Invited panelists included early technology journalist, Denise Caruso, now president of The Hybrid Vigor Institute, a non-profit advisory agency; Josh Bernoff, senior TV analyst for Forrester, a research firm; Richard Fickle, senior VP, AT&T Broadband; and Deren Triff, senior manager, digital business development enhanced TV for PBS.

Twenty minute + presentations were made each. Caruso used projects of the past, she said, "because I can", to talk extemporaneously about ITV and, perhaps, to place the day in context. One story she repeated was about how set-tops (for the expensive Time Warner Full Service Network trial in Orlando in the mid-70's) melted on top of people's TV sets. Caruso also expressed her beliefs that the ITV industry would more directly evolve when great advances like Napster disrupted the normal flow of events. Otherwise, evolution would just take place out of "fear and greed." Ok.

Bernoff's well-honed presentation titled "The TV Revenue Shift", was more linear and info graphic rich. In his talk, Bernoff made observations concluding that interactivity, in general, would drive new advertising revenue models, not ad impressions. Specifically, Bernoff stressed ITV would be most valuable for generating hot leads, not necessarily ecommerce, a point [itvt] doesn't agree with. Bernoff also believes that "lazy interactivity' (e.g. simple ATVEF-compliant HTML elements over the broadcast signal) and the digital video recorder industry (e.g. TiVo) will help to create a mass-market personal TV phenomenon. While [itvt] agrees with this, we believe he didn't go far enough to envision what we see as inevitable: communities of interest wrapping around programming and broadcasters catering more specifically to their needs rather than to the needs of millions. But, more about advertising, Bernoff expects the ITV ad industry will generate $23 billion in revenues by 2005. Currently, he said, the traditional ad industry does $55 billion in business per year. How and how fast will this style of "response marketing" evolve over time, he did not clarify. On the other hand, since the first days of ads on the Internet, "click through 1-1 marketing" has always been talked about, but never deeply achieved. One demo, however, illustrated how a home shopping channel might benefit from his prediction. As time went by, for example, computer units sold sending the price up by $100 incrementally. "This is not just commerce" he said, "it's gambling." Now that's a workable "killer app."

The next speaker, Richard Fickle of AT&T, presented their long-awaited broadband ITV platform. Fickle smartly stated early on, although, in a non-committed way, that the platform would be available "soon"- a refrain we've heard so many times. To avoid tricky questions of deployment, Fickle emphasized what AT&T wants their platform to be best at: "TV centric", "broadly targeted", "embrace standards to encourage innovation and scale", "fast" and "easy-to-use". Fickle also went over why they loved enhanced TV technologies and walled gardens, albeit, in short. Content by order of importance will be: 1) TV programmers, 2) Web-based content re-purposed for TV, 3) Content aggregators. One audience member asked about the future of streaming media on the platform, to which Fickle gave the standard vague response.

The next and final speaker, Deren Triff from PBS, showed their beautiful enhanced TV demo that has been funded by strategic partner, Intel. Triff drew the audience's attention to the fact that PBS has very strong content brands with which to explore ITV. Triff went over, in short, the history of PBS and new media technologies (see the [itvt] AFI-Intel Research & Papers here for more info) and then into their 24/7 digital media multi-channel programming strategy slated to debut this fall. Described more fully in previous [itvt] NAB 2000 coverage Issue 2.80 4/13/00, PBS will be broadcasting on set-tops, digital terrestrial ITV, to DTV-PC units, and to handhelds. Clearly, PBS remains an innovative and aggressive leader for the ITV and IP broadband industries. The types of advances they are capable of making and willingness to explore deep content is impressive.

After presentations, [itvt] spoke with other broadcasters such as Richard H. Beahrs, president and COO of CourtTV. Beahrs said his network was now in a good position to embrace this new technology. They are only just beginning to consider it more seriously, however, after a long apprenticeship developing their basic network programming strategy. Word was also heard that ZDTV this next week, in partnership with DIRECTV and Wink, will feature eTV components within "Fresh Gear" in beta to DIRECTV employees. In 3 more months, they plant to have more shows interactive. Took them a while.

[itvt] had a chance to speak to many more people, but you know...there's only so much time to reveal all the secrets.

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