Welcome to the world of interactive television.
With new digital TV set-top boxes with computing features, providing Internet, email, video games or home shopping facilities, who will buy a computer? Are the days of PC’s coming to an end? Why TV rather than personal computers?
Certainly, interactive television has many advantages to attract customers towards a new model integrating entertainment and functions. Consumers usually feel more comfortable with the TV rather than PC, particularly when they are at home because whereas the first one conveys relax, computers are associated with work.
According to Mark Gawlinski 24/7 services will have a brilliant future. The majority of on-screen shopping, banking, ticket booking or charity donating will be done by TV screen rather than PC. Moreover, the TV guide permits to customize the programming schedule and only the favourite programmes appear in the grids. Additionally, smart cards could be provided to the customers in order to personalise the environment and surface of their platforms. Consumers could have the ability to store their preferences (e.g. text size, colour combinations, favourite channels, and reminders) and personal details (e.g. credit card details). These cards have the advantage of being transferable between the systems (Gill, Perera).
Convenience is one of the main factors for those who support the use of interactive TV. People can just buy a product with only few clicks, from their houses and in their living rooms using the Internet capabilities that a bigger screen provides. This actually could give a big help to people that have temporary or permanent impairments. In fact, one study conducted in Europe found that 42% of the consumers feel comfortable using TV for shopping, while only a 26% prefer their laptops (Swann 2000). One of the reasons is probably the speed to make the transactions keeping the credit/debit card details for next time. Some experts have argued that with this kind of systems people is loosing their privacy and companies know everything about them, which products they order or the calls they made. But, this is not the same privacy than some online companies do leaving cookies to gather information about their consumers? Holding customer’s details is a way to look for new ways to satisfied them, not a lack of security.
Despite all of this, the disappearance of PC’s is unlikely to happen.
The linear model of TV will remain and its main use will be watching TV. There will be some people that use it to order some food, catch up with the sports or check the weather, leaving the more computer-related things for PC’s. It is hard to see an executive working on an Excel spreadsheet on TV.
What it can occur is a cultural division in the market but for now the truth is that a TV monitor is a TV set and people wants it better, not an alternative to the PC.
The next graph shows the most popular use of interactive services, and it seems that in Britain the weather is always something to be worried about.
References
1. Gawlinski, M. (2003) Interactive Television Production, Oxford: Focal Press.
2. Gill, J., Perera, S. (2003) Accessible Universal Design of Interactive Digital Television [online]vawww.brighton.ac.uk/cmis/courses/postgraduate/pgpit/euroitv/euroitv03/Papers/Paper10.pdf [17February 2010].
3. Swann, P. (2000) The Future of Interactive Television: TV dot Com, NY: TV books.
4 comments:
Very nice post. What I learn about it is that there is a very big difference in Belgium and the UK. In Belgium, iDTV has it's biggest market increasement in 2008. So that's very late if you compare it with the UK. But what I was thinking about ... is it likely that there will still be more TV's in each house because nowadays there are more then one computer for each household and when we're going to use a TV for other purposes then watching TV, will the sales numbers of TV's also increase?
In Greece its totally different. People are more interested to buy an new computer.There are some people that want to invest to iTV's but they are few. Even this technology is not so well known and people are not interested yet to learn something new.
This is a well written article that clearly explains both sides of the technology scale. However at the end it was mentioned that PC's would be around for a long time, can you explain why you believe this?
Well, we believe that TV's are trying to be computers increasing the number of features available for the customers. As we said, you can do lots of things through your iTV that you used to do before with your computer. Despite that the truth is that computers will remain for a long time. Probably what is going to change is the uses that we give to the computer. For example you may decide to buy a t-shirt using iTV but if you have to design something or use Photoshop for a presentation you will still use your computer. In addition, if you want to do something personal and don’t share with the rest of your family who are sitting in the couch looking at the screen…USE YOUR LAPTOP!
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