Want to improve iTV? Use mobile phones as remote controllers

iTV as a digital marketing channel is in dolldrums. There is a simple solution for revolutionising it.

There was an interesting piece of statistics in one of the recent issues of a digital trade magazine: the market for the interactive TV advertising is worth a pitiful £20 million in the UK.

What a letdown! When the red buton got its advertising purpose, the predictions were over the moon; the new era of the digital marketing seem to have arrived and the biggest shift of all - from PCs to the good old TV set - seem to have begun.

Not anymore. iTV was a big flop and, in hindsight, there seem to be several reasons for it.

For the start, platform owners (e.g. Sky) made it too complex for advertisers. It took Sky years to stop insisting that only its developers could produce 'dedicated advertising locations' for its clients.

Technology was clunky and even when the platforms openned up, it was still too complex and too expensive to advertise in the iTV way.

However, one particular thing has proven to be the insurmountable barrier: the very paradigm of how TV is used as a medium. The 'lean back' nature of it could not be changed into the 'lean forward' paradigm of the PC, due to the lack of a simple inputting device. Usability brought the iTV down.

All optimistic notions about TV banking, TV travel booking or the car brochure ordering disintegrated when faced with the very thing that succesfully liberated the 'old' TV: the remote controller.

Made for only a few of the simplest operations, the remote was just to cumbersome and tedious for anything more than that. People just couldn't use it to type in text with it, or - even worse - emails. Sky cheekily tried to capitalise on it by charging £20 for the special keyboard, but it was a step too far.

So, what is the future of iTV? I don't think it's the green button, the new attempt by the industry to push advertising content to our PVRs and + boxes.

The future is the iPod equivalent of the remote control. A device that is easy to use and input text with and easy to connect with a set top box. And we have such a device in our pockets already. There is no reason why our mobile phones couldn't be that. It only needs a bit of collaboration between phone manufacturers and TV networks (and their set top box manufacturers).

I'm waiting for a day when mobiles will have a TV control 'mode'. When that happens, and it will, inevitably, iTV will come of age and the good old TV will be free again, in the way that early pioneers of interactive television have always dreamt about.

Whether we will be watching TV at home and on TV sets by that time is another question.

Widgets will replace email as a marketing tool in 5 years

Here's my neck on a chopping board: I think that widgest are going to be for online marketing what SMS was for mobile - a distruptive technology that will change the way we do things, quite unexpectedly.

I believe that  widgets will replace email as a marketing tool. In 5 years time. 

The reason: widgets are about doing. Email is about telling. It's like in a good book, or a film, or a theatre piece: showing, not telling is a more powerful form of expression.

The smarter the widgets, the more things that we could do through them. If those things are done on a regular basis this may even reduce our visits to a brand's website. So, eventually, widgets could start cannibalising that channel as well. Put them on a mobile phone and the story widens. No wonder Japan is lagging behind many other countries when web is concerned: everybody over there does things through thousands applications available for their mobiles.

To win, widgets need to start becoming useful to broader audiences, not just kids and teenagers.

When that happens, email will start feeling the pressure.

Let me know what you think.