Dave’s Take

Along with flying cars, robotic maids and personal jetpacks, I place interactive television as one of the biggest lies fed to American consumers in the past century. As recently as 2001, American TV viewers were promised a whole new world with the installation of interactive TV or iTV as the industry calls it. We were baited into expecting everything from video on demand to interactive gaming would be but a click away from the average middle-class living room. Unfortunately, just like the Jetson’s space car, truly interactive television is just a dream.

A crude forerunner to iTV was first tried in the 1950s with the “Winky Dink & You” children’s TV show, where kids could tape a magic screen on their home set and draw along with the show. This eventually led to more refined attempts in the 80s and 90s to incorporate everything from t-commerce (buying goods in real time off your remote) to sending Email and files from your living room. The end game? To keep TV relevant by making your television as important to you as your computer and the Internet. Big companies like Microsoft, Bell South and Time Warner jumped headlong into the fray, spending hundreds of millions of dollars before realizing their mistakes and folding up shop.

There are an unlimited number of reasons why the majority of attempts at iTV have failed, ranging from exorbitant start-up costs to delivery compatibility issues. The few remaining iTV services are limited to video on demand and a few frivolous offerings like real time traffic and weather reporting. Shopping, videoconferencing, web surfing, banking and TV Emailing have never been fully developed and aren’t expected to do so in the near future. Which is a shame, because from an advertisers point of view, iTV could be a godsend. Think of the possibilities of real iTV: ads with guaranteed demographics; immediate feedback from customers; sales delivered for a fraction of the present cost per impression and those are just the beginning. The ability to change camera angles, display stats or watch a longer and more in-depth analysis of any news story is now just a dream. Same with Internet access and high def videoconferencing from anywhere—all dead for now.

Hopefully, declining viewership coupled with a recovering economy will motivate the major players into playing nice with each other and giving iTV the chance it deserves. I know the advertising industry will be waiting and watching.

Last week, I blogged about how Twitter and other social media sources were great for creating buzz, but lousy at delivering sales. Who could have dreamed that they would now be the main source for real time information about what’s happening with the revolutionary situation in Iran? The Iranian government has clamped down on most forms of news dissemination, including the shuttering of newspapers and television stations. MSM sources as well as protesters have adapted Twitter to get the truth out about what is going on in the Islamic republic. Just another example of how people will adapt to new channels of information if they are kept topical and relevant.