Lean Back and Think of England
Wherein our narrator finally gets to the heart of
the matter.
Colour me livid. Today we were treated to
something unusual at AFTRS, a genuine television big-shot who deigned to shower
us with his wisdom. I leave him nameless - for fear of a libel suit - but I'll
just say that he's arguably the most powerful man in the entire Australian
television industry. Now everything's relative, so this person will never reach
any audience bigger than about 7% of the total market in the USA, but for
Australia, he's the big cheese.
He came
to talk about a number of things, but I was most interested in hearing his
opinions on the interactive television (iTV, hereafter, for brevity) service
that he'll be rolling out in the first quarter of next year. There's a
tremendous opportunity for Australia to leap ahead of America here, because this
person's company will likely get millions of subscribers for his service in just
a very short period of time. it will be one of the biggest iTV operations in
the world, from its introduction.
I
view this as an enormous opportunity - not just a playground for experimentation
- but a chance to produce an indigenous iTV industry which could storm across
the Pacific, into the Northern Hemisphere, and conquer America. It's happened
before: both "Survivor" and "Big Brother" are foreign shows (one British, the
other Dutch, I believe) and they created the current mega-trend of "reality tv"
programming.
This fellow, however, has
other ideas. His idea of iTV is to be able to select among a number of
different news feeds: current affairs, sport, lifestyle, sport, weather, sport
and sport. These news feeds will be updated more-or-less continuously, and
available at the click of a button.
He
was broadly dismissive of any other potential of iTV, saying, "It hasn't worked.
People want to lean forward in front of the computer, but they want to lean back
to enjoy the television."
Now there are
lies, damned lies, and half-truths, in ascending order of evil. This statement
really does belong in the last category. Let's pick it apart and see
why.
Certainly, certain types of TV
programming - most particularly, dramas and situation comedies - don't fit the
interactive model well. They're very much like films. You sit back and absorb
the narrative. You don't want any interruptions - even for commercials. (While
they do show The
Sopranos in Australia on broadcast TV, I was
shocked to see they had commercial interruptions every 10 minutes.) LIke any
good story, the pleasure is in the telling, in the feelings it evokes in
you.
That said, there's another
category of programming which inspires all sorts of reactions - some very verbal
- from the viewing audience. Take a fan watching a football game, or someone
watching a game show and playing along. These are intensively interactive forms
of television, and would only become more so if it were possible to register
one's feelings at any moment in time, or make a guess as to the correct
answer.
I mean, imagine: fans could, in
real time, react to a coach's plays during a football game. Armchair
quarterbacking could rise to a whole new level, and the commentators - always
looking for something to comment about - could comment on it. People could send
SMS messages (as perhaps they already do) relating to the strategies employed,
etc. In fact, fans want to be involved as possible, and every avenue open to
them is quickly thronged.
But that's
just the tip of the iceberg, the low-hanging fruit. How about a political
debate where the voters could interactively indicate their pleasure/displeasure
with the candidate's opinions. This is already done, albeit at a very small
scale, with focus groups. But if it were spread more widely - as easily could
be done with this sort of system - it would add a nearly
Max
Headroom quality to conventional political
debate. I'm not sure the effect would be entirely positive, but it would
certainly be very interesting. And if applied to talk shows? I can just
imagine how that'd work for Bill
O'Reilly or
The Fox
Report.
Whooeee!
And imagine a version of
The Dating
Game updated for interactivity, where the
viewing audience could make their own recommendation on the fellow the
bachelorette should pick. (It augurs for a certain type of live programming,
which game shows are well suited for,
production-wise.)
I'm getting a sense
of what I need to do during my talk at SPAA - which will be in front of the 800
richest (and presumably most influential) produces in Australian film and
television: I've got to bitch-slap them. Hard. Not because they've done
anything wrong. They haven't, not so far. But they're about
it.
It seems that this uber-executive
is making a basic mistake: he's taking the lessons of Britain's experiment with
iTV and applying it to Australia. Since one of the parent companies for this
iTV project has a strong presence in Britain, and did their iTV trials there,
the model is simply being copied - wholesale - for Australia. How does this
make sense? If you completely and neatly avoid experimentation, you
short-circuit the possibility that anything entirely novel will develop. And
Australians are incredibly inventive - 12% of world patents are Australian, and
yet they comprise just 0.2% of the world's population. To underuse a resource
like that would be very nearly criminal - as well as consign his experiment in
iTV to failure. iTV needs a raison d'être, and it's not just
news-on-demand, video-on-demand, or anything-else-on-demand. It's being able to
interact, meaningfully, with the programming - being able to talk back, and be
heard. In a desire to be just like the British, Australian iTV is about to
commit suicide-at-birth.
Unless I can
help them wake up, recognize the horror of the situation, and get them to change
their ways.
Posted: Tue - October 28, 2003 at 05:21 PM