The industry still needs to decide what Interactive TV is and how it will be produced. There is no workable consumer definition for Interactive TV and people need to be educated as to what to expect. TV commercials are becoming less effective as people find ways to avoid them. TiVO's own user surveys show that 84 percent of its digital-video recorder customers skip the commercials. Interactive commercials will be an attempt to recapture this audience.
Commercials are, after all, what pays for most TV programming.
Viewers will be asked to pay a greater share of programming costs, one way or the other, as advertising revenue will be increasingly unable to carry the load. The upside of this is it will give paying viewers a more direct role in deciding what kinds of programs are produced or made available from libraries. But as this happens, it could be more difficult for new programming to be produced, as all the eyeballs and ears could be elsewhere. That is a potentially major downside to the explosion of content that could become available over the next decade. These are great times to be observing the media.