Interactive Television

The average person in Britain or America spends a quarter of his waking life in front of the TV set, perhaps saying "it's like having someone in the room." Meanwhile, because of television, we are less involved with other people. We have fewer conversations, and fewer people who know us intimately. But what if you prefer to monitor people in their homes, any time, day or night? What if you want to build up, over years, psychological profiles of individuals from a distance - what motivates them, what makes them anxious, what makes them jump? What if you want to use that knowledge to manipulate what they know, how they feel and, finally, what they do? Interactive television can deliver that as well. It can provide all this control, to any company or government that is able to pay the money. "We can build up profiles of people," says Two Way TV Managing Director Simon Cornwell, "based on what they say and on their actual behavior. Eventually the product will target itself to individual customers and what one customer sees will be very different from what another customer sees."

Interactive television will be used to invade viewers' privacy. Contrary to what you might have heard, this is important, because privacy was never about information; it's about power - the individual's bargaining power with the rest of the world. If you have nothing left to hide, then your negotiating position is impossibly weak. Your free will is exposed to tampering, and you may have much to fear. Interactive TV (iTV) is any television with what is called a “return path”. Information flows not only from broadcaster to viewer, but also back from viewer to broadcaster. Another feature common to all iTV systems is the ability to offer each TV set, or each viewer who uses that TV set, a different choice of content. There are different hardware configurations and it is possible to build a crude interactive service using analog systems. But the type of systems now being offered, that will dramatically change how viewers live, are digital – either cable or satellite.

People are talking about interactive television for three main reasons:

T-commerce: you will be able to buy a pizza without dialing a phone.

Interactive Goodies: you will be able to pause live TV or record shows, we will be able to click on advertisement to find out more.