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:
- 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.
- Self-updating, on-demand match summary (for late joiners).
- On-demand replays; user-driven camera selection.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.