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T A B L E__T A L K

AOL and privacy: Are the two mutually exclusive? Join the discussion in Table Talk's Digital Culture area

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R E C E N T L Y

Festival in search of a medium
By Karlin Lillington
Cannes' multimedia showcase loses its way
(02/17/98)

Metal madness
By Andrew Leonard
The battle for heavy metal on the Web
(02/13/98)

Friction or fact?
By Andrew Leonard
Trendy theories of a "friction-free economy" hit some bumps
(02/12/98)

Just pay for it
By Andrew Leonard
Technology may bring the Olympics to your desktop someday -- but not for free
(02/11/98)

21st Challenge
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
Ticklers for every situation
Plus: Haiku error message winners
(02/10/98)

BROWSE THE ARCHIVES FOR LET'S GET THIS STRAIGHT

Once more, into the interactive-TV breach

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BY SCOTT ROSENBERG | Remember "enhanced CDs"? For years the music companies tried to package and sell these multimedia hybrids in an attempt to jazz up your run-of-the-mill music CD with a few dozen megabytes of CD-ROM-style photos, video clips, lyrics and liner notes. Somebody somewhere thought we all wanted to pop our CDs into our computers so we could transform the simple pleasure of listening to music we love into a razzle-dazzle multimedia experience.

Unfortunately, one usually wants to read lyrics and liner notes while listening to the music itself -- a simple bit of multi-tasking that the clumsy enhanced-CD format does not allow. Today, the enhanced CD has mostly disappeared from the music store racks; it's just one more stiff in the dead-technology graveyard.

Enhanced CDs didn't develop to meet some public hunger. They were a gimmick conceived by a marketing alliance -- between technologists in search of new uses for their frequently purposeless devices and entertainment companies seeking ways to repackage and resell their "intellectual property."

Like enhanced CDs, most of the ungainly offspring of this prolific alliance usually flop in the market. But hope springs eternal. Technology companies and Hollywood are teaming up once more to hunt down the elusive chimera known as "interactive television." Bruised four years ago by the previous round of this struggle -- in which overblown predictions of a 500-channel utopia and video-on-demand heaven sank in an ocean of red ink -- the partners are hedging their bets this time around.

Where once we were promised all manner of futuristic innovations and life-transforming services, the versions of interactive TV now being prototyped are downsized and humble. They often involve marginal annotations to existing TV programming -- buttons you can click on that provide additional information about a show, like sports statistics or financial info. It all sounds familiar; these projects might as well be called "enhanced TV."

Attendees at Networked Entertainment World, a conference in Beverly Hills, Calif., last week, got a brief look at one new enhanced TV product dubbed Intertainer -- which had been unveiled in a New York Times piece a couple days before. Founded by Jonathan Taplin and Richard Baskin, a couple of Hollywood veterans, and backed by Intel and cable giant Comcast, the Intertainer company plans to use "broadband"-style networks -- based on either cable modems or forthcoming DSL telephone service -- to pump movies, TV and music programming, along with commercials, into the American home.

What makes Intertainer any different from the existing media? What's "interactive" here? Well, you get to watch and listen to stuff when you want it, rather than when it's scheduled. Electronic commerce is built in, along with "collaborative filtering" technology from Firefly that provides recommendations for your entertainment consumption if you don't know what you want already.

That's all fine. But what's missing are the very interactive features that have attracted some 40 million Americans onto the Internet over the past half-decade: e-mail and chat.

Enhanced TV products like Intertainer take the genie of digital technology and try to stuff it back into the living-room box. Entertainment execs kept trying to stir things up at Networked Entertainment World by suggesting that, if we don't find ways to use the Internet for mass entertainment, the new medium might prove to be "just a big telephone" -- as if the telephone were some kind of minor footnote in technological history.

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