The idea that people soon will "interact" with everything from their television sets to their lawnmowers may be a bit overblown, but the cable industry - losing customers to direct broadcast satellite companies - is sticking with the concept, if in a scaled-down form.
Case in point: Tele-Communications Inc., the cable industry's biggest, loudest, and most trend-setting player, says a near video-on-demand service that allows you to order reruns of TV shows is going to be the "key feature" on its new digital TV service.
It's dubbed Your Choice TV, and rest assured you'll be hearing more about it as TCI continues on its frantic schedule to make a digital video option available (again, for an extra fee) to at least 5 million households by year's end. It's not full interactivity, so you can't click a button and receive programming immediately. But it will allow orders about every half-hour similar to the satellite companies' pay-per-view offerings. Your Choice TV, by the way, is owned by the same folks who brought you the Discovery Channel, of which TCI owns a sizable chunk.
Of course, TCI's sudden bravado for pseudo-interactivity could have more to do with defending against DBS than forging a bold new broadband pathway to your TV set. But a number of interactive wheels are in motion here, and it could precede an industry-wide "on-demand" shift over the next couple of years.
For one thing, Time Warner Cable just folded its Full Service Network interactive trial in Orlando, Florida, after dumping millions into the project. The company is now quietly working on a new project called Pegasus to cut its losses. The main idea is to take what it learned in Orlando - a proprietary gold mine of marketing and buy-rate data - and apply it to the burgeoning Internet.
Time Warner's intended result is to unite the worlds of video on demand and Web surfing and pump it all through a TV set. Although the Web via TV isn't a new concept, combining the Internet with a private menu of video content is. A wide deployment of such a service by Time Warner could bring equipment prices down to reasonable levels for the rest of the industry and encourage other cable operators to offer similar services.
So the combination of Time Warner's Pegasus project with TCI's embrace of Your Choice TV means that the two biggest players in the industry appear convinced that there's money in them thar interactive hills. "This new wave of television fits into today's hectic, increasingly fast-paced lifestyles," says John Hendicks, chairman of Your Choice TV. "Selection and flexibility allow people to take control of their television viewing habits."
TCI will know soon enough whether the public will take to Your Choice TV. As the service rolls out over the next couple of years, acceptance may hinge on price, convenience, or other factors. Right now, TCI isn't releasing many deployment or pricing details. So in the end, consumers will decide whether "near" instant gratification is worth paying for.
