Television, drug of the nation, breeding ignorance and feeding radiation, sang the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy a few years ago. From its early days in the first decades of this century, television has been a one-way medium.
Early television was similar and different to film. A film projector operates by passing light through a rapidly moving series of film frames, creating an image on the screen that our brain interprets as continuously moving.
The earliest television technologies were mechanical, based on this principle: a signal was broadcast to the television receiver, which assembled it into a frame, and then projected it on to a surface. That technology lost out to the electronic television we all know: a signal is received by the television, and one or more electronic beams then strike the inside of the picture tube, line by line, to paint the image we see.
While people would gather in cinemas to watch movies, television created a fragmented audience watching from their homes. A cinema audience may laugh or gasp collectively. For television to get the same effect requires adding canned (recorded) laughter or applause or taping shows before studio audiences a pretence that the individual viewing at home is part of an audience, rather than one of millions of isolated viewers.
There is no audience feedback with television. If you are really angry with the show you're watching, you could break the television but the broadcaster would not be aware of that.
Suddenly we have interactive digital television or iDTV. Have things changed? According to the hype, they have. If you are a sports fan you will be able to choose which view of the game you want, or switch between them. You will be able to surf the internet, send emails, and even order pizza. The viewer is in the driving seat.
There is an obvious problem here. No matter how many views you have of a football match, you are still a passive consumer of the sports industry. And no matter how many views my television gives me, I won't be able to watch Norths playing rugby league any more because they were abolished by the big business-dominated rugby league administration because there were too many teams for maximum television programming profitability.
Leaving that aside, does iDTV offer an interactive experience? The process can work a few different ways. When you watch a game, there are really several channels broadcasting it. By selecting a different view, you are channel hopping between these channels. You may be able to pull up some statistics, or save and rerun some parts of the game (but don't bet on being able to block the advertisements by running your own highlights).
Another way is the Electronic Program Guide, the facility offered in hotels in which you select from a menu of television channels or purchase the viewing of a movie.
It can also involve internet access and email capability. This gets back to how the viewer sends information to the television broadcaster because the television is just a passive receiver (although this is not true of cable television). You need some sort of box that connects the television, a keyboard and a telephone line.
In this case the user suffers a double or triple disadvantage: the operation ties up your telephone line, the quality of the picture is dreadful (much worse than a computer screen) and the service you are offered by the iDTV companies may or may not even connect to the internet. The only identified advantage is that it is cheaper than buying a personal computer.
Rupert Murdoch and most other media moguls have traditionally hated the internet. Media companies are now hoping that iDTV will turn the tide against the internet, win back viewers and advertisers, and make them lots of money. At the moment they don't even seem to be in the game.
BY GREG HARRIS