Interactive television? A retrospective analysis of why red button content failed

Interactive television was intended to provide the viewers with an enhanced experience of television. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, both public service and subscription-based television broadcasters provided the audience with a variety of ‘interactive’ applications. By 2012, most of the interactive applications had been either reduced in scale and ambition or withdrawn completely. This article is an overview of why the interactive television experiment failed. The methodological framework is a content analysis undertaken in the summer of 2012 which found a small amount of red button content supporting traditional broadcasts. The little found was either pre-existing content or entailed the button’s use as, effectively, the portal to a supplementary television channel. Moving forward, the article provides a discussion on why the optimism that television could be an interactive experience in the early 2000s dissolved in a relatively short period of time. The conclusion is that interactive television did not fit the political economy of the media landscape.

Public policy and the digital deadline: The implementation of the Digital Addressable System (DAS) in West Bengal

The introduction of the mandatory Digital Addressable System (DAS) with strict, phase-wise deadlines for different provinces within India has compelled us to reconsider not only the television apparatus itself but also broadcast policies, television industry, content and reception. The introduction of DAS can be posited within a series of similar public policies starting from the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) project in 1975 to the more recent Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) or Aadhaar project and Digital India campaign, all folded into the developmental rhetoric of the welfare state. The rollout of DAS provides the site to explore the relationship between the government, neo-liberal market and digital technologies that underscores the contradictions which are constitutive of modernity, and invests in the study of the neo-liberal cultural sites of statist intervention. Within this conceptual framework, this article would focus on West Bengal as a case in point to read the implementation of mandatory DAS both as a site of hegemonic projects embodying promises of neo-liberal development and of the incongruities that are inherent in them. While the union government claimed that any cable television service provider who does not switch to digital signal within deadline can be penalized and the equipment confiscated, the state Government said that they would launch an agitation if analogue cable signals were blacked out after the deadline for cable digitalization and thus, the deadline was extended for several months. The confrontation over cable digitalization in West Bengal offers a site to explore in what way, contrary to its typical image of a fully automated digital ecosystem of governance, as the modern states would like to conceive, it is loaded with internal contradiction. My inquiry moves across a range of discursive locations and registers, aiming to explore in what way various local stakeholders negotiate in this policy implementation? How does DAS help theorization of a changing relationship between the market, digital technology and the developmental modern? While raising these questions, this article would try to explore in what way DAS can be located within the historical trajectory of techno-cultural rhetoric of public policy and how it invests in the shifting political economy of broadcasting in India.

The Audience “Talking Back”: Alan M. Thomas’ Educational Television Experiment in Democratic Decision Making

In 1959, adult educator Alan M. Thomas outlined a pioneering concept of the active broadcast audience in Canada. Thomas affirmed that the audience’s potential to be a force for two-way communication and direct democracy had been unfulfilled. Twenty years later, Thomas put this concept into practice. As president and chair of the Canadian Association for Adult Education, he developed a participatory television series with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation called People Talking Back. The six-part series was an activist experiment in democratic decision-making to facilitate social action and learning outside of formal educational institutions. This Research in Brief brings together Thomas’ concept of the audience with his adult educational broadcasting scholarship and research on People Talking Back, all of which have remained relatively unrecognized by communication scholars.En 1959, l’éducateur d’adultes Alan M. Thomas a initié une approche pionnière envers le public des médias au Canada. Selon lui, on n’avait pas encore développé le potentiel de ce public d’être une force en communication bidirectionnelle et en démocratie directe. Vingt ans plus tard, Thomas a pu mettre son initiative en œuvre. En effet, en tant que président de la Canadian Association for Adult Education, il a créé avec la Société Radio-Canada une émission de télévision participative intitulée People Talking Back (« Les gens répondent »). Cette série activiste de six épisodes a expérimenté la prise de décision démocratique dans le but de faciliter l’apprentissage et l’action sociale de ses téléspectateurs hors du cadre d’un établissement d’enseignement formel. Cette Recherche en bref établit un lien entre la conception du public formulée par Thomas et l’étude de celui-ci relative à People Talking Back de la radiodiffusion appliquée à l’éducation des adultes. Les initiatives de Thomas ont reçu jusqu’à présent peu d’attention de la part des chercheurs en communication.

Security Model for Educational Satellite Networks

Education has been the greatest tool for human resources development. The advances in information and communication technology has brought out a paradigm shift in the educational sector by making it more accessible, relevant, qualitative, and equitable for the masses. The use of satellite technology like INTELSAT, PEACESAT, and ATS in education has enhanced the opportunities for learners to acquire new skills (Moore & Kearsley, 1996). Both on-campus and distance mode students can be benefited by it. The satellite technology can serve a large geographical area. It allows audio and video signals uplinked from a station to be received to any number of downlink earth stations (Willis, 1995). Oliver (1994) reported that the transmission costs do not increase with the increase in the number of downlink stations. Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE), one of the India’s early experiments conducted during 1975 to 1976, produced and transmitted 150 different science programs of 10 to 12 minutes duration, offering them to more than 2,330 villages in six geographical clusters. According to Shrestha (1997) and Govindaraju and Banerjee (1999), this experiment demonstrates the effectiveness of satellite communication for educational purposes.

Some experiences in preparing for a satellite television experiment for rural India

A large scale experiment will be conducted in India, beginning middle of 1975, to reach a few thousand remote Indian villages via satellite broadcast television. The satellite will be supplied by N.A.S.A. and the ground hardware and developmental programmes for television are being developed by India. The experiment will last a year. The paper discusses the research and development aspects of the technological and software components of the experiment, the operational problems and solutions adopted, as also the hopes and fears we have about its outcome. Some of the already realized managerial, social and technological spin-offs of this multi-faceted ‘experiment’ are pointed out.