A crippling, perhaps mortal, blow was dealt to the comatose interactive TV field last week. As reported on CNN, Microsoft is shooting its marbles for a 1998 rollout of Windows-enabled ITV, allowing rapt sedentarians to access background info on (and chat with) their favorite shows while ignoring the actual show. That squishy thud you hear - the one that sounds remarkably like a large universal remote being jammed into a small orifice - is the echo of a decision so dastardly morbid it smacks of a prank. Microsoft's flagship ITV program, into which it's spraying between US$25K and $50K per episode: Moesha.
Granted, one doesn't graduate from basic arithmetic to differential equations in a single grade, but if Microsoft were shooting any lower, it'd be missing toes. Maybe it thinks the recoil will launch it into orbit? It's not only that plenty of companies have gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the public - Microsoft built its bank by doing something akin to the diametrical opposite: despoiling the wallets of geeks, actual and aspirant, everywhere. For Microsoft, boldly daring to be stupid - getting behind the wheel of the short bus, as it were - may be their most radical, ill-fated move since Bob.
"This is very clever and very well thought out, but it has very sinister ambitions about it," Phillip Monego, CEO of ITV competitor NetChannel, is quoted as saying. Sure, he's referring to Microsoft's attempts to control both the content and the delivery mechanism, but taken in context, it goes a long way in explaining just why so many ITV trials have folded into so many disasters. Serious TV creators are justifiably concerned about interactivity detracting from their "art," but as we continue the slow shamble through a long, hot rerun summer, creative alternatives abound. If Entertainment Weekly can mine multiple cover stories out of hashing and rehashing the interconnecting themes, players, and references of The X-Files, why can't Fox and Microsoft rub their heads together like flint and steel until a clue is sparked?
Pandering is a fantastic business strategy, but when your business is adding depth to entertainment, how hard is it to know to avoid the shallows? It only takes two inches in a bathtub to drown, but going under while hunting the great white whale, or a Greenpeace-friendly facsimile thereof, is so much more dignified.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
