Backchannelmedia

Response Magazine, May 28, 2002

Now Playing: Interactive television

By Steve Ulfelder, Special to digitalMASS

You'll be watching a Patriots game on TV. Using your remote control, you'll click a little icon in the corner of the screen - and buy a Ty Law jersey. Boom, just like that. Or maybe you'll be watching Friends, and a click will buy you earrings just like Jennifer Aniston's. Or maybe you'll be watching Survivor, and you'll buy Gervis a clue.

With reality TV all over the news (Bob Saget's record, long seen as unassailable, falls as CBS hires the three worst hosts in the history of mass communications!), it's reasonable to ask what comes next for television once we all get tired of sitting around waiting for the Big Brother people to have sex under a blanket.

Here's what's next: Interactive television (ITV), wherein you talk back to broadcasters, advertisers and other couch potatoes. It's happening already - in Manhattan, no less, not merely in some cheesy little test market - and it's about set to take off. According to Jupiter Communications, the U.S. ITV market will reach about 30 million households and generate nearly $10 billion in revenues in 2004. "A lot of issues need to resolved," says Michael Kokernak, president of Boston interactive media brokerage backchannelmedia and a frequent writer on ITV, "but it's going to be huge. How can it not be?"

Naturally, one major ITV subcategory is shopping. It's a match made in heaven. Or hell. You decide. It combines the features of e-commerce with the eye-candy only television can provide. And eventually, it'll blend in a healthy measure of personalization, so you and your next door neighbor can be hawked different products before you even realize how desperately you need them.

Braintree-based Commerce.TV is positioning itself to pounce on the adoption of the technology that makes all this possible. The company is certainly doing some of the important things right. First and foremost, the service will be free. It'll be easy to use. The user interface will be the beloved clicker.

The company also has some experience that could give it and edge over such competitors as RespondTV and Wink Communications. According to Commerce.TV Director of Marketing Evan Saks, the company founders were the brains behind a successful prepaid telephone calling card company, which was bought out in 1997. "They wrote the software platform that tracked accounts," Sakss says. The telecommunications field, with its stringent uptime demands (when's the last time you picked up a phone and got not dial tone?) and vast customer base, was a great teacher.

Commerce.TV hopes to apply those lessons by focusing on the man behind the e-commerce curtain - the unglamorous but vital transaction details. To that end the company, unlike competitors, is building a network of regional databases in anticipation of the enormous demand that only television can cause. "Even under the heaviest stress conditions," Saks says, "viewers will be accessing a regional database, not a single central one." The goal is to minimize error messages and ticked-off consumers.

In order to fill the merchandise pipeline, Saks says, Commerce.TV is "building relationships with vendors - Web companies, phone catalogs, anybody who can pick, pack and ship." That may be a problem: It sure sounds like the company is competing with the big boys, QVC and the Home Shopping Network. Saks says he considers these giants potential partners rather than competitors, but both are said to have ambitious plans of their own. Commerce.TV has advantages over home shopping channels. It's always available, no matter what channel you're staring at. One the other hand, that icon in the corner of your TV screen just sits there, passive. That may seem preferable to a bleating huckster with a bad comb-over. But whatever you think of infomercials and the shop-at-home channels, they've evolved to their present state for a reason. Direct marketers know what works. "Call now!" works. "Operators are standing by!" works. Placing an icon discreetly in a corner may not.

You may get a chance to find out for yourself pretty soon. Insight Communications, a large cable company that operates in Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Georgia, is rolling out the service right now. E-commerce and TV, all rolled into one. I think I'll just put in a standing order at Domino's and lock myself in the den. Stick a video camera in the corner and I may be the next hit TV show.