THE PUBLIC SERVICE VALUE OF INTERACTIVE TELEVISION

Abstract

‘Red button’ interactivity has become an important feature of the UK's digital television landscape, with the BBC launching over 150 such applications in 2004 alone. Simultaneously, interactive television has become an important site of fulfilling public service remits and providing public value by the BBC. This paper examines the place and purpose of the BBC's interactive television services in the newly developing public service landscape. The paper focuses on the dialectic between the rhetoric of choice that has accompanied digitalisation and the public service remits of universalism, civic value and education to interrogate two prominent cases of the BBC's use of interactive television: news programming and the coverage of the 2004 Athens Olympics. In so doing, I propose that such interactive applications promote choice as a public service value that is both problematic for how public service obligations are fulfilled and how television studies conceives and understands the television text. As a result I suggest that by paying attention to the specificities of television's form, we can usefully draw on new media scholarship to understand the interactive, non‐linear television text as ‘fragmented’. In turn, analysing these interactive applications as a form of textuality we can usefully term ‘fragment’, I argue that whilst choice is not an inherently problematic public service value, its privileging in news programming undermines existing notions of the genre's public service fulfilment.

Notes

1. Itself a term that is widely used in discussion of hypertext and new media, for example, Lev Manovich discusses the ‘fractal structure of new media’ (Manovich 2001, p. 30), whilst Luis Arata raises the concern that interactivity as much as liberating can lead to ‘sudden conflicts, disintegration, fragmentation and other unpleasant surprises’ (Arata 2004, p. 222) and Martin Lister suggests ‘fragmentation, non‐linearity, intertextuality and the “death of the author” have all been cited as both literary theory and hypertext reality’ (Lister et al. 2003, p. 28).

2. The choice between the term user and viewer here is problematic, the former for its connotations of ‘activity’ and engagement and the latter for the passivity it connotes. By ‘pressing the red button’ the television audience does not automatically become removed from their traditional ‘viewer’ position. Yet interactive television does suggest a different, and possibly new, subject position. To this end, we might prefer Dan Harries' solution to this ‘in‐betweenness’ in the term ‘viewser’: ‘the experience of media in a manner that effectively integrates the activities of both viewing and using … entertainment value is not only measured by what they see and hear, but also by what they do and the ways in which their activities have a direct impact …’ (Harries 2002, p. 172). As a result, I use the term ‘viewser’ to refer to the audience where it is ‘using’ an interactive television application and the term ‘audience’ to denote viewers of the traditional, linear television text.

3. I use the term ‘programme’ to refer to the broadcast text that is the familiar staple of discussions in television studies. That is, linear, part of the scheduled flow of programming on any given channel. In contrast, the term ‘application’ is used to refer to the interactive text, connoting the structuring aesthetic organisation and software configuration that constitutes these texts.

4. As Marc Goodchild (Senior Executive Producer of Interactive Factual Programming) points out, with sporting applications one ‘can spend a long time building the service/application and then tweaking it over a season, or over many seasons’, thus ensuring its robustness, ubiquity and perhaps ‘quality’ or refinement (interview conducted on 25 January 2005). It is easy to extrapolate from Goodchild's words that similar conditions exist with the development of interactive news applications, an inference further reinforced by their aesthetic similarity and the use of the same technological ‘blue print’.

5. This followed Channel 4's commitment in its Statement of Programme Policy 2001, to ‘develop its Interactive Television projects with a view to integrating interactivity into the fabric of television programming rather than as a supporting but separate service’.

6. It is important to note at this point that the viewing figures come from the BBC. At the time of writing there was no way to measure the use of individual interactive applications in Freeview homes. As a result, the figures here are based on ratings use in digital satellite and cable homes, providing the BBC with a ‘guestimateable’ figure for Freeview homes. Elsewhere, the BBC boasts its figures more robustly, with 9 million viewers claimed to have used the interactive service in Sky homes alone, with a further 4–5 million estimated in Freeview households. Unless otherwise stated, figures used in this paper come from Media Guardian and Broadcast online archives.

7. It is significant that the requirement to ‘build digital Britain’ has now been articulated as a core purpose for the BBC, having originally been articulated as an ‘ancillary’ purpose in the preceding Green Paper (DCMS 2005). As Steve Barnett has recently suggested, the government's decision to make the BBC responsible for the task of digital switchover not only raises important questions about how this switchover is funded and what part of the licence fee is used for this purpose, but also arguably places the BBC as the potential scapegoat should logistical problems, delays, technical faults and financial shortfalls arise (Barnett 2006).

8. The primacy placed on making navigation as simple as possible has arguably reached its zenith with the presence of an on‐screen presenter, Aiden Chiles, for Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC, 2005), who explained exactly how the viewer should navigate the interactive content. His presence, to a large extent, reflected the programme's address (as a history documentary) to an older demographic thought to be less accustomed to the interactivity of digital media.

9. My interviews with all three suggest that this minuscule cost is around 5–10% of overall production costs.

10. William Uricchio's excellent article on the importance of filtering and tracking technologies explores these issues further (2004).