The Future Of The Interactive Television Services Marketplace

Witnesses: Steven Case, Chairman and CEO, America Online, Inc.; John W. Froman, Executive V.P., Circuit City Stores; Lowell J. Gray, General Manager, Shore.Net; Margaret Heffernan, President and CEO, iCast; Gerald M. Levin, Chairman and CEO, Time Warner, Inc.; and Louis M. Meisinger, Executive V.P. and General Counsel, The Walt Disney Company.

&Quot;This forward-looking book focuses on interactive television (ITV), and illustrates how it is changing the face of TV broadcasting. The book provides professionals with important technical, strategic, and creative expertise to help in the development of ITV systems and with the assessment of their future business potential. Interactive TV Technology and Markets explains how bandwidth limitations associated with analog TV signals are eliminated as cable, satellite, and terrestrial TV network operators switch to digital bandwidth."--BOOK JACKET.

A decade before, this book predicted that by the year 2010, interactive TV would be a fixture in every American household. The author also predicted that interactive movies would soon allow the audience to change the outcome of films.

Television is one of the most successful technological consumer products ever produced. It has spread to virtually every household in Western society and for many TV has become their most important source of information and entertainment. TV, however, is not a static medium - neither as a technology nor as a service. Game consoles, VCR's, cable and satellite systems have already begun to change the image of what TV is and what it can be. In the years ahead, television faces even more radical changes and developments. Terms liker interactivity digitization, convergence, networked multimedia, the information super highway, integrated full service networks, content-on-demand, two-way cables, direct broadcast satellites, datacasting etc. point out some of the aspects involved in this process of change. Briefly, what is at stake is the delivery of interactive, digital, multimedia service to the home. The anthology describes and discusses various aspects of this transition. In this context, the phrase television of the future covers the entire spectrum of new multimedia content and services - from traditional TV sets to multimedia personal computers; from network computers to game consoles; and from terrestrial broadcasting, cable systems, to satellite TV.

A review of the events which took place in 1992-1993-1994 in the interactive multimedia marketplace

Recent years have brought many changes to the world of mass media. The In ternet and mobile communications technology have provided consumers with interactive digital services. Television is catching up with this trend through the digitalization process. Digital television is a hybrid platform combining elements from classical analog television and the Internet, providing modern multimedia services on a familiar platform. In short, digital TV is a gateway to the world of interactive digital media. Digital TV brings consumers into the television service arena and offers them new degrees of freedom. However, as the service and multimedia content types diversify and the services and their content increase, television is facing many of the same challenges of complexity and information overflow faced by other digital media. Metadata can handle the diverse services and content of digital TV effi. ciently and in a consumer-friendly way. Metadata means that the data are accompanied by other data which describe them. As data about data, meta data can provide an insight into syntactically and semantically complex data by distilling their essence to a set of simple descriptors. Metadata also helps to structure and manage information in diverse settings. The use of metadata in broadcast multimedia should not be restricted to being merely a tool for coping with the challenges of a complex networked multimedia environment. Instead, metadata ofTers new opportunities for the development of innovative services.