Will Viewers Tune In to Interactive Television?

This is about that vision thing, that tele-vision thing, and how two demographically correct California towns separated by geography and cable companies are about to have their vision thing tested.

A contemporary tale of two cities . . . for some, perhaps, the best of times, the worst of times, for some an age of wisdom or possibly an age of foolishness.

Cerritos in the south.

Castro Valley to the north.

Like Los Alamos in New Mexico, they are towns where a new age is about to explode: TV that goes two ways, known by the stuffy title of interactive television. You see crude signs of what lies ahead in this week’s triple offerings from NBC and the Olympics, where the hungry viewer can program what goes up on the screen. But, wait. . . .

Cerritos will go first this September when 100 cable subscriber families will be put to a six-month test by GTE Corp.’s ImagiTrek project.

ImagiTrek will do what no digital scientists has ever done: Take an entire cable network’s programs--in this case the Discovery Channel--and make them responsive to viewer quirks, questions and concerns.

Then, a few months later, it will be Castro Valley’s time when the giant entertainment company Viacom International unleashes its fearsome forces of fiber-optics upon its test audiences. Viacom has a multiphase approach to making television interactive.

First to be tested will be an on-screen viewing guide and video recorder from Insight Telecast Inc. Insight will record TV shows from a program guide displayed on the screen while also providing information on the programs at the request of the viewer. Beyond that the Castro Valley subscribers will be provided with pay movies on demand--when they want them, along with concerts and sporting events.

Once television was simple . . . black-and-white, on and off, family hour for the radio generation. Just another piece of furniture that just sat there.

Television and most of us have gone long beyond that. Now it’s warm-up time for the joystick generation, people who know their way around Macs, fax and Super Mario. Remote control is more than a hand-held device for channel churning. Remote control is couch control.

Television is about to make a generational leap, moving from passive viewing to active playing, appealing strongly to a younger generation of viewers undaunted by computers and electronic games.

The Cerritos 100, for example.

What GTE plans to do is to give each of its testees a new Philips CD-I player along with an assortment of compact discs that look like the familiar audio discs. These discs provide graphics, text and menus of opportunities--what a politician might call choice. Introduced commercially last year, CD-I plays through a television set and provides such interactive video adventures as museum-going and golfing.

ImagiTrek, according to its director of interactive publishing, Marc Dillon, has gone beyond that. It has taken an entire 26-week season of Discovery Channel, 750 hours of programming, and put all of that on one CD along with on-screen data cues and thousands of pertinent items of information from the World Book Encyclopedia.

The Discovery Channel shows, for example, a program about the Stealth bomber. The curious viewer might wonder mid-broadcast how the plane works, what it cost, who developed it, what makes it fly, what are its technologies. Curiouser and curiouser, the viewer stops the plane, sees cues go up on the screen, demands that the disc player provides requested information.

“Methadone for the itch to change channels,” Dillon says of the ImagiTrek test, in theory designed to keep viewers in constant linkup between their shows, their curiosity and their new digital encyclopedia.

There might be opportunities to do the same thing with entertainment shows but Dillon and the ImagiTrekers are not into that yet. He does see another possible application for his devices, such as calling up a menu of pizza opportunities, hitting the control device, ordering the just-right item, activating the pizzeria and the credit card company, getting the pizza delivered.

Interactivity for the eye, the stomach and the debit account.

During the six-month Cerritos test, ImagiTrek will be able to monitor how specifically the interactive devices alone are used. The viewers also will be questioned about their responses and feelings. The combined information will be studied, then it’s back to the labs for evaluation.

ImagiTrek is one of several companies started by GTE to develop new markets, in this case television software. The 37 people of the three-year-old Carlsbad-based company previously produced a hologram video game and a CD-ROM version of a new-technology magazine. The Cerritos program is its most ambitious consumer project.

Ambition seems to be a generating force in Castro Valley, where Viacom--owner of cable networks MTV, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, Showtime, Lifetime and VH-1--are stringing fiber-optic lines to its 12,500 subscribers.

Early next year, it will introduce interactivity to its subscribers through the Insight video recording program.

Then on to new frontiers of interactivity, what Viacom calls “quasi video on demand,” the ability of the viewer to order from a schedule of movies or other pay events at about the time the viewer wants it, not when a network schedules it. With the system capable of eventually offering up to 600 channels, a different movie could start every minute and there would still be room for pizza purchasing.

Viacom senior vice president Ed Horowitz sees other frontiers--transactional services, he calls them. This might include a video sales catalogue where viewers can contemplate clothes in different colors, for example, or turn the video image so that possible purchases could be seen from different angles. It might also be an area where people who want their MTV can get it in the next mail delivery, such as ordering MTV videos or records or T-shirts through a catalogue operation.

“The major question about interactivity,” Horowitz says, “is how entertaining will it all be? If the consumers aren’t entertained by what’s on the tube then they will lose interest.”

He talks of new audiences, the lose-or-choose audience, people in their late teens who know about computer games and interactive digital devices. “They’ve had five to 10 years experience with new technologies,” he says. “In a few years they will be in their 20s, ready for whatever is new. We are working with Silicon Valley people who might be able to take interactive television beyond text and data. We don’t know where that will be, maybe new games or contests or programs. That will be the final phase of our Castro Valley project.

“We know we are dealing with audiences who are not afraid to manipulate the screen, who are not afraid of technologies.”

For the television audience, then, a tale of two cities, an age of choices, perhaps.

But will it be an age of wisdom?

Or, ultimately, an age of foolishness?