"The foray into choose-your-own-adventure programming represents a big bet on a nascent form of entertainment known as interactive TV"

Err, no, it represents a big bet on the really old form of entertainment known as "interactive TV", which is older than a great deal of the HN denizens reading this and replete with a history of failure despite multiple attempts.

The question is, will this be the iPad of interactive TV, the implementation of a long-standing idea replete with failure that finally succeeds, or just another in the long line of failure? If the people involved are unaware of the history, the latter seems more likely, but I can't tell if those involved are unaware or just the person writing this article.

"Interactive TV" as an idea isn't quite an instance of what I call the BOAC fallacy [1], but it's a related idea. The short version of that idea is that you can take a new technology and computerize it, and that it will be just exactly like the old technology with all the same affordances and capabilities and business structures, "But On A Computer!", instead of realizing that the act of transferring the technology to a computer will cause profound, sweeping changes. Interactive TV is like the stupidest, simplest idea of what adding computers to video can produce; the same video system, the same production mechanisms, the same delivery mechanisms, the same amount of control over the audience, But Now It's Interactive! In the shallowest possible way. Literally; in information theory terms audiences will be given single-digit bits worth of control over the result, and ultimately I would expect the experiences to be at least semi-optimized for the viewer still watching everything in the end, which reduces the choices down to an ordering choice rather than a "real" choice.

Instead, the technology that permitted interactive television permitted video games, mobile apps that take interaction to a much higher level there as well, YouTube and all accompanying experiences, Twitch and all accompanying experiences, and so on, a rich ecosystem of options and opportunities that aren't just "it's video, hooked up to some quick time events! Wow!" Dragon's Lair is already a super-slick version of the "interactive TV" idea, and we consider it an interesting historical curiosity of an ultimately failed development line, not something content producers all strive to emulate.

Given the nature of Black Mirror, it's a decent guess they'll at least exploit some artistic possibilities out of it, but in the end I doubt this will take off. Not because it's necessarily a "bad" idea, but because the space is already saturated with better ideas that are already multiple generations into their development cycle that will crowd it out, just as the newspaper web experience is now fundamentally different than the paper experience.

(So much so that it's easy for young people today to not realize that the original promise of "newspapers on the web" was very often painted not as a modern hyperlinked site with comment sections, etc., but basically as downloading a PDF (in modern terms) of a newspaper, formatted identically to the modern newspaper, with people talking about how nice the experience would be of clicking "continued on Page 8" to go to page 8 instead of having to fuss with the pages. Particularly forward-thinking prognosticators might consider the possibility of a Letters to the Editor page being updated on a better-than-daily schedule, but still, nothing much like what we actually got. I'm speaking of the general press here; the very technical people made better predictions, but this idea was very much in general circulation.)

[1]: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2916