Does interactivity kill TV's killer app?

The next year or two could bring the biggest changes that the medium of television has ever seen. The liberation of programming content from the TV to PCs and other devices — supported for the first time by mainstream business models — is just one of the changes about to take place. The most significant departure for television could be the extent to which it becomes used bidirectionally and interactively.

Last fall's Telco TV show was rife with demonstrations of tweets and other social media on the TV screen. The new year began with Skype announcing a video calling service over PCs and TVs. And Cisco Systems made a splash at the Consumer Electronics Show by bringing its telepresence service to residential users.

The pioneers of the new age of television would be wise to take caution in their assumptions of how bidirectional people actually want their TVs to be. People have been talking about ordering pizza through your TV set for so long that it's now hard to mention the notion without being a little embarrassed. Did this long-imagined application never take off because the technology couldn't be mastered or — more likely — because it didn't actually solve a problem?

The coexistence of TVs and PCs has illustrated one of TV's chief appeals to be its lack of interactivity. In fact, one of the first truly successful IPTV applications was caller ID on the TV screen, not because it brought the application of telephony to TV, but because it allowed consumers to better ensure that their passive TV watching would not be interrupted unnecessarily.

That's why I'm very wary of applications that promise social TV-viewing or video chat combined with simultaneous viewing. I'm not convinced that very many people see anything wrong with the time-honored couch vegetable garden. And I don't think consumers have much of a problem segregating their lean-back experiences from the lean-forward kind on different devices. Why watch TV with a remote friend displayed on your screen when you can just watch it independently and discuss it later over whatever interactive technology you like? Two-way offerings like Cisco's and Skype's have another hurdle to overcome in the network effect: My home telepresence system is only as useful as the number of people I know who also have one. In the business world, this chicken-and-egg problem was overcome in part with third-party telepresence rooms that aren't easy to duplicate in the residential market.

The most logical way to socialize the TV set is through video games, which are already interactive. Platforms introduced in that world have the best chance of spilling over into traditional TV viewing, but none of these approaches will make it easy to revolutionize consumer behavior. The revolution may come to our living rooms soon enough, but I don't know; we're still waiting for that pizza.