Interactive TV Narrativity

Abstract

Looking back over the past 25 years, the impressive developments in information and communication technologies generated a booming popularity of the new forms of media consumption that allow for interactivity and mobility, such as Web information and entertainment and games. This was and still is particularly evident within the younger generation, who are the most avid adopters of both new technologies and new forms of media consumption (Schadler 2006; KPMG 2007). When asked, in 2006, which device they could not live without, 37% mentioned their PC, 26% their mobile phone, whereas only 17% mentioned their TVs (Schadler 2006); and all these were before the launch of products such as the iPhone, which offer increasing flexibility and mobility of the media experiences. Television, whose dominance started to be seriously shaken by this, responded by embracing interactivity: interactive television (iTV) made its debut in earnest 20 years ago, in the late 1990s. However, until quite recently, interactivity did not apply to narrativity, to the stories told by the programs themselves, but was provided in parallel with and more or less disconnected from the actual programs. Examples of such interactive services include “enhanced TV” (Jensen 2005), which is an advanced version of teletext, electronic program guides, betting, shopping, e-mail access, Internet browsing, and game-play. Their invocation can happen more or less at any point during the viewing of a program, as they are not aligned or synchronized with the moving image narration.1 They reflect television’s attempts to assimilate services that emerged and grew successfully on other delivery platforms, in more or less their original formats, rather than to develop its own forms of interactivity. In this approach, iTV emphasizes its position as a delivery platform for, more or less, disjoint interactive services, of which the traditional linear television narration is the one always present.