Interactive Digital Television (IDTV) and Civic Intelligence

The internet has provided the ideal models for “public participation projects in spreading information” to be developed for future IDTV broadcasts, such as Wikipedia and YouTube. At this point, the question may be “why focus on television when the internet provides similar interaction possibilities?” The answer is that television reaches a far larger audience, and is the place where most of the live debates between politicians and other policy makers in discussing important issues take place. It is the public arena with the largest “reach” to make a point or a statement. Most people who return back home from work prefer to watch prime time television instead of surfing the internet, which is mostly done in office hours. Another advantage of television is that it’s a “one time only” purchase, and TV devices are generally more affordable and widely diffused than computers. TV users may also choose to become members in expensive multi-channel satellite, cable or digital terrestrial networks, which currently provide the only available degree of interactivity in many countries today, but free public IDTV broadcasters are also starting to provide basic interactive services, such as video on demand and T-Government. These services will strongly expand in the near future, since all E.U. member states are obliged to go “all digital” by the end of 2012, when analog television broadcasts in these countries will cease to exist. The same change will eventually take place in the United States, Japan and the rest of the world over the years.

In order to optimally use the capabilities provided by IDTV, governments and municipalities, as well as NGOs and civic intelligence groups should establish close connections with such broadcasters (e.g. sponsoring them and using several hours of their daily broadcasting schedule in return, similar to the PBS in the United States.) This will provide them the means to reach their followers and especially for spreading their views to people who were not already aware of their activities, using the larger “reach” potential of television in comparison to the internet, which almost exclusively leads us to the websites that we are already interested in, through the data that we insert to the search engines. Zapping between TV channels is a more “randomized” act and can lead us to a program which we didn’t have in mind, whereas surfing the internet through search engines has a lesser probability of diverting us to a topic that’s different from the one which we had in mind. The interactive applications of IDTV will enable such organizations to receive feedback from their viewers, or to recruit new followers for spreading their cause. In a live TV debate between politicians, ordinary citizens should also be able to participate in the discussion, through applications similar to (but more advanced than) the use of Webcam in VOIP programs such as Skype. The only problem in such an application might be the temptation of vandalism, i.e. to make annoying or insulting comments under anonymous names during live broadcasts; but this problem can be solved with a strict identification method which will make anonymity impossible and restrain the users from such possible temptations, even though the system will probably need to be constantly monitored.