Interactive TV Ideas

By Steve Poland   •   April 11, 2007

Techquila Shots reader Andy Moeck wrote an idea that I don’t believe will ever happen (I believe the TV networks still hate the fact that DVRs exist), but I thought it was interesting and might spin some ideas:

Here’s something that bothers me – I record lots of stuff using my DVR (I watch almost 100% of my TV from my DVR) including sports shows like ESPN’s Around the Horn and PTI and political news shows like Countdown with Keith Olbermann and Hardball/etc. During each show, ESPN and MSNBC have a scrolling news ticker thing displaying breaking news and sports stories – The problem is that if I record PTI on Monday and watch on Thursday I am watching “Breaking” news from Monday …. Which isn’t so Breaking on Thursday. Worse yet, when I see a score for BOS vs. NYY it’s not easy to tell which day’s game they are talking about.

So …. With my DVR connected to my Cable which is also my Internet the system should be smart enough to pull an RSS feed of Breaking news during *playback* and display the ticker in real-time, not recorded time. Add the ability to include Ads, auction off ticker space … might be enough to turn a bit of revenue back to the show.

This is basically talking about a feature for Interactive TV — by the way, what is the latest with Interactive TV? When will I be able to buy that “swell men’s jacket” with the push of a button on my TV remote when I’m watching QVC? What other iTV features do you foresee?

Note: I get a ton of emails with various ideas, I post likely 1 in 10. My apologies to the 9 out of 10 — keep the ideas spinning, just don’t take offense if I don’t post them. Keep them coming in.




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Comments

5 Responses to “Interactive TV Ideas”

  1. MyAvatars 0.2 Kyle on April 11th, 2007 7:55 pm (perm link)

    Along these same lines — I’ve wanted something to sync delayed game-watching playback with Fantasy datafeeds — so if I watch a game like 5-10 minutes behind live TV, my real-time fantasy football stat-tracker doesn’t give away the ending for me.

  2. MyAvatars 0.2 Luca on April 12th, 2007 4:29 am (perm link)

    I imagine something like this wouldn’t be too difficult if the current distribution methods were used rather than RSS. I dunno about in the US, but here in the UK on our Freeview (DVB) system we have teletext which has all sorts of fancy features, such as picture in picture, fancy graphics, selecting what you want to watch.

    Adding a news ticker to this shouldn’t be difficult (there was actually one on the original teletext – but I can’t find one on the digital version), then all you need to do is reprogram the DVRs so that when you press the text button it shows you the live teletext when watching something.

  3. MyAvatars 0.2 Nathan on April 12th, 2007 1:04 pm (perm link)

    This sounds like something that ICTV could move to do quite easily.

  4. MyAvatars 0.2 Zander on April 13th, 2007 4:32 pm (perm link)

    I’m not sure about the whole RSS aspect for getting the latest feeds for something recorded on a DVR but a company called GlooMedia has a website (www.glootv.com ) that will allow users to purchase the things they see on their TV, movies, etc. I do know they have plans to integrate on set-top boxes as well so you can do everything on your TV.

  5. MyAvatars 0.2 James D Kirk on April 13th, 2007 7:02 pm (perm link)

    Add to the above concepts the company that Scoble vlogs at this site, and there are a whole heap of interesting changes coming down the pike.

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