NEW YORK - The future of digital television holds a lot more than interactive Barney. That was the forecast yesterday from the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information's DTV conference in New York City.
Scholars and television execs gathered under the auspices of the 15-year-old telecommunications research center to explore what CITI's Darcy Gerbarg called, in part, "the social issues" of DTV. Since the FCC mandate, much of the emphasis has been placed on the technological challenges of going digital. Thursday's panel on the "Impact of Digital TV on Content and Programming" focused instead on what viewers might expect to see once the technology is in place.
Representatives from ABC, PBS, and BBC discussed their explorations of three new digital frontiers: high-definition television, which delivers ultra-crisp sound and image resolution; multicasting, which enables broadcasters to split programming transmission into multiple channels; and interactivity, which lets armchair surfers manipulate a television show in a more Web-like fashion.
Robin Mudge, the executive director for BBC Digital Media, admitted that his company has been "looking for the holy grail of interactivity." With digital services in the UK beginning in the middle of next year, the BBC has been actively experimenting with a range of interactive broadcasts. One program called "Local Heroes" is a hybrid of a homespun how-to science TV show and an encyclopedic Web site. Mudge demonstrated how viewers can click out of a segment on Dr. Thomas' Automatic Egg Boiler to take a VR tour of the inventor's ramshackle lab. He described a similar plan to turn the popular British soap "East Enders" into a virtual world in which viewers take on their favorite characters while writers from the show provide dialog and scenes. "It's inhabited TV," Mudge said, "where the viewer is inside the TV."
PBS has similar interactive plans for its ubiquitous purple dinosaur, Barney, but more focus is aimed at exploiting HDTV and multicasting, said Gary Poon, executive director of PBS Digital TV Strategy and Planning. The company's signature evening programs on performing arts and nature could be transmitted in high-def glory, while niche programming for children and adults could be multicast during the day. "The technology has finally caught up with the richness of our content," Poon said.
Sue Trieman, executive producer of ABC.com, insisted that the real source of content for digital TV will come not from traditional programs, but rather from the existing world of content online. "Digital TV will be determined by what we're doing on the Internet," she said. "We're the only ones who get immediate feedback from people about what they do and don't want."
Despite what people want, of course, there will be more mundane matters to work out along the way. John Carrey, director of Greystone Communications, a media research and planning firm, emphasized that there are unresolved issues such as latency and navigation. "Where are all of the navigation icons supposed to go," he asked, "on the screen? on the keypad? Keypads are just terrible." Ultimately, though, these problems might just be a matter of McLuhanesque growing pains. As Jessica Josephson, CEO of International Media Strategies said, "when you look at any new medium, it has to find its new form."
