M+E Daily

TV interactivity keeps evolving as new technologies and services — including virtual reality (VR) and over-the-top (OTT) offerings — are introduced to viewers, executives said at the June 14 Transforming Home Entertainment (THE) Summit in Los Angeles.

There was a “real discussion” back around 2000-2001 about just “what does interactivity mean in the grand scheme of television,” said Seth Shapiro, CEO of New Amsterdam Media and governor of the Interactive Media Peer Group for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. TV traditionally had been a “one-way medium, unlike the Internet,” he said. But now, the “monologue” has often transformed into a “dialogue” between viewers and the creators and distributors of content, he said.

“What’s really interesting … is just how much the definition of TV keeps changing, and all of these things that were sort of frontier you know 10 years ago, 15 years ago, are now like in the mainstream definition of television,” he said, pointing to DVRs as one great example. Nobody thinks of a DVR as “wacky technology now,” but 15 years ago many people said there was no need for such a device because there were VCRs, he said.

Now, many viewers — especially younger ones — consider TV that doesn’t feature some degree of interactivity as “vanilla,” he said, adding that his daughter hates TV programs that she can’t talk back to or provide comments to in some way. “She thinks it’s boring” when there’s no interactivity, he said.

Last year, the Academy awarded the first Emmy for VR and “there are a lot more VR submissions this year,” he said. Moving beyond a single, fixed camera position so that the viewer is “actually inside an experience” is significant, he said.

John Canning, VP of new media at the Producers Guild of America and co-chair of events at the Academy’s Interactive Media Peer Group, agreed that there is huge potential in VR. But he warned that there could be dangers in over-hyping the technology.

“When people talk about VR today they use the same hyperbole that they used for 3D TV. We can see how well that worked,” Canning said. If someone making a TV program “can think of another way to shoot something” than with VR, that person “probably shouldn’t shoot it in VR,” he said. If that person is thinking that he would be better served by a two-camera shoot than with shooting in 360 degrees, then that person probably would indeed be better-served by a two-camera shoot, he said.

VR should probably be reserved for those times when the TV content creator really wants to “push the medium,” Canning said, pointing out that it will only be a “fraction of a fraction of the viewing audience today” that would be the audience for it.

Video games, of course, have been telling stories in a similarly immersive way for many years, Canning said. It’s important to get past the new excitement around VR to a place where it makes sense for the technology to be used for a TV program, he said. VR “does give you a completely different perspective potentially than [an] external one-camera shoot from a fixed position, where 3D was just trying to make things pop out at you but didn’t always do that effectively,” he said.

Once we figure out what kind of content VR is “useful for and how we can enhance a story or tell a story” with the technology, “then I think you’re going to see the advancement” of it, he said.

Second screens and mobile devices, meanwhile, have had a significant impact on the TV industry, he said. TV used to be defined by three factors: “the piece of glass, the distribution method and the content,” he said. “What we’ve done is ripped all three of those things apart from each other. So, television is no longer defined by its distribution method or the piece of glass you watch it on. It’s the kind of content it is” only at this point, he said.

OTT has “broadened the ways that we can bundle and package our content,” but companies in the OTT business are facing the same kind of challenges that cable companies have traditionally gone through, he said. Skinny bundles and other OTT services are providing a lot of content to a device, and the technology is “not necessarily revolutionized yet,” he said, telling conference attendees he believed video game console platforms have done more in the same period of time as OTT services have.

Shapiro predicted that augmented reality will become “pervasive” eventually, as will a blending of pro and amateur TV content. Canning, on the other hand, predicted that intelligent agents like Amazon’s Alexa that help provide us with content also stand to be significant going forward.

Also discussed was the significance of social interactivity in TV programs. The current “charged” nature of the presidential election presents news channels like CNN, Fox News and MSNBC with a “huge opportunity” to incorporate social functionality into their programs, Shapiro said.

After all, allowing the audience to say what it thinks and the polling of viewers makes tremendous sense during the election season, he said. The median age of TV news is about 67 or 68, and that’s why there are so many pharmaceutical spots and “almost nothing else” as advertising during their shows, he said, suggesting more social interactivity could change those demographics.

TV audiences crave commenting on TV programs and having an impact on them, especially when it comes to non-scripted shows, Canning said. But shows including NBC’s “The Voice” have done away with 1-800 calls and short message services (SMS) that allow viewers to vote on things, and have shifted instead to apps and web sites for the same kind of functions, he said. “It’s a constant evolution,” he said.

“I think there was a period of time when there was a real resistance” among TV show producers to incorporate interactivity into their programs, he said. Show-runners making linear-based shows didn’t want anybody adding such features to their programs initially, but there’s been “almost a complete reversal of that,” he said, adding that some producers even have to now be held back from providing too much interactivity, especially when it comes to scripted shows, he said.