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A New Diet for Couch Potatoes

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Now some meat for the television potatoes of the Western world.

Real beef. No McSeaweed substitute. No soy stuffings.

This is prime-time protein served up daily by a group of Canadian broadcasters who believe there is more to television than sofa sprawl.

For almost two years, TVI in Montreal, a division of a cable company Groupe Videotron Ltee, has been quietly going where no television broadcaster has ever gone. In addition to its usual transmission of network and local programs, the Canadian company’s Videoway service offers the hope of interactivity.

Interactive is the new, hot word among broadcasting’s dreamers and shakers. Interactivity gives viewers something to do besides just sitting there. They can shop, they can order airplane tickets, they can pick a movie.

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But in Canada where pioneer work in video technologies is a growth industry, the viewer can do much more now.

If this infant project succeeds--and it may be getting close to that point--it will become the superman of home entertainment, leaping tall buildings and spanning oceans. With 130,000 units reportedly installed in Quebec province and selling at the rate of 5,000 a week after an uncertain start-up, Groupe Videotron next January will start wiring a million homes in London, England.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of Videoway is how the project links technology with creative content. This isn’t just game playing or dialing for 900 numbers as offered by many interactive companies.

Consider two recent projects.

“Wa Ta Ta Tow” is colloquial for wow but it’s also a challenging new idea. Seventy-two half-hour after-school dramas were developed by the French division of CBC. Videoway turns them interactive. The dramas are broadcast from 4:30 to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. They are about family issues: divorce, generational misunderstandings, dating.

In each, viewers are told to watch for tell-tale signs. In one episode they look for clues to parental misunderstandings. Viewers press a button on a remote control when they spot a clue and a voice-over tells them if they are right or wrong. At the end of the half hour a voice announces the score and viewers are encouraged to watch reruns to improve their skills.

“Our research,” says Yves Plouffe, TVI program director, “tells us that our viewers are glued to the set to catch the clues. At school or over the telephone they talk about their scores and what they see. We estimate that we could rerun some episodes several times and still keep a high rate of viewership.”

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In September, the broadcast of a pop music concert demonstrated other unique potentials for interactivity.

Four buttons on the remote control turned the viewer figuratively into the director. The F1 button displayed the regular concert broadcast. F2 provided sing-along text over close-ups. F3 produced close-ups only of the star performer. F4 presented earlier clips and videos of the same artists performing the same song that was being broadcast. The most popular option among family viewers was F2, the sing-along choice.

But there’s more. The sponsor, Coca-Cola, also gave viewers choices--they could see and hear the same commercials that audiences in Greece, Italy, Japan or France might see. In Montreal, the pause that refreshed in Japanese proved the most watched.

According to Plouffe, the Coke experience has encouraged other companies to study interactive commercials as a way to reach target audiences. Ford has also produced a set of four, each choice featuring a particular car.

The TVI project in Canada dates back 10 years but has been on the air less than two years. It reaches about 14% of the 900,000 cable subscriber homes in Quebec province. When 150,000 subscribers are reached, the company will hit critical mass. The break-even stage financially will be 250,000 subscribers. “We are no longer a gadget,” says Plouffe.

Videoway offers two levels of broadcasting. One is videotext, a 24-hour service offering home shopping, games, trivia quizzes, weather, professional and other services.

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The second level is interactive network shows from 8:30 a.m. to midnight, every day. Interactive broadcasts of ice hockey is the second most popular of TVI’s offerings. The viewer can watch not only the regular “linear” game broadcasts but can call up close-ups of certain players or can hit a button to get an instant replay of the action, due to a 7 1/2-second delay in the broadcast.

TVI’s most popular shows are gaming shows--roulette and blackjack--followed by hockey and news.

You can also get the 6 and 11 p.m. news with interactive options. F1 gives what everyone else in Canada gets. F2 gives you six to nine minutes on a particular story indicated on the screen’s menu. Instead of 90 seconds of a government hearing you can order up nine minutes’ worth. F3 provides up to nine minutes of sports and F4 nine minutes of financial news.

There are other interactive versions of network shows--”Jeopardy!” where the home viewer becomes the fourth player and “You’re the Detective,” where the viewer can’t just guess who did it but has to spot the clues that told him who did it.

Subscribers pay $8 a month on top of the average $30 a month cable fee. More than $50 million has been spent by Groupe Videdtron in developing TVI.

In the United States there are at least 20 companies working with interactivity. A Sacramento project offers a diet of games, another company has music videos on demand and a test in Cerritos lets viewers buy movies at their convenience. Last week at a three-day conference in Los Angeles called “InterTainment ‘91” researchers told of such futuristic uses of interactivity as political pulse-taking, public opinion sampling and instant lotteries.

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But no one is offering us the future as have the fast-forward thinkers of Canada’s TVI where technology merged with programming.

So brush up on your French. We are entering the world of “Wa Ta Ta Tow.”

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