LONDON -- Britain might be the patron saint of lost causes when it comes to medal hopes at this year's Winter Olympics, but its TV coverage is winning admirers.
A sporting smorgasbord is being pumped into British living rooms and it isn't coming from the commercial networks, but from the public sector via the good old BBC.
Building on last summer's groundbreaking coverage of the Wimbledon tennis championships, the BBC is offering multiple simultaneous live feeds of all the action from Salt Lake City, and it is the armchair Olympians with their remote controls who are in the drivers' seat. Instead of TV producers deciding what you watch, you choose the action via your remote.
Press the red interactive button and the BBC serves up three video feeds of live events to choose from, all accessed via the same screen. Scroll down to the action you want, and press the button for the full-screen version, or scroll back up and watch all three events at once.
Other simple text choices give you up-to-the-minute results, medals tables, event schedules and the latest sports roundup. If you happen to miss your favorite ice hockey showdown, you can go back to the coverage outside broadcast hours and use the remote to call up the highlights.
It sounds like the Web on steroids, but it's the true promise of interactive TV unfolding in Britain and across much of Europe. For sports fans in particular, iTV coverage is finally becoming an exciting ride.
Scott Gronmark, BBC's Head of Interactive TV, said the real broadcast challenge is "not whether the technology will work -- we've tried and tested it -- but in putting up and taking down so many interactive applications around this volume of output."
In addition to the Winter Olympics, the BBC is offering the same interactive treatment for the FA Cup, the Six Nations Rugby, and later this year the biggest soccer event of them all -- The World Cup Final held in Japan and South Korea.
As the trailblazers of interactive TV programming, European broadcasters have been trying for years to figure out how to make good on its potential. Vast amounts of money and rhetoric have been flung at one central but flawed idea -- that your TV will morph into your PC and your PC will morph into your TV in a bloody battle over convergence.
"A lot of our commercial colleagues saw interactive TV as a way to make up for a lot of dot-com failures," said Gronmark -- particularly in the area of e-commerce. "Their reaction was: Let's flog things on interactive TV instead. But they didn't figure out what to sell people or whether this would be a good experience through your TV screen."
The BBC sat on the sidelines watching these experiments, doing its own research and development and coming to interactive TV dangerously late. This time last year, it didn't provide a single interactive service to its satellite viewers.
Then came Wimbledon, where the BBC gave viewers five video feeds to choose from, along with results, game stats and player profiles -- you could even choose to watch a match with or without commentary.
Viewers never needed to leave the live action on screen, let alone march over to their computers to fire up the Web. The broadcaster attracted more than 8 million unique users to its iTV programming in 2001. More than anything else, interactive sports reeled them in.
David Murphy, an interactive sports producer with the BBC, believes these enhanced viewing breakthroughs will play an important role in the bidding wars for major sporting events in the future. "Offering alternative video and audio feeds and making the experience genuinely interactive is a real driver for winning sports rights back from the competition."
The success of these services coincides with U.K. viewing figures just released showing the number of people watching multi-channel TV via cable and satellite has outstripped those watching through terrestrial channels for the first time.
With around $4 billion in public funding, the BBC is ready to move on these trends. Two new interactive children's networks, mandated by the British government, an upmarket arts channel and an edgy entertainment channel targeting the lucrative 18-to-34 demographic have either just left the runway or poised for take off.
Time will tell whether the youth-oriented channels score well with this picky demographic. The BBC, though, can afford to keep playing in the sandbox.
"We have an enormous privilege in that we don't have to make money out of this. That's not to say we're wasting it," Gronmark said. "We're now reaping the benefits because we came in late and stuck to a particular strategy -- we put the TV program, not the Web, at the center of the interactive experience. Everything starts with the quality of the program and whether it lends itself to an interactive experience.
"Just because we can make it interactive doesn't mean we should. There's nothing worse than technology for technology's sake."
Gronmark said the U.S. market, in particular, is looking to the BBC and others in Europe to see how far they can go in fundamentally changing the relationship between the viewer and that powerful box in the corner of the living room. "America leads the world in so many areas, and they're asking us how we do it."
