Issue 9, September 1st 2002

The BBC should get a medal for bravery. In the small (but perfectly wired) English city of Hull, the UK's deep-pocketed public service broadcaster is embarking on what it calls a "ground breaking interactive drama". In these times of dot fatigue, spotty advertising funds and low share prices, the verve of the BBC to plough ahead into the dangerous territory of interactivity is fearless, even noble, right?

Well, let me give you the drama and you tell me. There are 185,000 homes and businesses in Hull that are connected to a broadband ADSL network. These are the lucky few who will have exclusive access to interact with Thunder Road, the BBC's first foray into interactive drama. Thunder Road is a social club that is threatened with demolition, unless a local couple can resurrect it. So far, so good. But Thunder Road will not be the uncontrolled 'reality TV' style of, say, Big Brother. In fact, the story will not in any way be influenced by the viewing public, claimed the head of BBC Fictionlab (the arm of BBC that is in charge of the project) to an audience attending the Edinburgh TV Festival recently. There will be no voting people off the show, nor will the public be asked to vote at the end to decide if Thunder Road the club should continue to exist or not. Nope. The BBC has decided that the interactive part will be stuff like choosing to watch a video diary, accessing 500 clips of 'extra' material, playing a virtual game of darts, and chatting to other viewers about how the drama is going.

Yawn. Now switch off my Sky pay-per-view service if I am wrong, but if there is one thing we have learned about interactive services it is that to be compelling the interactivity has to effect an outcome. Why did all those millions of people vote for Pop Idol? Because their votes chose the winner. The story of Thunder Road may be very, very good, but in terms of interactivity, what the Beeb is offering those lucky viewers in Hull is pretty low-level interactive fun.

The BBC may have tied its own hands in developing Thunder Road. The obvious criticism is how the Beeb can justify spending TV licence fee money on a drama that is going to benefit only one town in East Yorkshire. Well, the answer that comes back from the Beeb is that after Hull, the hour-drama will air in its entirety on BBC 4 to a national audience. Of course, BBC 4 is one of the BBC's digital channels so it only reaches a small proportion of the British TV audience, but we'll let that one slide. The other answer is that it's the director general's fault. Greg Dyke is said to be besotted with Hull's interactive potential.

It's not just the BBC that is still embarking on new interactive pathways. While the future for Vivendi Universal looks more likely to be back to water and waste treatment than working to make content available on any device, anywhere, anytime, Sony is taking new interactive steps to build a 'digital bridge' between its hardware side and its content side. Sony's big interactive play will be making its Playstation console a broadband device where video games can be played among remote locations. Sony is also one of the pioneers of so-called persistent on-line gaming with Everquest, a Dungeons and Dragons-like experience that has already attracted 430,000 subscribers in the USA alone. A nascent wireless business is putting Spiderman graphics and Men in Black 2 ring-tones on wireless devices. Sony's participation in the not-yet-launched Movielink broadband on-demand movie service and, with Universal Music, in the recently launched fledgling music download service Pressplay, are bigger and less sure bets. But in the UK, Sony Pictures' digital unit recently spent an estimated £1m to launch a completely interactive version of its famous game show franchises Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune under its new brand Go Play TV. One pound gets a player two puzzles, all ordered through the Sky TV remote.

Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune are proven TV franchises, but they are unproven in the graphics-heavy interactive TV space. However, Sony executives think that people will come back again and again because there is a community (the system posts the latest high scores every 15 minutes) and you can win lots and lots of prizes. Interactive gaming, like voting in Big Brother, works because you can effect an outcome. The trick is to make sure the interactivity yields a direct result and to price it correctly.

The BBC says it has the final i-trick because the Thunder Road club itself actually exists. Yes, you can be really 'interactive', they say, and go down there yourself. You mean every Saturday night? In November? While the show is actually airing? I don't think even the people of Hull will fall for that one! But even if they do, I still wouldn't call that interactive TV.