Eyes on iTV

Summary of the first day of the Eyes on iTV conference:

William Cooper of informitv and BBC fame talked about interactive television, IPTV, broadband video and gave a good, broad overview of the field. Conclusions - lots of things are happening at the moment, what with AppleTV, Joost and other P2P television systems (apparently BBC are set to launch their own version in the near future), IPTV, video on demand over broadband and so on. Television is changing, and changing pretty quickly. The era of television and broadcast is fadeing, while the era of the consumer choosing what they want to watch and when they want to watch it is rapidly on the rise. Mobile television on the other hand... well, William at least remains sceptical.

Frank Alsema gave a number of examples of cross media, UGC concepts, for kids and adults, like The Blackbeard Connection or Moovl. Lots of things happening, all in all.

I did a session as well, a case study of the development process behind The Space Trainees.

Day 2 of the conference has just begun, and we're currently listening to Konstantinos Chorianopoulos from the university in Weimar, about the academic and practical aspects of interactive television.