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.
