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iTV Standard v1.1 Released
mbstone writes "The iTV Standards Initiative this week announced the release of version 1.1 of its proposed iTV Production Standards, an open XML-schema-based scheme for interactive TV. In other words your set-top box or PC TV card would use the proposed standard to let you click on something displayed on your TV screen, for example, to answer a poll or buy the product featured in a commercial."
This is pretty cool stuff...would this kind of be like the HTML of TV? :)
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
And the Popup ads begin to multiply... quick! get the raid!
IMO, iTV only makes sense if the TV show itself is set up to be interactive. Think, for example, reality TV type shows where you could vote for certain things to happen, or where the audience could vote off contestants, rather than having the producers make the decision.
Otherwise, iTV simply gets in the way of TV viewing. If I want to talk to others or answer polls about my favorite TV show, I will do it on my computer after watching the show, not on my TV during the show.
I have a $200 sony all in one remote that tries to provide a single interface to all my stuff. Problem is that it does not quite cut it, the Onkyo receiver does not quite do what it should.
Result is that only I can get the home theatre to work properly so I leave it turned off most of the time because I don;t want to spend all my time being sysop for the home entertainment system. Wish the wife would buy a Mac, then I could tell her she is absolutely on her own for service calls as I don't do Macs.
All I want is for a bunch of high end but still mainstream stuff to work together - we are not talking about obscure audiophile $25,000 turntables here. But there is no reason that a $2,000 TV and a $500 satelite receiver and $1,000 home theater box should not talk to each other either. We are not talking about big ticket changes, just an RFC822 or maybe a USB port.
Interactive TV leaves me cold, the stuff is real weak when you try the canned demos with oodles of thought gone into the interactive parts. Run of the mill content that will be seen mostly on non-interactive tv sets will be a bust.
There is no middle ground worth exploring between TV and videogames. Tombraider and such are lightyears beyond what iTV could hope to be. Why fight it trying to do interactive lite?
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--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
It has happened, MS's WebTV was attaching URLs to my broadcast (regular VHF in the air style) TV years ago. Back before the bubble burst. You also might notice this is iTV 1.1, this implies there was an iTV 1.0.
Its no big whoop, or selling point for consumers.
Just when the ford commercial comes on you can go look for a little icon to link you to fords website. Probably doesnt add jack to the cost of a commercial, and can get info to someone while their interest is piqued. That's the theory at least. TV is and will no doubt always remain a passive medium for the most part.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Cable companies, networks? Sometimes I wonder if there will be a day when one company will be the only source of information for any given person.
They'll define his world. Everything in his life would be viewed from some context he learned from that company. It would innescable because everyone else around him would have personalities derived from the same source.
More likely, society will split between two groups. Those who favor homogenous information, lifestyles, entertainment. And those who don't.
The homogenous society will dress more or less the same, listen to the same music, watch the same shows. A large chunk of society will fall into this category, and you could identify them right away.
The heterogenous society will do whatever suits them.
Maybe things are like this already. Do people dress/think/act more similarly in large cities than in smaller ones?
I used to code to the PowerTV API
I'm sincerely sorry to hear that. If I ever see preprocessor macro based exception handling again, I'm going to strangle something. Probably a kitten.
How about a way to have my PVR determine when a program really starts and ends, so that a preempted or delayed show won't cause me to record 20 minutes of a news cast or the show that was on before the one I wanted. A particluar network may slip a few seconds per hour, causing a missed lead-in for a particular show (eg for CSI this can be disappointing), and there is a trend lately on broadcast networks to run shows together by a minute or two either way with little or no break between them, which also throws off recording.
It should be relatively easy to send this information, per channel in the overscan area (close caption area) in the current scheme of things, but with interactive television on the way, I would love to see the broadcast be able to interact with automation devices as well as people, if only for this one feature.
Unless they completely disable our ability to record by the time this stuff is in use...
you are assuming they have any rights over 'ITV'...i seriously doubt it!
chilledchaos