The interactive television age is dawning.
OK, so that's been the message floating around the industry for awhile. But a recent decision by the broadcasting association to adopt a digital television transmission standard has given hope to this year's National Association of Television Programming Executives conference in Las Vegas.
For the past five years, the development of digital television was held up while the National Association of Broadcasters debated whether to adopt the European standard of digital television transmissions or to go with 8-VSB. After a heated debate that dragged on for some time, last Friday the NAB decided to endorse 8-VSB.
Now that a standard has been endorsed, content creators need to figure out just exactly what digital television means.
Digital television can mean either high definition or interactive, said Martin Jacklin, a digital media consultant based in Switzerland.
High definition television requires a massive cash infusion up front, he said, making it unlikely that HDTV will explode onto the consumer scene. To create quality content, studios would have to refit their studios with updated equipment, and consumers would have to upgrade their current home entertainment systems.
"The battle is over whether to use digital television to get to interactivity or use digital television to get to better picture quality, Jacklin said. "Set-top boxes, home shopping, and game shows can be done with standard television."
Jacklin recommends getting revenue streams going through interactivity on standard televisions, before moving consumers into the HDTV world.
Whether the studios decide to focus on interactive or enhanced television, ATV Forum member Cindy Kelly said new hardware devices need to be equipped with the technology to both send and receive data streams across those multiple networks.
The ATV Forum is a consortium of hardware and software companies trying to develop the network that would distribute any content across those multiple networks.
Sun Microsystems broadband market development manager Rob Glidden said his company was developing the platform that would speed up the creation and delivery of that content. The JavaTV standard embeds data into a single stream of video. It allows users to experience interactivity through one screen, without the annoying pop-up screen that blocks the picture you're trying to watch.
But the television isn't the only place much of this content will be viewed. If executives really want to market their brand, and retain eyeballs, they need to figure out ways to distribute their shows across multiple platforms.
Sounds a bit dry until you consider what the quality of a movie made for the big screen would look like when viewed on a personal digital assistant.
"The initial world view was that for Internet content, the PC was the center of the world," Glidden said. "The idea was you build your content for the PC, then you automate some transformation to other mediums like television and movies. Clearly, as more and more content management tools appear across the devices, it has become a much more sophisticated view on how to develop cross-medium content."
All of this is good timing for the folks at NATPE.
The organization has come a long way from its beginnings 38 years ago when it was made up of a group of local television programmers from around the country. Now the organization boasts 4,000 corporations, independent and local products, along with content and technology companies.
The conference is now more about technology and new innovations than it is about programming. The hot topic at this year's conference is interactive and digital television.
"There was a time when we were all about the content, now that distribution is integral to the content in some respects," said Beth Braen, senior vice president of creative services at the conference. "There is a convergence of software and hardware, hence the adding value to high definition television. The bigger picture is then how digital television affects the content creators."
