In the first article of our three-part series, The Road to iTV, we've looked at a brief
history of the ideas and the efforts to create interactive television. For decades, the
vision has enthralled both program producers and the cable and telephone companies who
want to deliver interactive content. And for decades, it has been a black hole into which
these companies have poured money without ever coming up with anything that consumers
really wanted to use (or pay for).
Sometimes you learn a lot more from your failures than you do from your successes. As one
of the people who also tried and failed through the interactive TV attempts of the past
fifteen years, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what we did wrong, and also looking
at WebTV users -- the first true iTV users ever (other than video game players) -- and the
reasons why this system is a success.
A success? Yes, it is. It's not the success that it could have been by now, had it
been marketed well and had a service provider who understood what service means. But if
anything, the fact that it has survived and grown in spite of this demonstrates to me even
more that there is something compelling to people about the things they do on WebTV. And
in this lies the potential -- finally -- to success with iTV.
One of the things that I've realized about all of those years of trials is that we who
were developing iTV were quite enamored of the technology and the products and the
programs that they would let us do. But in this excitement about what we could do
with interactive multimedia and high-speed delivery, did we ever step back and wonder what
people want to do?
What's so compelling about interacting?
Our first mistake was thinking that people want to interact with television. Why
should we? Interacting means work. If the value of the result we're going to get doesn't
vastly exceed the work involved in getting it, then why bother? A lot of the iTV
programming of earlier efforts can best be described as "clicking opportunities" -- making
people click to get content that they were going to be shown anyway just so it could be
"interactive."
So, I took a step back and looked, not at the interactive products or programs, but at
people. Why do people interact? If there's nothing inherently compelling about
interaction, then what are the motivations that make them willing to make the effort --
not just interacting with televisions or products or programs -- but interacting with
other people, or with anything at all?
Command Mode: Make It So!
Well, the first reason that we interact is to make something happen the way we want, and we're in command mode the moment that we're born. It's not that we want to be -- what we want is for the world to read our minds and configure itself to suit us without our having to do anything. But, since the world doesn't typically read our minds, some interaction is necessary to make it happen.
When we're ordering a meal, tuning a TV, getting money out of the ATM, doing anything to get a known result that we want, we're in command mode. One of the things about command mode is that, when we're in it, we have very little patience or tolerance for delay or extra work.
Think about the times you've browsed a bookstore for an hour, come out to find a ten-minute-long line and put down your books and walked away. As soon as we came to do the transaction, we went into command mode and the idea of having to wait became intolerable. That's the reason that there's a "$40 Fast Cash" at the ATM with one button, and a "#1 Happy Meal" at MacDonald's. And it's also the reason that Microsoft Word users hate that stupid dancing paper clip: don't try to entertain me when I'm in command mode trying to get a result with minimum work.
Knowledge Seeking: Oh, I see... so in that case, what about...?
One of the seminal thinkers in "hypermedia" was Vannevar Bush, who, in 1945, wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly called "As We May Think." Bush observed that people don't think or learn in a linear fashion, but rather take off in all kinds of different directions as they integrate what they are discovering into what they already know. The foundations of the Web as it is today and HTML -- Hypertext Markup Language -- that allows us to jump from link to link as our interests and knowledge take us, is laid in this wonderful article.
Knowledge-seeking is an interactive mode in which we naturally learn. When you tell me something new, I organize it in my mind against what I already know or my "framework of the world," and then I'm likely going to come up with an insight that leads off to another connected piece of knowledge or question.
But "connected," perhaps, only in my mind. Each of us is unique, and each of us has a unique framework with which we order our understanding of the world. This is one of the reasons that the "infotainment" and "edutainment" products failed -- there was no way that we could make them big enough to contain all the possible content that would satisfy any individual, much less an audience of many. The first "product" that has really been able to do that is the World Wide Web -- and largely because it's "by the people, for the people," and threaded together in hyperlinks so we can explore it in a natural human way.
Stimulation/Self-Expression: This is cool, isn't it?
This is a sort of two-part mode in which we interact because it's fun and we're stimulated, and also because we like to show off. Games, hobbies, creative endeavors all fall into this mode, as do things like taking a poll and then seeing how it comes out, or posting in a newsgroup and seeing how people react to what you've said. The two really do go together. You may think that your hobby is cooking, but I'll bet that it's really cooking something for someone else and then enjoying their appreciation. Interactive Jeopardy falls into this mode -- but if you can't complete it and post your scores (not getting the self-expression part), it can be very frustrating because the mode is not fulfilled.
Many of the successful "interactive products" like videogames and music software serve this mode. One of the things about stimulation, though, is that it requires novelty. You'll walk away from a game that doesn't continue to challenge you, no matter how much you enjoyed it when you first played it.
Community: Hey, I do that too!
The fourth main motivation for people to interact is "community" -- building relationships with each other. Of all of the modes, this is one that has never really before been delivered by a product other than the Internet. It's also a human need that has been less and less fulfilled in today's society. We live physically further apart from our family and friends, and the dissolution of town centers and the availability of so much in our homes that used to take us out reduces the opportunities for casually meeting new people in a comfortable environment.
Community relies on commonality and on "differentness." I believe that one of the reasons that WebTV has such a strong user community is that we have both good things and bad things in common because of our platform, and we are different from the rest of the world of Internet users too.
Serving All Four Modes
As I look back at more than twenty years of "interactive products," it appears that the ones that were successful served at least one "mode" really well. VCR+ was a successful "command mode" product that fixed a flaw that people perceived in VCRs -- the difficulty in programming them (failure in command mode). There are lots of popular "stimulation/self-expression" products that make people want to interact with them -- at least for awhile. Products that don't -- CD-I, for example, that tried to drape itself over both knowledge-seeking and stimulation/self-expression and did neither well, are failures.
In my opinion, the previous attempts at iTV failed because they didn't supply any of these modes. Command mode services -- especially shopping -- failed because what we wanted wasn't there. Knowledge seeking wasn't served -- even today's new beginnings of iTV like "The Liberty Bell 7" from Discover Channel serve a lot more of that mode because they can link us out to the Web where we can "follow our noses." Stimulation/self-expression? It's hard to keep your audience stimulated when you have to make it all yourself and they consume it faster than you can make it. Plus, there were the "host of things we haven't thought of yet" (and never did) that were supposed to serve that mode.
And, closed systems can't serve the Community mode, because the very nature of it requires
enough people, interacting with each other in a free-form manner, that communities can
form. iTV never really imagined this mode in its earlier incarnations.
If there's a message here for iTV, other than "look at what the people need rather than
what your product can do," it's don't forget the Internet!
A lot of cable companies are thinking that the Internet is a distraction and will take
people away from what they want them to do. You can't make people do what they
don't want to do -- and we should have learned over the last twenty years that what they
didn't want to do was the iTV we gave them before. The Internet isn't a distraction --
it's a salvation. It can keep people happy and well-served and give us in the iTV industry
time to figure out how to deliver iTV programs that serve them, too, rather than have it
turn out the same way all over again.
