Interactive TV gets real.....................................
tvbroadcast.com
Interactive Television: It's Real!
By Mitchell Berman, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Operations, OpenTV, Inc.
(May 24, 1999) While the media focuses on broadband and "Internet-on-TV," digital interactive TV has come out of nowhere to reach two million subscribers today, and potentially 5.5 million viewers by the end of 1999. This is despite the media spotlight given to technologies such as WebTV, which, even with the hype, haven't found anything resembling a mass audience.
A good example of the steadily increasing penetration of interactive TV is the sale by British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) of 500,000 digital set-top boxes to support the firm's launch of interactive home banking, shopping, weather services and program guides in April 1999. The secret to the success of this particular form of interactive TV is that its TV-centric point of view adds an entertaining, convenient and easy way for the mass TV-viewing audience to enjoy watching television without forcing them to adopt new and unwanted PC-like television viewing behavior.
In the U.S., cable operators have begun to upgrade their networks, but consumers have obtained the benefit of high-speed Internet services in only very limited deployments. Moreover, the prospect of delivering enough bandwidth to handle mass quantities of TV-quality video via WebTV or over even the upgraded cable systems is far in the future. In most cases, today's modems and upgraded cable systems typically bog down after just a few minutes of video delivery. Even assuming these technical and infrastructure problems can be overcome, there is no compelling Web content available to drive the average American, watching seven hours of TV a day, to pay an extra $500 for a set-top box and a $60 monthly ISP or access fee.
On the other hand, since December of 1996, TV-centric digital interactive TV (the delivery of MPEG-2 rather than HTML-formatted services) has been using conventional television broadcast media to demonstrate its ability to deliver compelling content to a mass audience in Europe.
The key advantage of this type of interactive TV is that it provides additional services to the consumer and new revenues to the broadcaster, while maintaining the same paradigm and infrastructure as current TV broadcasting. No ISP fees. No extra, expensive set-top boxes. No keyboards are necessary.
As James Gleick pointed out in the New York Times, "We sit 18 to 24 inches from a computer screen, a distance suitable for reading, but four to six feet from a television, a distance suitable for placid entertainment."
Using only their existing TV sets and remote controls, viewers with TV-centric, forward-casting interactive TV can easily obtain information about an advertised product or order a wide range of goods and services. They can obtain specialized information--such as local weather forecasts, stock quotes, sports statistics and horoscopes--and enjoy an array of other interactive services.
Access is instantaneous. No World Wide Web wait for a modem to bring this information across the TV screen. It looks like TV and acts like TV.
For distribution networks and content providers, the forward-casting type of interactive TV offers analogous advantages. Deployment costs are a fraction of those required for high-speed, two-way broadband. The revenue pie is wide open, since ISP fees and other "gateway" aspects, like those controlled by WebTV, are non-existent and, thus, not eating away at the revenue food chain.
Forward-casting MPEG-2 digital interactive TV can take advantage of the existing infrastructure by offering a high-speed digital data stream into the home, while the plain old copper wire or high-speed cable takes it out of the home.
Electronic commerce and other types of transactional interactive services are available, too. This is made possible by sending data through the set-top box using a simple modem connection, just like WebTV offers--whether using the plain old telephone line or still scarce bi-directional cable networks.
However, the difference between an Internet-on-TV and forward-casting approach is that there is no waiting while you interact with what's on the TV screen. The only time one actually uses the modem in the set-top box with OpenTV, for example, is to send transaction data. Thus, the TV-centric approach combined with an IP return path for security and transaction processing really caters to the impulse buyer. It's fast and easy-to-use for the typical TV viewer.
Moreover, the set-top requires very little processing power to offer these services. Thus, it can be offered for about the same price as today's dumb set-top boxes. In fact, most of the processing and transmission of interactive applications takes place in the broadcasting environment, not the set-top box. This allows a multitude of different interactive TV services to be deployed in an extremely cost-effective manner.
Up to now, European broadcasters have led the way with forward-casting interactive TV services. In early 1997, digital satellite broadcaster la TŽlŽvision Par Satellite (TPS) was the first to launch this type of interactive television on the French direct-to-home (DTH) system and by December of last year had 640,000 subscribers (making it the largest commercially operated interactive television system of its kind anywhere in the world).
Before the end of next month, an additional two million homes will join the party from BSkyB in the UK, TELEFONICA and VIA DIGITAL in Spain and Italy's STREAM S.p.A system. In each case, their subscribers will be able to enjoy forward-casting, digital interactive services provided by OpenTV.
The first major U.S. forward-casting interactive TV application is scheduled to debut before the end of this year, when EchoStar Communication's direct broadcast satellite network, DISH--leveraging technology from OpenTV--begins transmitting a suite of new interactive TV services to over one million homes.
These new interactive services may include one for music, featuring an option to buy music videos, CDs and concert tickets and play music trivia games. Yet another may be for weather, featuring current local, national and world weather maps that can be accessed with the simple click of a TV remote control.
In addition, DISH will debut an initial suite of interactive services by partnering with the TV networks to enhance current, recognized TV programs and channels.
An important benefit of this forward-casting, TV-centric type of interactive TV and its huge lead in deployment around the world is that the products required to implement this technology are well-defined and stable. Unlike WebTV, which is still engaged in the effort of attempting to prove the technical and commercial viability of Internet-on-TV, TV-centric, forward-casting interactive TV is real and has many, proven mass market applications up and running around the world.
It's been real in Europe for two years. It will finally be real in the U.S. this year. For terrestrial broadcasters, it's a technology that can't, and shouldn't, be ignored.
Mitchell Berman is Senior Vice President, Marketing and Operations at OpenTV, Inc., based in Mountain View, California. He can be reached at mberman@opentv.com.
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