The American Film Institute-Intel Enhanced Television Workshop. July, 1999.
"Enhanced Television: A Historical and Critical Perspective"
By Tracy Swedlow
This White Paper has been commissioned by the AFI-Intel Enhanced Television Workshop for distribution to participants of its 1999 activities, and on its Web site. The purpose of the paper is to provide technical and historical background for the television and creative community who are not principally concerned with technical issues. Feedback on this paper may be sent to swedlow@itvt.com or to enhancedtv@afionline.org.
For further information about the Workshop and the topic, go to www.afionline.org/etv.
INTRODUCTION
Many television producers, technology, and media companies as well as "new media" enthusiasts today are turning their attention to an emerging medium called "Enhanced TV". "eTV" for short, this medium may transform mass media like television and the Internet. For that to happen, changes must first come to the creative and production processes and business models supporting them.
Enhanced TV uses certain technologies from the Internet to deliver graphical and informational elements on the same screen as a video program. Once transmitted over the air or via telephone wires and cables, these components are televised on top of video programming viewed on traditional TV sets, computers, and on other video-ready digital products.
Members of the television and related creative businesses are, therefore, curious if this high-tech upgrade will make their television production work more difficult to produce or more expensive to fund. Should they bother? The appeal, which seems to be drawing this community to the new medium, is the opportunity to build more creatively dynamic programming, to reach a global audience, and to build new revenue streams. In particular, opportunities for electronic commerce can generate significant financial support as it has for the Internet. Furthermore, the availability of communications technologies in this environment could, ultimately, reinvent the way producers conceptualize shows as well as the way viewers experience them.
As of 1999, there is a great deal of speculation about whether enhanced TV will succeed and, if so, in what form. Will enhanced TV become an underlying foundation upon which a new form of television can become an active experience rather than a passive one...or will it go the way of prior experiments?
This paper has been commissioned by the AFI-Intel Enhanced TV workshop to provide members of the creative community with a context for ongoing training and collaboration. Intel and the AFI believe that the creative community will make an enormous contribution to the evolution of this new medium, because it is the creatives who understand the audience and methods to reach those audiences with compelling content.
The challenge of this white paper is to present enhanced TV in its context historically and abstract a few lessons from this and current experience. The hope is that content producers who are excited about developing new programming and methods to support this new medium will enhance their understanding of where enhanced television has come from, where it is going.
What is "Enhanced TV"?
Enhanced TV has certainly generated a lot of "buzz", but still remains controversial. The ultimate question is will it allow two powerful technologies from the world of television (broadcast video) and the Internet (the Internet Protocol and the Hypertext Markup Language "HTML") to merge? Enhanced TV is, for the purpose of this paper two things: 1) the ability to transmit Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) data and files to analog TV, set-top box, personal computer, digital television, or some other capable device; and 2) the media form of which Web- interactivity can take place on top of broadcast video. In order to understand why these technologies have found a possible interrelationship, let's look at first how enhanced TV elements appear on the screen, the types of content and applications that will exist in this environment, and then the technology behind it through a historical evaluation. Towards the end of the paper, there will be a short investigation into emerging platforms and observations from those working in the field.
How it Looks and Feels
To the viewer, "enhancements" appear as graphical and sometimes purely informational elements on the screen overlaying a video broadcast. Often these are opaquely colored and cover the video broadcast in part or are transparent or semi-transparent. Specific reoccurring elements are icons, banners, labels, menus, information about the program, data you can print, open text fields in which you can insert your email address, or forms to fill out in order to buy a product. If the producer has done her or his job adequately, these enhancements will be relevant to the television programming beneath it.
To understand what this looks like, visualize the way semi-transparent banners with scores and statistics printed on them sometimes overlay basketball games or golf tournaments on TV now. Another good example is how details about a music video will appear in the lower left-hand corner of the screen on MTV. Some readers may be familiar with the graphics and text displayed on the TV when setting up a Nintendo, PlayStation, or Sega game. Here, players navigate graphical or textual elements with a keyboard or joy stick to select the difficulty of the game or learn about its rules. A final good example, but slightly different, is the Prevue/TV Guide Channel carried on most cable and digital broadcast satellite (DBS) systems. Here, the video screen is reduced to one corner of the screen while the viewer browses or watches a TV schedule go by. Rather rudimentary in its creativity, producers hope the use of enhanced TV technologies will help make this a greater creative opportunity and more pleasurable and interesting for the viewer.
To navigate and participate in such enhanced television broadcasts, viewers can use the buttons on the remote control, type commands or words with a wireless keyboard on certain systems, or use the mouse if experiencing eTV via a computer. Depending upon the network, the software on the set-top box, or if you're also connected to the Internet, the viewer will receive access to an electronic programming guide (EPG); a special TV-online service containing links to local information; or applications like email, games, home banking, and community message boards, and many applications to come.
The Promise of a New Medium
Many people are excited about eTV because it could really provide the underlying foundation for rich media television programming and services to exist on a mass scale. Essentially, what was and is still currently a passive, linear, absorbing-only viewing experience for millions of people around the world can now become a participatory, non-linear viewing and communications medium as well. This last part is crucial.
For example, it is well observed that many people go online while watching TV to chat in real-time or send email to others about the show. In an enhanced TV context, people will certainly want to gossip, talk about their own interpretations, communicate directly with the show's characters or producers, engage in group-forming for loyalty clubs, collaborate with others on games, and much more. Ultimately, this may encourage and eventually require television producers to create shows, which consider the group and not the individual or the mass audience as a viewer unit.
Certain types of programming, thus, will fare well in this environment --- perhaps documentaries, news, sports, game shows, children's and nature programming, talk shows, music videos, business formats, and even situation comedies. It seems possible that the enhanced TV environment will also spawn distance learning programming, business and town hall meetings, as well as personal TV channels if public access is enabled in this way. In the near future, video cameras will certainly be built in to the TV set permitting the " Video Phone" phenomenon to occur when all networks are upgraded.
The emergence of a new medium, in addition, also opens the door to the possibility of breakthrough applications, which take advantage of the unique features of that medium in ways not initially apparent. In the computer world, such breakthroughs are often termed "killer apps," or applications, because they come to define and indeed drive the entire platform. Email and the Web browser were examples of "killer" applications that appealed to so many people that the Internet grew exponentially. What will those killer app(s) be for enhanced TV? Some speculate it might be video-on-demand or home shopping,
The other part of this equation, of course, is how to make enhanced television economically feasible for the industry and affordable for the viewer. For example, production budgets on projects today are already in the double-digit thousands to the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Before long, these budgets will increase over time as technology improves and audiences demand more functionality, more shows, and possibly more of the shows to be enhanced. In order to pay for that, companies are already building business models that reflect complex revenue sharing arrangements between producer, set-top box vendor, software provider, network, shopping vendor, ISP, cable provider - the list goes on and on. The greatest revenues may come from the viewers, themselves. Subscriptions to the service or the ability to make direct purchases will be offered in most cases; but, it is still unclear what combination of the above will become a winning strategy. Before embarking on eTV production, therefore, it is important to construct a business model that can expand over time as the industry grows.
The Potential of Ecommerce
Making money with enhanced TV programming is a real possibility, no doubt. We've seen in the last two years that ecommerce over the Internet is making billions of dollars and that's at primarily 'narrowband' speeds of PC and modem. Once eTV can be viewed on television sets around the world via satellite, broadcast via the digital signal, and sent via cable systems, billions who do not already have a computer, but who might accept a free set-top or afford a low-priced computer, will get access to programming. In the end, sharing the wealth created by these transactions will probably be enormous. Or, the lack of it will drive the new medium to failure; but this is doubtful. If it is successful, new investments will be made in programming and fresh ideas in communication and business will form.
Placing Things in Context
This paper attempts to provide an understanding of the emergent enhanced television landscape consisting of its historical and industrial developments, its emergent current technologies and practicing players, new content, production, and business models evolving today. An effort is made to illuminate the above issues which remain unresolved and of concern. The hope is that this overview will enable a greater understanding for the potential of the medium.
EVOLUTION
Early experiments pave the way
Years before television was invented, people spoke as if film, radio, and the telephone would some day converge. Sound familiar? Terms like "Radiovision" and "Telephone Eye" were used to express a future device that might provide an integration of services. Although the electronic transmission of pictures is what they got, the idea that these technologies could be combined into one device became a long held dream. Today we refer to PC-TVs, NetTVs, or about different types of video/teleconferencing to mean something similar, but enhanced or "interactive television" is something more. Inventing the real medium of ITV took many years of hard work and exploration. Like anything, it required innovation and failure before the right discoveries paved the way. The earliest exploration into a type of "enhanced" TV was a show called "Winky Dink".
"The video that turns your TV into a toy!"
Some people may remember "Winky Dink" - a program first broadcast in October of 1953 in black and white on the CBS network. Created and hosted by future "Joker's Wild" game show host, Jack Barry, "Winky Dink" featured the adventures of a cartoon character named Winky Dink and his dog Woofer. The simply drawn character was a small boy (voice-over by Mae Questal of "Betty Boop" fame) with ragged hair who appeared on a TV set next to Barry and talked intermittantly with Barry and the kids in the studio. During the program, Winky Dink also went on dangerous cartoon adventures and got into a lot of trouble. In order to save him from his perils, Barry came up with a unique gimmick: The Winky Dink Kit. Essentially, Barry developed and marketed thousands of Winky Dink Kits containing sheets of transparent plastic and several crayons to kids so that when prompted they could place the plastic on the TV monitor and draw a bridge or rope across a cavern from which Winky Dink could escape. At the end of the program, kids would also be able to connect the dots at the bottom of the screen to find a secret word. Cheap by today's standards, the kits cost $.50 a piece by mail or for $2.95 at toy stores. Ultimately, the show was a big hit. Barry kept it going for many years - even in to the early 70's in some locations. "Winky Dink" is still remembered today by the very people building this emerging industry. At conferences, often someone will remember their days spent in front of the set watching the show. In fact, a company selling new kits called "Winky Dink and You" from Hollywood Ventures at $19.95 a piece says most of the people buying the kits are those who are working in the industry today. In the kit, you get a 30 minute video with 3 cartoons, magic screen, wipe-away "woobie" and 5 magic crayons. You can buy them via their Web page at www.bennysmart.com
But, not all early TV innovations were of this nature. In one case, use of un-exploited technology would enable better communications via the TV and lead to an important discovery still with us today.
Closed Captioning and the Vertical Blanking Interval
Work done to develop closed captioning would truly pave the way to the discovery of how to use the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI). A highly unused portion of the analog television signal, the VBI is used today to broadcast closed captioning and, recently, HTML data at high speeds to television sets, set-top boxes, and TV tuner cards installed in a personal computer. Originally, the VBI was not used for much of anything. The discovery of how to use it occurred when the National Bureau of Standards funded early experiments in cooperation with the ABC network to send out exact time information over the signal. Fortunately, this experiment failed to provide needed results so ABC suggested text captions instead. This and other experiments throughout the 70's on programs like the "Mod Squad" also led to engineering partnerships with the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). With PBS, ABC developed early in-room decoders to interpret the VBI signal and display captioning on the screen. But, it wasn't until public television station, WETA, broadcast and encoded data successfully on line 21 of the VBI that closed captioning became possible on a mass scale. Now, television was a personal communications device/appliance for a small segment of the population. By 2001, estimates say closed captioning will be available on every television set made.
Today, the government has deregulated the VBI signal. Many broadcasters are beginning to take advantage of this opportunity and team with two-way enhanced TV software platforms like Intel's Intercast, WebTV, WorldGate, and Wink to provide graphical and informational enhancements to their viewers. Bloomberg terminals, in fact, receive VBI data such as news headlines and stock prices. Your cable set-top box receives its TV schedule information via the VBI.
Eventually, sending data through the VBI will cease when the digital signal emerges as the broadcast standard. But, let's get to that later.
Broadcast, Cable, Satellite, the Internet, and Wireless
The history and evolution of the over-the-air broadcast, cable networks, satellite dishes, microwave wireless, and the Internet industries are too vast for the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say these video and data networks have and continue to operate in parallel to this day, but not for long. Soon, eTV technology may bring such integrated services into homes around the world. In order to understand how powerful that convergence might be, it is important to look at a few statistics. For example:
# of TV Sets 600 million - worldwide, 250 million + in the U.S., 200 or 400 million + in China
# of Cable Homes 67 million - homes in the U.S.
# of Computers 103 million - worldwide
# of DBS Homes 10 million - worldwide
# of Internet Hosts 44 million - worldwide
# of Internet Servers 3 million - worldwide
# of Internet users 160 million - worldwide
# of Web sites 4.4 million - worldwide
# of Web pages 800 million - worldwide
# of emails 7.3 billion - sent per day in the U.S.
These numbers are surely impressive, but what is the significance of them? One day, an integration of such services (perhaps on a global scale) may occur once the digital signal becomes the standard for broadcasts around the world. When that is possible, we may have an entirely new global, high-speed, video-based communications, news, entertainment, and productivity medium: digital Interactive Television. Before we can talk about Interactive Television, however, let's consider the first real interactive "enhanced" television trial, QUBE, back in the 1970's.
Trial and Error
QUBE TV, as it was called, was a significant achievement because it demonstrated that viewers within a community really wanted interactive enhanced programming. Originally a Warner cable franchise in Columbus, Ohio (this author's hometown), the then un-named system offered 36 channels - a large number even at that time - to subscribers, but it didn't showcase much programming. Subscribers did not want to pay for an empty service and began to sign off. In 1977, executives quickly recruited a team that would begin to develop 8 hours of original programming for the service now being called "QUBE", says Peggy Connor on "Media Central". Producers quickly latched on to the idea that they could develop a two way system in order to attract more subscribers to the franchise. With help from Pioneer, the only two-way cable plant at the time, the QUBE team put together an end-to-end set-top box system featuring buttons subscribers could push to choose or vote during shows. It was an instant hit in town. The author, in fact, can attest that all the kids in Columbus wanted one - though most didn't have cable TV, yet. Early prototype shows included home shopping, children's shows, a movie channel, and music videos. These became QVC, Nickelodeon, The Movie Channel, and MTV networks later on. According to Connor and others who worked at QUBE, the specialty cable provider came to an end due to the fact that: 1) American Express, the investor partner, dropped out of the cable business; 2) other desirous Warner cable franchises stretched QUBE's ability to provide content; 3) subscribers figured out how to rig the boxes for free movies with a safety clip at the back; and 4) Warner's Atari division lost $1 billion in 1983. QUBE was soon sold to Viacom, Inc. and that's the end of that.
Although QUBE had a glorious start, and a messy ending, this interactive TV experiment proved there was not only interest in systems of this sort, but room for another. Post 1983, cable really took off and the basic set-top box began to appear in many homes.
REVOLUTION
Digital Technology Changes Everything
In the early 1980's, just when cable programming became serious competition for the film industry, Japanese representatives from NHK introduced High Definition Television technology to Hollywood called "NHK Hi-vision". This technology was clearly revolutionary because it was able to transmit better pictures and sound inside a wider screen - something the film industry was keen to provide. Unfortunately, the HDTV signal, as it came to be called, required 5 times (20 MHz) the bandwidth than an NTSC analog signal (6 MHz). In addition to usage of spectrum issues and compression problems, there were many incompatibilities with the present system.
For the next 16 years until 1996, however, the standardization debate raged on while Japan put a non-NTSC analog version of HDTV in place. Over 23 well-funded international proposals from corporations and educational institutions were submitted to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. These proposals tried to answer: 1) Would an HDTV transmission be analog, a mixture of analog and digital, or purely digital? 2) How would the signal transmit: broadcast, satellite or, cable? 3) What part of the broadcast spectrum would HDTV occupy? 4) What video compression scheme would be used to fit a 20 MHz signal into a 6 MHz one ? Finally, in 1990, after much haggling, the FCC decided an HDTV digital signal would be simultaneously broadcast until analog phased out. In order to receive this signal, people would be required to buy either an integrated digital TV set, a digital set-top box , or digital TV tuner card to place inside their personal computers to properly interpret the signal. Eventually, four proposals seemed serious, but no one the winner. A suggestion was made to form a "Grand Alliance" between these contenders: AT&T, General Instrument, MIT, Philips, Sarnoff, Thomson and Zenith. Still after much discussion in 1996, the FCC adopted the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) Digital Television Standard based on an MPEG-2 compression scheme proposed by the Grand Alliance. It was that year, also that the Telecommunications Act was passed. In 1997 the FCC allocated pure digital spectrum, not analog or a blend, to broadcasters further requiring them to begin transmitting on a graduated schedule by 2006.
During that hashing out period, many important developments took place: 1) the cable industry became a powerhouse of programming and franchises around the country; 2) the PC revolution gave the television and film producing community suites of software tools to digitally edit and manage their work, especially those from Adobe and Macromedia and Avid. Out of this emerged the CDROM industry, which became the stalking horse for development of interactive multimedia applications. (Note: This was the first time the author of a digital product used the same machine to make the final product the consumer bought to play it.); 3) Satellite companies, eager to get a bigger piece of the market, introduced smaller 18 inch -- 3-foot diameter residential dishes into homes called Digital Broadcast Satellite (DBS). These dishes received transmissions of over 200 channels of digitally encoded NTSC broadcast signal to digital-to-analog decoder set-top boxes nationally and internationally; 4) A mix of analog and digital consumer electronics devices also appeared such as CD-ROMs, VCRs, camcorders, laser disks, and digital video disks.
But nothing was as influential as the arrival of the Internet and the television industry would feel the tremendous weight of it. A new digital era was certainly beginning.
The Internet Makes Wide Interactivity Possible
The Internet emerged as an idea when Leonard Kleinrock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1961 wrote "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" and J.C.R. Licklider of MIT (and soon to be head of ARPANET, the network that would become the first implementation of the Internet), in 1962 wrote about a "Galactic Network" of computers in several memos. It wasn't until much later in the early 90's, however, after serious developments in infrastructure, protocols and languages, that a distributed, interactive, text, audio, and video environment was made available to the public as the "Web".
Two innovations made a widely distributed interactive rich medium possible: 1) in 1991 Englishman, Tim Berners-Lee, at the Swiss institute called The European for Particle Physics (CERN), posted his ideas for the World Wide Web to a small newsgroup, "alt.hypertext". These ideas evolved into the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML); and, 2) in 1993 Marc Andreesen and company at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) located on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed the first visual browser for the Internet called "Mosaic". Up until that time, navigation of the Internet was done through cumbersome, text-based menus and hypertext links called "Lynx".
Once anybody with a computer could simply buy a modem, install some software, dial-up an Internet Service Provider (ISP) from their computer, and use an HTML-compliant browser to navigate to a Web address called a " URL", the Internet became a popular multimedium - one which has become ubiquitous today. Furthermore, because this new multimedium was built upon technological standards such as the Internet Protocol and HTML, every capable person and company had to have a Web page. A new industry was born. Today, hundreds of thousands of companies are developing and deploying standalone or shared Web-based applications-.
Examples of Internet applications:
Email The exchange of text messages
HTML authoring Tools that create Web site documents
Chat Ability to talk to others in real-time
Search engines Web tool to look up words and sites on the Internet quickly
Streaming media Video and audio downloaded from the Internet
Ecommerce suites Tools which help create shopping on a site
Auctions Web sites where you can bid on products and services
Web applications Email hosting.
In a dark corner
While everybody migrated to jobs at Internet companies because "that's where the money was going", several singular projects in the San Francisco Bay Area continued to explore the possibilities of innovative TV in different ways. One, called Telemorphix, was a small start-up that formed around 1992-1993. Telemorphix tried their luck on a 1 hour live broadcast show they developed that showed once a week. It was called "21st Century Vaudeville". This show, which ran in San Francisco for 6 months and then in Boston on WMFP for a year, featured viewers who called in with a 800 telephone number. These viewers called in to become cartoon "actors" on the show. How did that work? Each caller-viewer could choose from hundreds of cartoon characters or fax in a drawing of their own. Once in the "virtual green room", they waited for their turn to get on TV. When their character finally appeared, they talked into the telephone and their voice came out of the TV set which triggered the mouth of the character to animate (the mouth was pre-animated by the producers). Each character (Fork, the Punk, the Knucklehead, etc.) interacted with the cartoon host, "Jack" until he kicked them off. The effect was marvelous and drew a cult following. Unfortunately, the company suffered a financial catastrophe when the founder went through a divorce. Additional experiments like this and other start-ups experimenting with interactive television technologies such as the beleaguered NetChannel, TV Answer, and Interactive Television Network (ITN) never really got off the ground and suffered financial ruin. Although, many would term these "failures", those in the industry know that their work paved the way for further developments. There are no failures.
CONVOLUTION
Trials and Products
Lessons learned from smaller and much larger enhanced TV trials in the mid 90's helped a fledgling group of professionals around the country learn exactly what consumers wanted and which technologies would work. Because of developments in the Internet and an MPEG compression technology, large corporations, that could afford it, also wanted to test multi-service, high-speed television systems on a wide basis in the field to see if interactive/enhanced television was possible. Trials of different scope were sponsored by a singular or a coalition of companies - sometimes from different industry sectors. In general, competitiveness and a belief that enhanced TV would be a lucrative industry drove these companies to explore such systems, methodologies, and business models. New services tested in the field included movies-on-demand (now called video-on-demand or "VOD"), local information services, interactive gaming, shopping, and education. These professionals say that it was what they learned about designing the user an interface and how people made choices on the screen - a direct precursor to enhanced TV - which taught them the most. Many of those discoveries are being implemented today. In total, over 21 trials kicked off after 1993 when Source Media launched the Interactive Channel in Denton, Texas. Between 1994-1996, 17 more major telco or cable trials took place outside the U.S. It's not known how many more experiments were taking place around the country. Please submit your war stories to swedlow@itvt.com for inclusion here.
A small U.S. sampling:
Company Name Location Technology Services
Bell Atlantic
AT&T FutureVision
Tele TV Dover Toms River, NJ Phillips set-tops
nCUBE servers Switch Digital Video Near VOD Pay-per-view Shopping
Bell Atlantic
AT&T Stargazer Fairfax, VA Stellar One set-tops
nCUBE servers AT&T ADSL VOD Internet
Time Warner Full Service Network (FSN) Orlando, FL Fiber to curb VOD, games, shopping, postal
TCI
Microsoft MS Network Redmond, WA General Instrument
Hewlett Packard
NEC VOD, games
Cox Cable no name Omaha, NE Zenith set-tops
an Hybrid Fiber Coaxial VOD, an NVOD transaction
Southwest Bell Little Richard Richardson, TX Fiber to curb VOD, games, 60 channels
Data provided by: S.Churchill
Although most of these trials would get cancelled, many "lessons learned", according to Daniel Levy, now director of program development at Wink Communications, an enhanced TV software developer, "still reverberate today." Launched on December 14, 1994 over fiber in over 4,000 homes made up of mostly family units, Time Warner's Full Service Network tested services like video-on-demand, shopping, games, an electronic programming guide, and interactive postal services. Not a free ride, by any means, customers were billed on a an pay-per-use basis via their credit cards. All told, the project cost many millions of dollars - possibly up to 100 million.
With enormous financial losses due to the fact that the technology simply cost more than the deployment could support, FSN closed down in 1997. "It was far too expensive, but we knew that going in", says Levy - responsible for the service style guide. Contrary to public assumptions about the project, "We knew FSN would eventually become deployable much later on", he says. "It wasn't a wasted effort: we learned a lot." When asked, Levy also points out certain things gleaned from the experience: 1) the service, itself, must be available free to the customer; 2) different tiered pricing models do not work.; 3) video-on-demand is a very popular application of the technology; and, 4) people really want simple interactive options. These things definitely foreshadow the eTV systems and emerging business models we have today.
As big corporate trials flared and failed, the Internet continued to grow rapidly. More and more people connected to the Internet and began expecting greater amounts of speed to access greater amounts of content and multimedia. Hundreds of TV-related products released to the market claimed to be "the" video solution which would enable the computer or Internet to unite with the TV. Terms like "PCTV", "InternetTV", "NetTV", and eventually "WebTV" and others became the buzzwords in every magazine. Meanwhile, telcos returned to the labs to develop what they hoped would be their solution to pumping video data through the pipes, e.g. high-speed data networking technologies such as an xDSL (where the "x" stands in for several variants such as A, H, S, & V). The cable industry began to explore and build high-speed hybrid fiber coax or fiber data technologies t |
