Interactive Commercials

Today I was watching the Colbert Report and saw something interesting… and surprisingly it was a commercial.  It was a commercial for a local university… nothing out of the ordinary from a visual standpoint, but what was unique was the scroll across the bottom, prompting me to press a button on my remote for more information. 

I pressed, and it tied into my cable company’s Education OnDemand service… a nice feature and one I’m surprised I haven’t seen more often.  Now this got me thinking about where this technology is going… the Internet as TV.  Now of course the technology is there, but it got me thinking why we haven’t heard or seen more marketplace innovation.  Now mind you, most TVs are glorified monitors, and need a CPU to run like a computer, but most of us use a cable box a (relatively poor) CPU.  So why haven’t cable companies brought more innovation to the customer?

The answer is simple… they have no financial incentive to do so.  Now they’ve created this Education OnDemand service, for which they no doubt charge the Universities beaucoup dollars, especially when they include these interactive commercials.  If you could click a button on your remote and go directly to the website, what would the cable companies have to gain?  Why would a cable company willingly integrate a new bit of technology if it would only mean millions in R&D and implementation costs, while also closing down a profitable alternative?

So we look to the private sector for innovation here, but it seems that apart from TiVo, there aren’t many alternatives to the standard cable box.  We’ve seen computer manufacturers come out with media center PCs, but they’ve failed to take off.  Hulu has brought TV to the web, but with any real interactivity. We’ve also seen software companies attempt to bridge the gap, such as PlayOn, but again with limited marketplace immersion, as it relies on a third party bit of hardware. 

While PlayOn is a great step forward, like the other solutions, it fails to truly integrate the two bits of technology, partly because in many ways, people want to WATCH TV, not interact with it.  Were it loaded onto a fancy, wireless, touchscreen remote control device (on maybe a widget or mobile app), I think we’d hear more buzz around this technology. Yet with the cable companies having little or no interest in providing people with content they don’t control, true integration of cable TV and the internet seems at this point a pipe dream.  Even if you do wish to interact with the programming, how would you leave a show to browse the web?  Some bizarre picture-in-picture display?  That seems hardly satisfying.  How would you chose which source is playing sound?  And how would developers make low-res web graphics look good at 42” and 1080i, yet still be deliverable across the web without significantly increasing their bandwidth?

Clearly, there’s a great deal of room for innovation here, and I for one am looking forward to seeing the solutions.