Speculation about IPTV, interactive TV and additional uses for the set-top-box seems to have been ongoing for a while now. I remember sitting through a presentation 8 years ago called “Put Card in Telly” outlining how payments through your set top box could be THE thing in 2001. Aside from the technology, infrastructure and security issues (is it “safe” to enter your PIN into the insecure remote control?) there was a lot of scepticism about what we will and won’t do with TVs – the lean-back, lean-forward debate.
Interestingly, theoretical debate didn’t hamper Nintendo who has a diverse age range – in 3 million households across the UK – leaning all over the place as we bowl, ski and race our way round the living room – all channelled through the TV. I can only assume that they knew the proposition was strong enough to get us leaning forward and out of our seats.
The fact that we’re not glued to our sofas with a “you do all the work for me” attitude has to be good news for the latest generation of TV innovations. The best of these were the focus of the UK arm of the IPTV World Series Awards held in London last week. We’re particularly excited about them because our client Miniweb Interactive won the Best Interactive Service or Application award. The judges were most impressed by Miniweb’s ability to allow internet content to be redeployed as an interactive TV service and to provide a solution for delivering interoperability. The real jewel in the Miniweb crown is that fact that it is instantly available in the 9 million+ homes on the Sky Digital platform in the UK.
TV as a compliment to PC based information is really attractive. While it’s unlikely that I’d use it for a task like listing a product on eBay, I’d certainly use it to check my bid status during a regional weather forecast. You can see it working well with Fantasy Football too – you might use it to tweak your team at the last minute. The success of services like the BBC iPlayer has also helped more generally to smooth boundaries between TV and PC content.
And Miniweb works for the content providers too, especially home shopping channels, attracted by the possibility of permanently listing more products for sale. With some major brands in early planning stages for getting onto the platform and ads starting to appear on some digital channels, I am sure that a great number of us will have tried it out by the year end.
