML-based 1.0 specification developed by members of the Advanced Television Enhancement Forum (ATVEF – pronounced "atveff" by some), the Digital Video Broadcasting--Multimedia Home Products protocol (DVB-MHP), the JavaTV application programming interface from Sun Microsystems, and XML for controlling metadata supported by the TV Anytime Forum. These technologies are continually mired in controversy due to the fact that no one has become a worldwide standard. Companies in Europe and American firms such as Liberate, Sun Microsystems, OpenTV, Excite@Home, ICTV, PowerTV, Microsoft, and interoperability organizations like CableLaboratories (CableLabs), promote discussions and workgroups to invent the answers; although, no firm conclusions have been made. Meanwhile, such technologies are finding acceptance on a regional basis. ATVEF has found favor in North America. In Europe, companies have embraced DVB-MHP. XML is just now gaining real popularity within the Internet community, which may carry over into ITV. Unless a standard can be agreed upon, ITV technologies and, therefore, content programming will be expensive to produce.

Paying for Itself

Production budgets on ITV projects are escalating. Today, a producer might spend perhaps $70,000-$3 million to get it right. Before long, these budgets will increase as technology improves and audiences demand more functionality and shows enhanced. Production companies must and are developing new business models that reflect complex revenue sharing arrangements between producer, set-top box vendor, software provider, MSO, shopping vendor, Internet Service Provider (ISP), billing vendor, in order to get commitments on a project. Some revenues may come from the viewers, of course, through tiered subscriptions. Additional revenues generated will come from interactive and/or targeted advertising. Tcommerce, on the other hand, will be the greatest revenue generator, or so the theory goes. Content producers are discovering that in order to pay for new ITV programming, they will have to build a store, too. Before embarking on an ITV production, therefore, it is important to develop a business plan that considers tcommerce. For although some producers might shudder at this prospect, viewers may enjoy the accessibility of products relevant to that programming. On the other hand, this close relationship between consumerism and content can be abused. Our hope is that we build a medium that outshines its initial promise as a "revenue generator" and becomes an influential medium of personal and cultural expression. In order to understand where ITV may go, let's first discuss its origins.

EVOLUTION

Early Concepts

Years before television was invented, people spoke as if film, radio, and the telephone would some day converge. Sound familiar? In the early part of this century, terms like "Radiovision" and "Telephone Eye" were used to express a future device that might provide an integration of services. Although the electronic transmission of pictures ("television") is what they got, the idea that these technologies could be combined into one device became a deeply embedded dream even back then. Today, our PC-TVs, NetTVs, or even video/teleconferencing services echo that long held vision. Real ITV is something much more complicated, though: inventing it has taken large investment, innovation, trial, error, and further exploration. One of the earliest innovations to have an influence on the generation that would invent ITV was a show called "Winky Dink."

The Television as Toy

Some people may remember "Winky Dink" - a program first broadcast in October of 1953 in black and white - on the CBS network. Created and hosted by future "Joker's Wild" game show host, Jack Barry, "Winky Dink" featured the adventures of a cartoon character named Winky Dink and his dog Woofer. The simply drawn character was a small boy (voice-over by Mae Questal of "Betty Boop" fame) with ragged hair who appeared on a TV set next to Barry. Winky Dink talked intermittently with Barry and the kids in the studio audience. During the program, Winky Dink went on dangerous cartoon adventures and got into a lot of trouble. In order to save him from his perils, Barry came up with a unique gimmick: The Winky Dink Kit. Inside the kit, there were sheets of transparent plastic and several crayons. When prompted on the show, kids would place the plastic on the TV screen and draw a bridge or rope across a cavern or river, as examples, from which Winky Dink could escape. At the end of the show, kids would also be able to connect the dots at the bottom of the screen to find a secret word. Cheap by today's standards, the kits cost $.50 a piece if sent in the mail or $2.95 at toy stores. The show and the kits were a big hit. Even into the early 70’s, Barry kept things going until popularity waned. "Winky Dink" is still remembered today by the people building this emerging industry. At conferences, often, someone will remember their days spent in front of the set watching the show. A company called Hollywood Ventures, is selling new kits called "Winky Dink and You" for $19.95. In the kit, you get a 30 minute video with 3 cartoons, magic screen, a wipe-away "woobie", and 5 magic crayons. You can buy them via their Web page at http://www.bennysmart.com.

Early Innovations

In the early 70's, it became obvious to television engineers on both sides of the Atlantic, that the TV was a powerful portal delivery vehicle for data communications. Playing around with the analog signal, these engineers soon developed a way to send data through the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI) which could then be displayed on a screen. In the U.S., work done to develop closed captioning for the deaf would also lead to innovation. In England, engineers from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) developed teletext, a news and information broadcast display technology for TV.

To provide some understanding, visually the VBI is represented by the black stripe at the top and bottom of a TV picture. Physically, it constitutes 21 lines of a total 525 lines transmitted per second to the set in the analog National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) TV signal. The VBI is embedded inside two rectangular fields comprised of 262.5 lines each. Each line is made of 427 pixels that form the color video images on the screen through a process called "interlaced scanning" (an electron beam zig zags up and down the screen depositing the pixels). The first 9 lines of the VBI are used for timing information of the shows. Lines 10-20 are, for the most part, unused. Line 21, however, is used for closed captioning, teletext, and now to send HTML data and interpreted with special software on a set-top box, software-ready digital TV, or TV tuner card on a computer. In the U.S., use of Line 21 began when the U.S. National Bureau of Standards funded early experiments in cooperation with the ABC network to send out exact timing information over the TV signal. Fortunately, this experiment failed to provide needed results so ABC suggested text captions instead for the deaf. This and other experiments in co-operation with the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) affiliate, WGBH, throughout the 70's on programs like the "The French Chef", "The Captioned ABC News", and ABC's "The Mod Squad", led to more developments. In cooperation with PBS, ABC developed early in-room decoder devices to interpret and display data sent within the VBI. It wasn't until public television station, WETA, broadcast and encoded data reliably on line 21 of the VBI that closed captioning became possible on a mass scale. Now, television was a personal communications appliance for a small segment of the U.S. population. Only recently, in 1997 the FCC mandated that closed captioning became available within all video broadcasts "regardless of distribution technology."

Back in England, BBC engineers launched a teletext service in 1974 called CEEFAX. These text broadcasts appeared and continue today (though there are many services available from other broadcasters) as pages of information on the TV one can access by punching in a three-number code on one’s remote control and use of the Fast Keys (as we mentioned earlier). The "home page" (for want of a better term) of CEEFAX is 100. To receive these pages, one's television set must have the proper decoder built in. Broadcast content includes news headlines, sports scores, racing results, gardening tips, travel reports, film and theater reviews, weather, and much more. Another type of interactive teletext is available, if one dials in to a special phone number and the viewer orders things by punching in the correct code. Digital teletext, a phenomenon soon to be deployed, does not use the VBI to broadcast information : Sky Broadcasting will use OpenTV's middleware platform to interpret and display data.

Within the last few years, the U.S. government has deregulated the VBI signal. Some new companies Stateside have found a way to take advantage of this available technology. Bloomberg TV terminals, for example, have sent out news headlines and stock prices through the VBI for some time. Cable networks broadcast TV schedule information for EPGs. Early developers of ITV platforms such as Intel, WebTV, Wink Communications, and WorldGate (which we will discuss later), explored new types of broadcasting over the VBI in the mid and late-90's and continue today. ATVEF, mentioned earlier, was set up to exploit the uses of this technology. When the digital signal broadcast over the air (terrestrial) and through other types of networks becomes more widely adopted as the mass broadcast standard, sending data through the analog signal through the VBI will become an anachronistic practice -- that is, in theory. The transition to digital, as it is commonly called, may take a lot longer to achieve that the original legislators in Washington D.C. intended. Analog platforms will persist for a long time because new digital equipment is still expensive and local broadcast stations are facing astronomical costs and challenges during this upgrading period. Furthermore, the controversy surrounding the adaptation of one type of broadcast modulation scheme over another (e.g. 8VSB vs. COFDM) continues to rage. For now, broadcast data streams must travel over the VBI to digital set-top boxes or other data receivers. The origins of these very first two-way set-top boxes can be found in the history of the first commercially-deployed ITV network called QUBE, which was deployed in Columbus, Ohio.