Why Not A 40-MPG SUV?
Civil Disobedience Planned For Webcasters

Interactive TV In NYC

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the go-go-TV-go dept

Thu, Oct 17th 2002 3:38pm — Mike Masnick
Time Warner is making a big deal about their decision to launch interactive TV programming in New York City. There have been a bunch of articles about it. I still wonder, though, if this offering really is any better than a TiVo. I was starting to believe that real interactive TV would come through a TiVo or Replay style box. However, this is more of the traditional style interactive TV that people wasted a decade or so talking about. It does let you order movies, and then pause/fast forward/rewind. It will be interesting to see how well this is adopted, because just about every other test of interactive TV has failed miserably. However, even more important, is that this appears to be Time Warner's attempt to roll out additional services, and take control of all information coming in and out of your house. They want to offer voice, video, and data, all through a single company.
2 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    LittleW0lf, 17 Oct 2002 @ 4:36pm

    I already have this...

    I have this already, through Cox in San Diego... My phone line is run by cox, my cable is run by cox, and my data is through cox, and that has been the way things have been for roughly a year now...how is this any different?

    If I had showtime, skinamax, and hbiou, I'd have interactive video too...

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Steve Snyder, 18 Oct 2002 @ 10:48am

    We even have PVR

    For whatever reason TW has been rolling out a lot of the new stuff in our small market (Green Bay area of Wisconsin) ahead of most others--I guess it makes some sense though as far as working through the bugs on smaller markets and scaling up for the big ones.

    Anyway, they were slow in rolling out digital cable, but shortly thereafter started offering Video on demand as well as their own TiVo-like PVR.

    Kind of amusing--they offer the PVR and in their ads for RoadRunner cable internet, they talk about how great it is to download music and movies so quickly and easily. But at the same time, their other divisions as part of the music & movie industries have to be going nuts because they don't want sharing of movies & music and want to replace the play button with a pay button. I would have to imagine there are some pretty major internal conflicts between the Media & Communications side and the Entertainment side.

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]


Why Not A 40-MPG SUV?
Civil Disobedience Planned For Webcasters
Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

Friday

19:39 Important Announcement: Techdirt Is Migrating To A New Platform (0)
More arrow

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.