iBreakfast Club Meeting Report — I think a rant about the dead-end aspects of interactive TV might be my column for PC Mag online next week. This stuff has never taken off. It assumes that we want to be shopping while we watch TV.
The interactivity of TV will be a soft option, its there if you want or recedes if you don’t. So, if watching Sex and the City means clicking on Sarah Jessica Parker’s dress to buy it, or just sitting back to enjoy it, the choice is yours.
Then this paragraph caught my eye.
What will open up the marketplace and drive competition is the arrival of Digital Broadcast TV. According to Jim Heard, whose company, Cache TV is developing a server and advertising control system, this has already become a phenomenon in the UK and is likely to catch fire in the US.
Do a Google search on Jim Heard, CacheTV, or cache TV and see what you come up with. Bupkis is what. For something that is supposedly a phenomenon that could “catch fire” in the US there is zero ‘net buzz. Zero. There is a CacheTV website that is vague and uninformative here.
The whole idea it’s just ridiculous. When people want to buy something they say on tv they go to a local store or the internet.
The Interactive TV that everyone would want to have is the one on which you can watch anything at any time 24/7. But they’ll never sell us that.
There’s nothing to see here, move along.
Actually, the entire
Uh, while shopping may be the motive for interactive TV, it need not be the definition of the process.
Sky TV’s implementation allowing viewers to follow a featured player during a football match — by using their remote — is an example. The kind of collateral information which can be similarly accessed, say, during an episode of “This Old House” — as proposed during Cringeley’s most recent TV spot with Steve Thomas — is an example.
You might have a minimal commercial presence — or none — or something as heavy-handed as you’d expect from GM or Coca-Cola. But, it can be accomplished, effectively and subtly.
A quick note from the other side of the pond. I manage an interactive TV development company here in the UK (so please excuse the blatant bias). It is clear that the US is repeating the mistakes made here in Europe – interactive TV is patently not the Web on TV and is not about people using it as a virtual shopping mall. Viewers here snubbed that concept long ago as it does nothing to enhance their main reason for watching TV – being entertained! However, that does not mean iTV is not commercially viable. Ask SKY, who now make more money from iTV (games, betting, and voting being the main generators) than they do from commercial ad placements on their channels. When that starts happening you know iTV has arrived.