TV interactivity: Hot trend or hot mess?

Interactivity in TV is being touted as being a plus for IPTV, or maybe it’s for True2Way, or maybe for digital TV. Any time you see this sort of “smearing the buzz” phenomena, you know something’s hot, and interactivity surely is.

True, there is a rush to make it a differentiator in the TV space (Verizon’s widget program is an example), but a bigger question might be whether this rush to interactive TV will have an impact on online advertising. Some interactive concepts, like Yahoo’s widgets, can be incorporated in a TV set (or set-top box, in theory) and provide a link between TV and online, which could be good.

Some interactivity could make television commercials interactive, which could be bad for online advertising because it could steal a differentiator. All this continues to point out that we have a game of musical chairs here, with a lot of applications and industry players looking to sit down on about $700 billion in total global adspend. No matter how many bottoms are involved in this game, the dollar size of the seats isn’t going to change.