Make the dumb TV your slave

Bhaskar Majumdar
06 June 2002

Mumbai: We in India, like in most parts of the world, tend to believe that television broadcasting is a passive, linear, entertainment viewing experience. But with the proverbial idiot box changing its stripes, there are a number of applications that are changing the way we watch the dumb telly.

TV is emerging as an on-demand, participatory, non-linear, infotainment, advertising targeted, broadband, two-way communications platform. When fully realised on a mass scale (this will require happen globally by 2010, as this is the date given by the International Telecommunications Union as the date on which analogue television transmission will stop around the world), 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-interactive television (ITV) production studio in their living rooms. If that happens, TV 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 s/he has 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 programme, 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 the 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 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 or operators, also called multiple system operators (MSOs), are hoping that the public will want and pay for basic ITV services such as walled-garden information and Internet portals, video-on-demand or just banking services. That may be true in the near term, but for mainly the older generation. Will todays 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 familiarise 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 all this new high-tech form of TV 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?

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 (like 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 ITV, and how it looks and feels
ITV 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 coloured 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 a part of the TV programme. 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, visualise the way semitransparent banners with statistics printed on them during basketball games, car racing, or golf tournaments appear on TV now.

Let us take our national lifeline cricket. Some of the cricket-centric applications that are being built around ITV are in:

1. Real-time polling: In cricket, let us take the case of the touch-go decisions that need the approval of a third umpire. These are very controversial and evoke high opinions. These take about two-to-three minutes to be decided and there is high drama during this while. Such LBW decisions, run-outs and any other controversies during a match are ideal for viewer response polling.
2. Self-updating, on-demand match summary (for late joiners).
3. On-demand replays; user-driven camera selection.
4. On-demand statistical analysis: There are few typical ways cricket scores can be highlighted. For example, the user can decide whether he wants to see the Manhattan or the Wagonwheel. This could be a menu-based feature.
5. Custom highlights: Users could bookmark deliveries. Book-marked deliveries would later be available as a custom-edited highlight for the user after the match (not sure technically how feasible this is).
6. Quizzes: Topical questions relevant to the current run of the play. Over a season or series players could be tracked and the highest scorers could be rewarded with both publicity and prizes.
7. Live betting: Betting will become legalised in India, and in the subcontinent. After the opening up of the lottery market, this is the next step forward. This will become real big and we should have a betting application ready while the match is going on.
8. Auctions: Auctions of cricket memorabilia generated by each match. These could be stumps, shirts, bowls, bats, you name it.

There are more long-standing examples of ITV-like video programming that include the data boxes or elements that appear in the corner of the TV screen during music videos on MTV or when a game-player sets up a Nintendo, PlayStation or Sega console experience. Here, the player navigates graphical or textual elements with a keyboard or joystick to select the difficulties of the game or learn about its rules.

A final good example is the electronic programme guide (EPG). Many MSOs and platforms have deployed EPGs. Due to the fact that EPGs are easily becoming the portal application to the new TV experience, many companies are trying to develop their own versions of the EPG.

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 UK and in other European countries, remote controls (also called handsets there), and wireless keyboards aggressively exploit primary-coloured buttons (red, green, yellow, blue) called fast keys. These simple buttons provide consistent navigational infrastructure-something US manufacturers are yet to exploit.

In the future, we may also see voice commands through ones 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.

And, as the old clich goes, the world we live in wouldnt be the same again.