Student Envisions Future of Interactive Television

Television has always been the proverbial "lean back" medium with information flowing mostly in a one way direction from the TV to the viewer in a non-interactive manner. That's changed a bit over the years with the arrival of video on demand and other semi-interactive capabilities. However, it's never progressed to the interactivity of the web and it's still unclear whether or not it should aspire to that level of interactivity.

The current passivity of TV hasn't stopped people from attempting to add interactivity to the medium and it hasn't stopped Koen, a student at Working Tomorrow who created this demo of clickable TV whereby a simple click of a product in an ad of product placement brings up information and ordering screens. It's not really new but it's interesting to see how different people execute the same idea. Whether or not TV ever progresses (or should progress) to this stage remains unclear.