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By Patrick Donoghue

I’ve sat in a lot of meetings over the years and a lot of pitches. Sometimes I am the one standing there in front of that PowerPoint and sometimes I am the one dutifully taking notes and asking questions at the appropriate time. When all of this drama plays out, we are left with action items, follow-ups, due diligence and, most importantly, ideas. Some of these ideas are so great that they never die, coming back year after year, hoping that technology can make them real or that economics can make them viable. The easy ones get built and launched, but I often wonder what will happen to the rest. Who remembers the great ones that have never seen the light of day, and where does history record the ones that were never meant to be? How many times can an idea resurface before it disappears forever? Luckily the readers of [itvt] have attics and basements full of CD ROMs, floppy disks, and VHS tapes of their work, just waiting to be unearthed.

In each installment of this series, I will call out to interactive TV veterans for screen shots and war stories of the ITV that never was or has yet to be. How many people have worked on the fabled Order a Pizza While Watching TV application? Has anyone actually built the one that allows viewers to click on Jennifer Aniston’s sweater to buy it while watching Friends? What happened to them?

The Mystery of the Virtual City!

The first (ITV archetype) topic I will explore will challenge even the most seasoned ITV people and may require the resurrection of laserdisc players and ancient copies of Macromedia Director. It seems like everyone in the early 90’s wanted his or her ITV interface to look like a virtual city, but I never understood why. Was it because of the hype around Apple’s eWorld, or did we need a place to go to on the much-talked-about "Information Superhighway"? The first ITV assignment I ever had was to build one of these metropolises based on some storyboards I was given by Viacom. I was told: "Each building is a different service, such as Movies-on-Demand or Games, and while you’re at it put a blue blimp in the sky to represent the blue button on the remote." I sat there for weeks building sports arenas and movie theaters in 3D, rendering drive-through animations and linking it all together with clever bits of Director’s Lingo code until finally it worked! But what I had created was an interface that inherited all of the limitations of a real space. Purchasing an on-demand movie was supposed to be easier than going to the movies, but instead, it required you to cruise down virtual streets, making wrong turns, backtracking, and with no one to ask for directions. Within a year, everyone in the industry discovered that this concept was a train wreck (or traffic jam), and we all left our virtual cities behind us, abandoned with tumbleweeds blowing in the streets.

I remember visiting the Blockbuster offices at about the same time, where they had a similar idea of a virtual store you could navigate via the remote. It was a beautifully rendered 3D experience but flawed in the same way my Viacom city was. I also met with a very smart UI team at a cable company in Denver (America West?), who had produced a very flashy city for their ITV trial. In those early days we were all looking for the voice of this new ITV medium. These city interfaces were built before most people had seen the Web. There were no rules, no standards, and no examples of good on-screen navigation except a few multimedia CD ROMs and touch-screen kiosks. It seemed logical to use reality as our inspiration and to navigate the ITV world in the same way we did the real world.

Send in Your Examples

I’m sure there were others caught up in this early ITV craze. Consider this a call to arms to the urban cyber warriors who built those city applications and others like them to send some screen shots and war stories we can publish. Don’t let the ideas die!

The next installment of Legends of ITV will depend on what the readers submit. Please send your materials for: The Weirdest Remotes Ever, ITV Pizza Ordering, and anything else from your archives.

Note: Patrick J. Donoghue is an ITV veteran with the scars to prove it. Since 1992 he has received four Emmys and an [itvt] Leadership Award for his work in the field. To submit materials for his column, email donoghue@itvt.com.

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