Interactive TV Puts Couch Potatoes to Work
L O N D O N, Nov. 27 -- Not too long ago, interactivetelevision was being written off as a geeky experiment thatwouldn’t catch on as U.S. entertainment giants lost hundreds ofmillions of dollars on ambitious trials that flopped.
But the techies refused to give up and interactive TV isback in town, this time with Europe leading the way.
Money is pouring into transforming the humble television set — which has spent the past 50 years as a passive medium — intoa gateway of personalized services from e-mail and home shoppingto video-on-demand and gambling.
But why should it be any more viable this time around?
For a start, the rise of an Internet culture has givenpeople a taste for e-commerce, e-mail and Web browsing, whilepay TV has got viewers used to paying for what they watch.
Technology has also become sleeker and more powerful sincethe U.S. experiments in the early 1990s when cumbersome, costlysystems failed to woo viewers.
“No one dictates when I read the newspaper or go to thebathroom, but TV does. It’s too inconvenient for this age andthat’s why the chances for interactive television are so goodnow,” Werner Lauff, president of the broadband group at Germanmedia group Bertelsmann, said at a recent conference.
While Europe is showing signs of success with some 4 million viewers tapping into on-screen features such as shoppingand e-mail, analysts say interactivity still has some way to gobefore appealing to the global masses.
The British Laboratory
Europe is seen as the ideal testing ground.
PC penetration is lower in Europe than the United States, butthe population is just as content hungry a void developershope will be filled by interactive TV (iTV).
Many viewers in Europe are already used to interacting withtheir televisions through teletext — a 25-year-old servicewhich offers pages of information on the TV screen — whilesatellite operators have been aggressively rolling out digitaltelevision, forcing cable and terrestrial rivals to follow suit.
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