INTERACTION DESIGN PRINCIPLES FOR INTERACTIVE ...

1.4.2 Additional Examples
Many other countries have experimented with interactive television to varying
degrees of success, including France, Spain, South Africa, Turkey, Australia, Greece,
China, New Zealand, and Italy. Not surprisingly, the most popular types of programming
are sporting events and games shows. Table 1.6 presents a brief overview of the types of
interactive programming being offered abroad, courtesy of Broadband Bananas.
In addition to these examples, the video vault on the Broadband Bananas Web site
(http://www.broadbandbananas.com) features dozens of examples of interactive
television programming from countries around the world.
In the U.S., the American Film Institute’s annual enhanced TV Workshop
(http://www.afi.com/education/etv/), now the Digital Content Lab, has played a key role
in pairing together TV producers, directors, and creative executives with technology
leaders to prototype the next generation of interactive television programming. The
workshop deployed its first prototype, Celebrity Mole: Yucatan, in 2003. With its 2005
shift to the Digital Content Lab, however, the AFI hopes to facilitate a year-round digital
production center with more ambitious goals to guide productions from prototype to
deployment in the future.
The U.K. has by far the most deployed interactive television programming
available today. The United States operates on quite a different model, however. The
BBC is the primary media force in the U.K., and they are developing standards that work
across systems, devoting a comprehensive section of their operation to interactive TV,
detailing everything from how iTV programming works, how to interact, platform-
specific instructions, and guidelines for iTV programming.
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