So the new FCC boss, Julius Genachowski, thinks there should be restrictions on interactive programming aimed at children. I agree; there’s no reason to let kids run wild with a remote control. I disagree, though, with the idea that some sort of uber parental opt-in device is needed to save the children and their parents from themselves. That’s, unfortunately, the type of overkill that maims and destroys new ideas such as interactive TV before they even get off the ground. 

According to published reports, Genachowski is advocating the prohibition of interactive advertising without said parental opt-in “protecting kids from inappropriate commercialization” and that “interactive ads directed at children are off-limits without an opt-in by parents.” 

I agree. There is no way that a nine-year-old should be able to buy a $649 electric Hummer just by pressing a couple buttons on the remote. On the other hand, that’s a pretty stupid example in the first place because it would be stupid for any kind of advertiser to give a nine-year-old that kind of power without parental verification. It’s like buying cigarettes; the kids might still think it’s cool but the sales agent knows it’s not a good idea if they’re under 18. 

The nice thing about interactivity is that it’s a smart technology that’s able to identify and flag the underage buyer. One of my colleagues, no doubt trying to be more clever than he’s ever actually been, suggested that any sort of ubiquitous parental opt-in would be a blanket ban that would throw the baby out with the bathwater. Besides being clichéd, there are no babies, I don’t care how smart, who would be ordering toys online from their baths, unless they were rubber duckies and they probably have those already.

Seriously, though, the problem of kids having access to inappropriate content for sale has been addressed and answered by the computer. Kids can type in all they want; the right controls handled by the service provider and/or applications provider and accepted by the advertiser prevent them from getting what they want without a parent’s involvement. Works now on the Web and interactive TV is just as smart, maybe more so, than the Web. 

Interactive TV for children has so much potential it worries me anytime someone makes even the slightest suggestion of controlling it. Television, even with the growth of a generation of computer savvy youngsters, is still the entertainment medium of choice for children. Making that medium more interactive, more educational and, frankly, more user-friendly is not a bad thing … it’s a good thing, for the children and for television itself.

The new FCC chairman is on my side with this. He’s stated that “digital television will provide new and beneficial economic opportunities to broadcasters.” I’ll take that even a step further and say those benefits will also naturally accrue to cable operators and programmers and interactive TV providers such as ActiveVideo. We’re all in agreement on that. 

We’re even in agreement when he says that the FCC should re-examine the 1990 Children’s Television Act “in light of the current marketplace and technologies” because there have been a number of advancements in the space in the last 20 years. As Homer Simpson would say in a program that might or might not be appropriate for kids, “Doh!

The thing is, examining the best way to deliver interactive television to children should not include any kind of blanket restrictions. In other words, Julius, “Don’t have a cow, man.”

The Tour de France is the Franco Super Bowl. In the U.S., it’s the Super Bowl broadcast for Versus, a channel that the rest of the time makes its living showing rodeo and hockey—as if the two aren’t interchangeable. This year it’s the Super Bowl that actually has some drama; seven time champion, cancer survivor and all-American hero Lance Armstrong is back and challenging the pack.

You can almost hear the announcers at Versus drooling. For three weeks in July Versus becomes the Tour authority, opining on the drug issues that have dragged the famed race into the gutter with more gusto than a nasty headwind. Versus viewers learn how the peloton might chase a breakaway unless it finds the breakaway’s members to be harmless, and then it leaves the breakaway alone. They learn about sprinters and kings of the mountains. They know the difference between climbers and domestiques and why George Hincapie is a great rider who will never wear the yellow jersey in Paris.

And if that’s not enough, Versus viewers can go to the channel’s Web page and find out even more; participate in chatrooms; play games and contests; get the latest from the Versus race experts and just immerse themselves in the three-week French festival. This year they can even compete to win a spot in Paris for the Tour’s final day.

The Tour de France is the tour de force of the Versus schedule.  And if you happen to miss it on any of the multiple times it’s on live during the day, it’s on VoD, the crew reminds you.

This year that crew is in bicycle heaven. Armstrong is back and Americans are rallying in the Alps and Pyrenees, cheering on this cancer survivor and hoping he can once again shove his bicycle up the noses of the snooty French who check out his urine more often than my neighbor’s dog examines his favorite watering holes.

This constant cloud of drug innuendo annoys Armstrong. We know this because Armstrong constantly “tweets” his fans about his disdain for the testing.  He also lets them in on trade secrets about his Astana team and whether he’s really happy with the way teammate Alberto Contador is challenging his yellow jersey supremacy. And if fans don’t get enough Lance, they can always tweet over to his teammate, Levi Leipheimer.  Lepheimer, himself no slouch on the saddle, has his own Twitter account.

So what’s all this got to do with interactive TV? Nothing. And everything. If you want the extra information that Versus hawks with every pedal revolution, you have to step away from the screen and log onto their Web site. If you want to know what Lance has to say about drug testing – or whether he’s really all that happy with the race as a whole – you need a cell phone or a PC and a Twitter account. The Tour, in all its glorious HD beauty – and the scenery IS stunning — is a static event when it comes to television. Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen and Bob Rolls talk at you, not WITH you – unless, of course, you happen to log onto your computer.

Lance Armstrong, a true American idol who is seemingly doing things the clean way in a dirty sports world, could turn the Tour de France and bicycling on its ears this year four years after retiring. You can see it happen one Sunday soon in glorious HD. But if you want to hear what Lance thinks about winning – or even more juicily, losing – you’re going to have to use other media because the television hasn’t caught up yet.

As Chicago Cubs fans like to say – maybe next year. Of course, to be fair, it’s a good bet than the Tour de France will be on interactive TV long before the Cubs even reach the World Series.

Since the first cavemen wrote on their walls—and their mothers sent them to bedrock without any mammoth—writing has been the way humans express and differentiate themselves. Sure, we talk … and talk and talk and talk, if you happen to catch cable TV … but we still use our hands to do much of the communicating. Cell phones, in fact, are now used more often for texting than talking, no doubt causing Alexander Graham Bell to roll in his grave.

This human tendency to want to write, text, type, thumb the cell, is at the center of one of the truly hot debates about interactive TV. Some naysayers contend that interactive TV will never reach its full potential because, in the end, people have been trained to type and interactive TV is a visual medium without a stylus.

Interacting is evolutionary. When I was a kid, a TV announcer interacted with his audience by telling them to rush to the phone and “call now.” (I wonder if those operators are still standing by…)  A dozen years ago, that announcer advised his audience to rush to their computers and type in whataripoff.com to get more information. Today that announcer, still interacting with his audience, tells his viewers to text in the numbers 8675309.

Every time that happens the viewer steps back from the TV and moves to another medium. Interaction with the TV stops.

The most logical solution is to give viewers a keyboard. Of course, with the exception of a few diehards who don’t see the sun as often as they should, sitting in front of a TV with a wireless keyboard on your lap is a cumbersome way to experience interactive television.

There are better ways and they start with the remote control. Vizio is preparing to introduce a slide-out QWERTY keyboard to enable on-screen texting. That’s a quick fix, perhaps, and certainly better than a full keyboard. At the Cable Show, ActiveVideo demonstrated how to tweet on TV using intuitive software from Keisense that transforms several simple keys on a remote control into an interactive guidance system.
 
Ideally, and this is something that’s in development, a remote control will contain the intuitive elements that will enable it to learn from and understand its user. Network sensing technology that identifies the user’s quirks and typing habits will fill in the gaps to accelerate the interactive process. It’s working now with the iPhone and other so-called smartphones, so why not move to the remote control? Can you imagine a guy sitting in the bar, knocking them back and telling the bartender, “My remote doesn’t understand me?”

In the end, it’s not only possible but likely that texting will be replaced by the oldest form of communication, talking. Ideally, a voice-activated device would let viewers tell the TV what they want to do and say. It works now in voice recognition systems in cars—and nobody ever said carmakers were an advanced lot—so it should work with television. Think of the fun when channel changing turns into shouting matches that are less violent but no less entertaining than fighting over a remote.

Despite the opinions of the naysayers, interactive TV is happening. The applications are there; the public desire to interact is certainly there; providers can make it happen; and there’s content, with more always on the way. That’s plenty to write home about – no matter what kind of keyboard you’re using.

With the flurry of big-name deaths over the past several days, a couple of things are crystal clear:  First and most obviously, it wasn’t a good week to be a celebrity; and second, the medium that played a huge role in catapulting many of those same folks to prominence has some hurdles to get past when it comes to bringing today’s communities of mourning fans together.

Where did you learn about Michael Jackson’s untimely death? Probably on television. How did you share the news? Probably via Twitter or texting or talking with your friends on Facebook or even via email. To do that you deliberately had to distract yourself from the medium that was giving you the news to use another medium to discuss it.

Talk about letting your audience walk out.

This is the sort of thing that interactive television can and must solve. If the eyes are on the TV, keep them on the TV and let the fingers do the walking on a remote or some other TV-connected device, not on the cell phone and certainly not on the computer. Television has always been a social network, starting with the pre-remote control days when the family gathered around the set and chose one unfortunate to be the channel changer and picture fixer.

That model, like the nuclear family—except in North Korea where the nuclear family is still all too real, unfortunately–changed over the years. At the same time, television’s entertainment value as a conversation piece remained constant.

Were you shocked when the “House” scriptwriters killed off Kal Penn’s Dr. Lawrence Kutner character this year?  Did you text or tweet your friends with the news? While it was even more shocking to find that Penn was giving up acting to work for the Obama Administration, the bigger surprise came when the network offed his character. Fox continued the charade by dedicating a memorial page to the departed doctor—on the Internet—but TV, as has been its recent wont presented just the static statement of the television show: Kutner’s dead. If you wanted to learn more or talk to friends about it, you had to leave your seat or pick up your cell phone and go to the PC.  That’s as lame as the story line, incidentally, which limped along worse than House without his cane.

Television needs to find ways to keep fans from wandering off to other media.  It’s still a primary source of news and entertainment but it’s a secondary source of social networking.  Interactivity – particularly the cloud-based iTV solutions that are now being deployed — can change this and make television the primary line of social interaction by giving the viewer a name and an identity and a network with whom to communicate on the screen and with the screen as events happen in real time.

Interactive TV can help find that favorite Michael Jackson video moment, recall a personal incident or simply enable a viewer to reach out to commiserate with like-minded fans.  The technology is real, it’s deployed and can bring that sharing to the television.  And unlike the Internet and Twitter, it can do that heavy lifting without compromising the integrity of operators’ video bundles and ad sales pitches, or burdening their high-speed data networks.

Let’s hope the entertainment industry doesn’t have another week of Jackson and Fawcett and Mays and Malden anytime soon.  But if it does, I’m hopeful that viewers will be able to connect and interact with one another at the real hub of the entertainment world – the television.