Slashdot Mirror
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."
My cat has been pointing and clicking on the screen for years. Now I finally know what she was getting at.
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.
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?