The research company Giga Information Group: no change is expected in the field of interactive television in the next 5 years
Avi Blizovsky
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For the last 10 years, the medium of interactive television has been perceived as such, which should bring the news of technology to the masses, but this breakthrough has not yet happened. Although we are beginning to see indicators regarding the way in which revenues can be generated from interactive television services, we will not see any significant growth in this area in the next 5 years at the current rate of progress, says Martha Bennett, a senior analyst at the international research and consulting company Giga Information Group, in a working paper published at the end of this week
Bennett points out that only government intervention, which will manifest itself in setting a definite point in time to stop analog broadcasting, combined with providing subsidies for the replacement and upgrading of the reception equipment, may bring about a faster and more drastic change in the countries where these measures will be taken. According to Bennett, in most of the countries where interactive television experiments are conducted, experience shows that people are not interested in investing money for these services, and there is strong resistance to investing in new technology on the part of the general public. Therefore, Bennett believes that the flourishing of interactive services will be related to the transition to full digital broadcasting, and not before.
The biggest and most important lesson to be learned from interactive TV experiments in the UK, for example, is that most people don't want to interact with TV at all. The experiments show that very few people are interested in receiving additional services through television. Various services offered, such as shopping or financial services, received a very low response rate, due to two main reasons that Bennett cites: The first reason is that television is seen as an entertainment device for leisure time. This fact, in addition to the fact that interacting with the TV remote is not very convenient, meant that only a few people were willing to interact with the TV in any way. A second reason is a matter of convenience - due to technological reasons, the interaction through the television is much more cumbersome and slow than performing a similar interaction through the phone or computer. The main conclusion that emerges from the various experiments is that the general public is willing to interact with the television only on the condition that it is a simple action.
A technology that has not been successful is video on demand (VOD). In many countries, the cable companies have been offering videos starting every 15 minutes for many years, without the need for interactive technology. It seems that the number of viewers who are interested in full VOD services and are willing to pay the price for it is too small, for this to be worthwhile in terms of financial investment for franchisees. An experiment conducted in Portugal also shows that the general public is not enthusiastic about interactive television.
In a joint trial conducted by the Portuguese television company TV-Cabo together with Microsoft, the television company estimated that 100,000 of its 1.2 million subscribers would join the service. In the end, only 10,000 subscribers chose to join. The Portuguese television company even offered users to interact using a keyboard linked to the TV, but received cold reactions similar to those received in other countries - "If I wanted to use a keyboard, I would use a personal computer".
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