The hype-meisters at the Fox network are calling Sunday's "Fox-O-Rama" event "the freshest and funniest detour on the information superhighway." They're also calling it "interactive television."
That could be a real letdown for those who just can't wait for our TV sets to turn "interactive," so we can start rearranging the plots of our favorite soaps from home, making HBO put on the movies we really want to see and finding out where we can buy that awesome outfit Heather Locklear is wearing on "Melrose Place" while we watch her strut around in it.Truth is, we'd better start scaling down our fantasies. Most of the far-out ideas will require real interactive television - the kind you get through two-way communication over fiber-optic cables.
Those fantasy concepts are feasible, but they're still being developed at a cost the trade journal Electronic Media estimates could run as much as $50 billion over the next five years. Common household technology is years away.
In the meantime, we'll have to endure lots of pseudo-interactive television, the sort we're going to get Sunday on Fox. It may be more technically sophisticated than CBS's 1950s kid show "Winky-Dink and You," but not much.
For instance, Fox's medley of "interactive events" includes a demonstration of "Sheneneh-Vision" during Sunday's episode of "Martin" (7 p.m.). That turns out to be nothing more than showing some viewers' impersonations of the show's Sheneneh character, which they sent in on videotape. "America's Funniest Home Videos" already does that.
Also on tap: an "Aroma-Vision" interlude during "Living Single" (7:30 p.m.), in which viewers will be prompted to use "scratch 'n' sniff" cards from Fox-O-Rama kits viewers can pick up at participating 7-Eleven stores (selling locally for 35 cents); some 3-D scenes in "Married . . . With Children" (8 p.m.) using glasses from the same kits; a "Grumble-Vision" segment during "The George Carlin Show" (8:30 p.m.) in which Carlin will list his favorite "gripes," all submitted by viewers in advance. Finally, during Monday night's movie, "Revenge of the Nerds IV: Nerds in Love" (7 p.m.), viewers get to use the 3-D glasses again and more "scratch 'n' sniff" cards.
Fox is either defining "interactive" pretty broadly - or blowing some big smoke at us.
"The word `interactive' is not as special as it used to be," said David Keim, associate legal counsel for cable's the Family Channel, which is heavily investing in genuine interactive research. "Any word that gets used an awful lot is going to become trite and lose its meaning as more people try to buy into it."
Anyway, Fox-0-Rama isn't the kind of interactive TV that's going to take up several lanes on the information superhighway.
"Anytime a viewer can manipulate the action on the screen, that's what I call interactive television," said Jennie Trias, who runs ABC's children's programming department. "You probably won't see it on ABC for the next couple of years, but we have a multimedia group that's looking at a number of things."
So do most of the other networks, especially PBS, which may be way out front with a multimedia master plan to involve young viewers in interactive educational television. Already coming to life in incremental stages is PBS Online, which distributes educational materials for teachers and students through thousands of schools linked to local PBS stations. On July 11, PBS starts Ready to Learn, a whole bloc of children's programming with interactive components developed by the Eon (formerly TV Answer) service.
Then there's MediaFusion, run by PBS and Apple Computer Inc. Among other things, this will allow students to download digitalized video segments from PBS's "MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour" for use in school reports.
These programs are just the beginning.