What Do People Want?

Andy Grossman

Beware pontification on ITV Here is the question for today: Do you believe a) "The melding of the TV and the Internet is about to arrive; b) TVs should just stay dumb; c) both.

Several weeks ago this space criticized Red Herring magazine for its skepticism that people really want interactive television. The seven-page story in its August edition used as its hook a 1,000-person survey in which few people said they were interested in interacting with their TV set.

So why on Oct. 2 did Anthony Perkins, editor-in-chief of Red Herring, write a long op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal waxing enthusiastically about interactive TV - even quoting the notoriously optimistic projections from Forrester Research?

Here's a direct quote from the piece: "Led by the two Internet brand giants that helped make the Web experience open and friendly, and facilitated by the cable and satellite giants, we should all be interacting more comfortably with our television sets and watching video on our PCs."

OK, so is ITV, in Red Herring's words, ushering in "The yawn of a new era," or should we, as Mr. Perkins opines, "straddle on for the next big trip across cyberspace? We promise it will be even more colorful and fun than the first."

So to some entities, the answer to our question is "c."

I don't know what Red Herring really believes because Perkins declined to answer several e-mails on this matter. But we can guess, and the answer gets to the heart of the confusion and debate over which middleware platforms will survive and what applications will succeed.

You can talk and debate and research until your No. 2 pencils are spent to a stub, but no one has a clue as to how customers will respond to the introduction of interactive television during the next year or two.

Oh sure, they'll love video-on-demand, but that's really just a logical extension of pay-per-view. Cable operators are smart to roll out VOD in droves next year while keeping many of their enhanced TV plans on hold. Why not go for the slam dunk?

Companies competing for software space inside operators' set-tops have their own set of answers. ICTV says its platform allows for sophisticated use of Internet plug-ins and is dealing with streaming media companies for delivering this content.

Canal+, too, claims its Java Applets will enable more "robust" content (a claim, of course, that the French company's rivals dispute). OpenTV says it is more realistic about what people really want to do while watching television, and Liberate, for now, has an HTML-based platform that it argues is easy to write for.

The company points to its lineup of content developers and its Pop TV initiative as proof that it's on the right track. Rivals disagree and say Liberate's platform is too simple to do much beyond the basics.

Interestingly, many of these companies insist they are not really competing with each other even as they discreetly put down their non-rivals' products. Believe me, these companies and others are all competing for the hearts and minds of cable operators.

The trouble is cable operators really can't make an adequate assessment of what is right for them until they're fairly certain what their customers want. And in this area, research is a shaky place to be. If only 5% of the respondents to Red Herring's survey said they were interested in using their televisions to send e-mail, does that mean 95% would not use or enjoy the service, or even pay for it?

If you asked people in 1926 if they would pay to attend talking films, how high would that figure have been? In 1983, who wanted a PC in their home?

This isn't to put down research but to say anyone who makes blanket assertions about what people really want based on these surveys are naive.

The answer is no one will truly know what platform is best or which applications will sell - or if they will sell at all - until they are actually placed in people's homes.

At this week's CTAM Broadband Conference, a host of speakers - many of them high-ranking executives at good companies - will pontificate about the future of interactive TV and broadband in general. And we will cover and write about them - albeit with a teacup of skepticism.

Just remember that no one has a magic eight-ball into the future and that even prestigious, huge publications like Red Herring have split personalities on interactive TV and broadband.

And all those big research books predicting how many billions ITV will make in five years can always come back and say, "Did we say $10 billion by 2005? We meant by 2007."