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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."
And the Popup ads begin to multiply... quick! get the raid!
does this mean i can make the Pilsbury Doughboy laugh when i click on his bellybutton? what is this thing?
Notice how easy it is to just change the channel when commercials come on? Now notice how few people actually change the channel when commercials come on.
People watch TV to be totally passive. They don't WANT to interact with the news channel. They just want to sit there and absorb information.
My cat has been pointing and clicking on the screen for years. Now I finally know what she was getting at.
So how long until ITV (The TV channel) in the UK decides to let their lawyers loose?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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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the way that we watch porno...
I truly can't wait
Interactive Television is the granddaddy of vapor. It has been in the works in one form or another since long before the internet. Before computers probably. It just is never going to happen.
Another Mac product... oh wait... *hears Switch commercial music playing in the background* "And like, I was watching this great show on TV, and suddenly the TV was like going *beep beep beep beeeppp beep* That's when I switched to iTV."
Karma whorin' since 1999
Can't wait for advertisers to distort the hell out of this. In the middle of your favorite show's climax, oops, popup!
Grrr.
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?
Why doesn't the TV industry spend more effort figuring out what people actually like, instead of trying to convince us we want something that we really don't?
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...
The UK digital systems have been using MHEG for the past 5 years for our interactive service, and although slow at first (mainly due to STB problems) it's getting pretty fast now. BBC's BBCi is superb, and offers everything our our teletext system used to.
Some of the interactive services are a bit naff, but some are pretty interesting.