This week's Technocultures class featured a talk from Justin Hewelt, who manages the Broadband Bananas website, and works as a consultant. Interactive TV seems to be reaching a threshold point.
The most compelling applications he showed used IPTV set-top boxes, the standard that seems closest to delivering video-on-demand. It runs over IP and ADSL to the home, but is not the Internet as much as a custom TV service. It is somewhere between broadcast/satellite/cable interactive TV (that sometimes have back-channels over phone lines, for example) and Windows Media Centre.
He also pointed to an excellent resource called Enhanced TV cookbook, which features detailed documentation of different standards for enhanced TV.
The lesson from his talk for consumer advocates is that (surprise! surprise!) interactive TV developers are looking to strategies to maximise their returns. It's worth contesting these standards as they emerge, and before they become entrenched.
