I Want My iTV
Session: MyTV (Television Marketing in the Age of Consumer Empowerment)
What a substantial representation of interactive television industry experience and ideas! Allan McLennan has been in the business at least since the early ‘80s and was one of the founders of Worlds Inc., an early 3-D avatar driven chat environment that - even in the mid-‘90s - put its later rivals the Palace and the still-new There to shame. Panelist-cum-moderator David Hutchinson, VP of TV integration for the Phelps Group worked on some of CityTV‘s early interactive television experiments.
The panel was also graced by the more-than-token TiVo representative Kimber Sterling. And even though MediaVest‘s Adam Gerber admits to being new to the industry, he name dropped the early-‘90s Orlando project, so it’s clear he’s doing his best to get up to speed quickly. Gosh, why does that feel so long ago?
McLennan’s expertise and experience was given extremely short shrift even though he was the opening panelist. He was tasked with defining interactive television - which is a bit like defining “online community” or “blogs,” much less their commercial applications, and he spent much of his time roaring through a healthy highlight of extra-North American examples, which gently countered an earlier panel‘s assertion that we don’t need to look to Europe for TV- and phone-based success stories any more.
If anything, TiVo is a watershed iTV success story - or is on the cusp of such. Sterling painted a picture of what the future of TV might be like in a TiVo-inspired world: Enhanced advertising featuring information-based marketing messages, product placement that steps beyond virtual product placement, and what Sterling terms “couch commerce,” or Amazon-like one-click ordering from your chesterbed.
To close, Gerber held up the increasing importance of the TV remote as the new UI-driving peripheral. Which brings us back to Hutchinson’s assertion that the consumer is king - regardless of how important content may be.
“In the 1950’s, people said that Milton Berle sold more TV’s than RCA,” Hutchinson says in the ending Q&A. “In the ‘80s, ‘I Want My MTV’ really drove the success of cable. Today, do things like American Idol drive iTV?
A full transcript of this session is also available.
