Signposts for New TV : A Film and Another Way of Watching Football Indicate Where Interactive TV May Be Heading

The broadcast looks like football, sounds like football, even has the feel of football. And on certain Monday nights it has the smell of football. But is it football?

Is it television?

*

The scene looks like a TV movie, sounds like a TV movie, feels like a TV movie.

Is it television?

*

While you’re at it today, give thanks to the familiar turkeys of Old TV and brace yourself for the New, for in a couple of separate Southern California studios a New TV is cooking and here’s what those birds look like.

Hard to believe, but for an estimated 2 million Americans there are two Monday night football broadcasts from two networks, both licensed by the NFL. One has been changing our Monday night viewing, eating and drinking habits for 23 years. The other dates back only eight years to Super Bowl XVIII.

The younger broadcast is called “QB-1,” America’s longest-running authentically interactive television show. It lets you watch live sporting events while allowing you to punch in what you think the plays will be on a second TV monitor. The second set keeps track of your calls and rates your skills, along with those of players all over the country.

“QB-1” may very well be television’s next great leap . . . forward?

The New TV crowd wants to make television two-way by endowing the hand that holds the remote control device with certain inalienable choices.

So to play “QB-1” you need three tangible objects:

* Two television sets.

* One keyboard.

* And the neighborhood saloon.

For most of its brief history, “QB-1” has been going out by satellite from NTN Communications of Carlsbad into what is called the “hospitality industry”: subscribing bars, restaurants and hotels. The broadcasts, on the air up to 11 hours daily, have featured sports, games and trivia contests--a bar toy with considerably more charm than liar’s poker or Happy Hour.

But “QB-1” and NTN are heading for new indoor territories--households, which in most communities should outnumber bars. This year NTN took its shows to cable: GTE Main Street in Cerritos and Continental Cable in Massachusetts. The service also is now available on the Genie home computer network for $6 an hour plus telephone charges or a season ticket of $350.

NTN has a role model in big-screen TV sets and computer games, says Dan Downs of NTN. Those electronic devices first found their audiences in bars and then moved homeward.

While Mondays are “QB-1’s” biggest night of interactive broadcasting--along with its own interactive commercials--other days and nights are not dark. As many as eight pro and college games can be offered weekend days. On other nights and other seasons there are shows like “PowerPlay,” “Hoops” and “DiamondBall” for followers of other sports. On those rare nights of no live sports, NTN broadcasts a range of trivia games, even going black-tie for some on Academy Awards night with a companion broadcast of filmic facts and figures. NTN broadcasts 11 hours a day, mostly afternoons and evenings so that it can go live across three time zones to its 640 outlets in 48 states. It is also considering programming for the lunchtime noon crowd.

“QB-1” may very well be more than a game for Monday night drinkers and strategists. Its technology is being used in Kentucky schools to get immediate evaluation of student responses to lessons, by Canadian GMC and Chevrolet for in-service training, and in a network of English pubs.

Bars or pubs may seem an unusual launching pad for a television broadcaster, but a recent study by the advertising firm of Backer Spielvogel Bates indicates that home-away viewing might involve as many as one-third of this nation’s mobile adults.

In the agency’s monthlong study, almost 33% of the people surveyed said they watched TV away from their homes--at someone else’s place (23.7%); at a restaurant, bar or club (8.6%); or at a hotel/motel (8.6%).

Not too surprisingly, this recently discovered demographic group is heavily male, with incomes well beyond $40,000.

In bars and in homes, NTN may have found the elusive motor to drive New TV: programs that involve viewers, even if the programs just mean pushing buttons and making such big decisions as . . . run right . . . deep pass.

*

Programming is what David Riordan of POV Entertainment Group of Thousand Oaks is also seeking in television’s seemingly new world, making TV movies that fit into a compact disc and that play out on a home screen through a new way of storytelling.

For example, the movie “Voyeur,” which he is producing on a closed set in the warehouselike stage on south La Brea. What you notice first is that there is no set, no studio-built walls, just a blue screen behind the actors and perhaps one or two props. You notice, too, the TV camera never moves, no panning, no backing up. There are no pauses in the shooting for close-ups or cutaways. The action is almost like old black-and-white TV--live and into the can.

This could be the now and future of filmmaking.

Sets are seen only on the screens of a control room--remarkably realistic computer images of room interiors. The taped scenes involving the actors are sandwiched onto the computer-created backgrounds, sets and foregrounds, almost like the making of an animated movie where the action takes place against a fixed setting.

“Voyeur” is the first adventure by POV’s parent, Philips, into interactive TV feature films. Last year Philips came out with its CD-I player and video discs, a so-far slow-selling library of children’s movies, an encyclopedia, games. Now it’s planning to test the adult market next year with the self-rated R “Voyeur,” a “Rear Window”-like movie starring Robert Culp and Grace Zabriskie. Next up will be an interactive feature version of boxing.

What distinguishes “Voyeur,” a joint production involving POV and Propaganda Films, is that in addition to watching what may seem to be a traditional movie story, viewers have choices--which rear window to look into, for example, or which clues they want to collect, or which of the nine characters they want to pursue. And ultimately there are other choices: 12 different endings.

*

Only in the last few years have the words two-way , interactive or even New TV crawled into our language, often with promises that turned out to be false dawns. Several companies are bravely going forward into New TV, giving viewers the power to tell a Vanna White which letters to flip, or which movie or music video they want to see on demand, or which pizza, clothing item or trip to distant lands they want to order.

Since April of this year the Mountain View-based Interactive Network has been offering a variety of these new programs for a test San Francisco audience with game shows, plays and sports.

TV Answer of Reston, Va., says it also will go national next year with an interactive system of games, direct selling and polls.

Several Hollywood movie studios have established think tanks to examine the interactive possibility of their movies and movie titles. Already several studios have signed licensing deals with computer game developers and are examining the possibility of adapting old movies or making new ones.

Imagine the possibilities of old movies, multiple choices.

Citizen Kane lives.

Rhett gives a damn.

Dracula chokes.

USC over UCLA?