What is Interactive Television?

June 09, 1999

Interactive TV combines the appeal and mass audience of traditional TV with the interactive nature of the World Wide Web. What if you could view tonight's local news headlines while you watch your favorite network shows? See plot summaries for upcoming shows? Look up individual player and team statistics while you watch the Superbowl? Chat with other fans? Order the products you see in commercials with the click of a button? Interactive TV makes all of this possible, and it's happening right now! Keep reading to find out what interactive TV looks like, who can watch it, why you should broadcast it, and how you can create your own interactive TV shows.

Contents

The Interactive TV Experience—What interactive TV looks like to the television audience.

Who Can Watch Interactive TV—The receivers you can use to watch interactive TV.

Why Broadcast Interactive TV—Some of the benefits of broadcasting interactive TV.

Going Interactive—Some basic information to get you started on the road to interactivity.

The Interactive Television Experience

You can enrich your viewers' TV experience by creating interactive programming that integrates Web content with traditional TV programming. Web page content such as menus, graphics, and supporting text can be seamlessly integrated with the TV image.

Another way to get your viewers more involved with the TV show is to embed the TV display in a Web page and trigger changes to its appearance with the TV signal. For example, during the World's Series, a window on the side of the screen shows the statistics for the current batter. By sending triggers to the page, you automatically update the window to show the correct statistics every time a new player steps up to bat. You can also let the TV audience update the show by interacting with the Web page. Picture this, your audience is watching Seinfeld, a window pops up with a trivia question about the scene, if the viewer answers correctly, a door opens at the bottom of the screen and Kramer bursts through, sliding across the screen.

To create this kind of interactive TV programming you'll need to do the following:

• Design your interactive program, both the television production and the related Web content.
• Specify a package that contains the Web content of the interactive TV show.
• Broadcast interactive television links to connect the TV broadcast with the related Web content.

The Weather Channel's Interactive Program

The Weather Channel's interactive program illustrates how broadcasters can provide a national audience with updated, in-depth information much faster and easier than they can modify their television broadcast. While continuing to watch regular Weather Channel programming, viewers can access related Web pages, allowing them quick access to local information or more in-depth coverage of Weather Channel programming.

What the Television Audience Sees

During the show, an interactive television link icon appears on the television screen when Web content is available.

The interactive TV link icon shows viewers that interactive content is available.

It's quick and easy for your viewers to see interactive programming. When they see the interactive television link icon, they can select it with either their remote control or keyboard. After choosing the link, a selection panel drops down. Viewers can choose to view the interactive program or continue watching full-screen TV.

The selection panel lets viewers choose to watch the interactive program.

When viewers choose to see the interactive program, a connection window appears. Viewers can still watch the TV show while the interactive programming is being downloaded.

Connecting to the Weather Channel's interactive programming.

You have total control over the look and feel of your interactive program. For instance, you can place the TV display on top of a Web page and let your viewers interact with your site while they watch your program. You can also embed, or inset, the TV display in your Web page, reducing the display to a portion of the screen while the Web content occupies the remainder.

In this example, the Weather Channel has provided their viewers with the opportunity to watch the current weather show live while looking at breaking weather, local weather maps, personalized weather reports, and more. The viewer can use either a keyboard or remote control to choose options from a menu that appears next to the TV display.

Sample from the Weather Channel's interactive programming.

Back to Contents

Who Can Watch Interactive TV

Interactive TV is viewable on both televisions and computers. To watch interactive TV on your television, you need to use the WebTV-based Internet Receiver (a set-top box that uses the Microsoft® WebTV Network™ Plus service). To watch it on a computer, you need to use Microsoft® WebTV® for Windows® (a feature of Microsoft® Windows® 98) with a compatible TV tuner card.

The information on this site is geared specifically to the WebTV-based Internet Receiver. For information about developing for WebTV for Windows and about Microsoft's Interactive Television initiatives, visit Microsoft Corporation's Interactive Television site.

Back to Contents

Why Broadcast Interactive TV

Interactive TV can also be a great business opportunity. The following are just a few of the ways you can enhance the TV viewing experience for your audience and create new business opportunities through interactive programming:

• Add depth to what's happening on the screen at any given moment.
• Add details or content that couldn't fit within the show's original running time, production schedule, or format.
• Reward your audience for good viewer behavior, like watching advertisements, with coupons.
• Provide commercial sponsors with opportunities to directly reach their audience.
• Support an e-commerce or other revenue model tied directly to your productions.

Back to Contents

Going Interactive

The first step in creating an interactive TV program is to create Web pages designed specifically for a particular TV show. It's a much better idea to design Web pages that complement what's happening in a TV show than to simply link viewers to your Web site, because unrelated Web pages can be distracting and can even lead your viewers away from your Web site.

When your Web content fits the program well, viewers will continue to watch the TV show and explore the interactive program at the same time. For example, you can create Web pages that contain baseball players' statistics. During the game, you can display links that point to information on the player currently at bat. The viewer can watch the game and read the player's stats at the same time.

Putting it All Together

The articles below contain all of the information you need to create your own interactive TV programs for WebTV-based Internet Receivers. If you'd like information about developing for WebTV for Windows, please visit Microsoft Corporation's Interactive Television site.

Click on the article of your choice to find detailed information about the following components of an interactive TV program:

Creating Interactive Television Links—Interactive TV links are links between your TV broadcast and your Web content. They are broadcast within the TV program, in a portion of an analog TV signal called the vertical blanking interval (VBI).

Interactive Television Link Checksum Tool—This Web-based tool calculates a checksum, a means of verifying if all of the information (data bits) contained in a link is retrieved by a receiver. The C source code for the checksum tool is also available.

Displaying TV Broadcasts in Web Pages—Technical specifications for creating Web pages that contain live TV broadcasts.

Interactive Television Programming Examples—This sample code can help you create your own interactive television programming.

Additional Sample Code—A site maintained by a WebTV Networks engineer, http://itv.webtv.net has many examples for you to run on your WebTV-based Internet Receiver (it is not intended to work on a computer).

Interactive TV on WebTV-based Internet Receivers and WebTV for Windows
This article describes some of the differences between interactive TV on WebTV-based Internet Receivers and WebTV for Windows. It contains a list of Web programming features that you should only use with caution when creating interactive television experiences that will be viewed by both television and computer-based audiences.

Interactive TV Development Resources
This list includes hardware you can use to encode interactive TV links, software and other tools for producing interactive TV shows, and the names of production companies who can help with the process.

Back to Contents