As a result, winner Adam Block from Red Apple Entertainment, a Toronto-based company, will travel to Los Angeles for two days of meetings with industry executives in hopes of landing a development deal for the next hot interactive TV property. The contestants pitched ideas ranging from cooking and travel shows to dating games and even a show featuring a ship and crew sailing the globe in search of examples of cultural diversity. However, people are still fixated on the Web.
Interactive television is more than that.
Interactivity has to draw the viewer into the content, leading to a deeper experience with the program. The winning program focuses on the wide world of bugs. The interactive portion of the show would go beyond links to Web sites and the listing of additional information about specific bugs by linking classrooms around the world and allowing students to share information about their various bug-related classroom experiments. For example, students in Kansas could provide material and streaming video on an experiment they conducted, while students in India could compare their findings and share the differences with the viewing community. The show has been in development for over a year.