interactive television
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Ins and Outs: Whatever happened to iTV?
Jeremy Toeman contributes Ins and Outs, an opinion column on entertainment technology. He is also the founder and editor of LIVEdigitally. As a sophomore in college I wrote a presentation on "the next generation home" wherein I discussed topics I had researched, ranging from "the information superhighway" (this was 1992, before Mosaic was even in beta) to home automation to interactive television. The thinking was we'd have amazing, automagically working technology controlling our home and our media, it would all come soon and cheap, and work, for lack of a better term, like magic.Here we are in 2008, and while technology's come a long way, only the rich have home automation and most of the time they spend using it involves rebooting their house. When it comes to interactive television, however, the vision of watching TV and doing cool things like seeing real-time sports statistics, selecting alternate viewpoints, or playing an interactive game just hasn't come to any home I know of. The only major improvements to TV technologies in the past 15 years are: the mainstream availability of HDTV sets and programming, on-demand movie watching, and DVRs. And these improvements are all evolutionary ones, not a single bit revolutionary.
Sci Fi Channel creating hybrid TV series and MMO
The Sci Fi Channel plans to air a TV series that simultaneously plays out as a massively multiplayer online game, the Los Angeles Times reports. This pairing of television writers with game designers will allow fans of the series to influence its story arc through their own actions in the virtual space. David Howe, president of the Sci Fi Channel, said, "This is the Holy Grail for us, without a doubt... this is groundbreaking, and I don't say that lightly."The large and dedicated player communities attached to various titles in the MMO space are appealing to the Sci Fi Channel. "Bundling a World of Warcraft player community with a series and an on-line social community is something the Sci Fi Channel has tried to puzzle out for several years," according to the Los Angeles Times. The Sci Fi Channel's desire to tap into the MMO market led them to work with Trion World Network, a California-based game company with some major investors standing behind it. The hope is that together, they will achieve a first in interactive entertainment: create a hybrid television series and online game, where players affect or even determine the direction of the show. If successful, this will stand as a milestone in the history of both television and games.
Samsung launches first ACAP HDTV, the SVP-56K3HDB
We know what you're thinking: another Samsung HDTV, another HDTV technology standard, another day. But you might actually want to check out Samsung's 56-inch SVP-56K3HDB, the first production model featuring ACAP. For those who haven't previously heard anything about it, the Advanced Common Application Platform (ACAP) standard was developed with the intention of being the future universal standard for interactive television (and is already a part of the ATSC spec in the US). Oh, sure, iTV's been around in various incarnations since forever, but there's never been an internationally standardized internet-connected TV system based around the concept of moving apps and data to and from your set -- hence ACAP, which might enable newsfeeds, weather and traffic, as well as commercials linked to online merchants, and, of course, in depth sports stats, backgroun info, or interactive information about the program you're watching. We don't know much else about the plasma dusokay the ACAP system's powering in the SVP-56K3HDB, but we're a little more interested in the two way data right now, if you don't mind.
