GoldPocket Looks to Writers for ITV Innovation - by Ian Olgeirson

GoldPocket is taking its interactive TV content technology straight to the source: script writers. The company unveiled Monday morning (8/19) an integration deal with Final Draft to enable writers to insert enhanced TV concepts that can be transferred directly to GoldPocket to make them a reality. The idea is to infuse new programming with interactive features at the start instead of making it an afterthought in production.
Making ITV fundamental to new programming is a smart move, but it will only pay off when there are enough set-top boxes out there with the type of middleware and back-end infrastructure to enable interactivity, and that is proving a slow process.

While we estimate nearly half of the digital cable and DBS households in the U.S. had some sort of interactive capability at the end of ’01, full-fledged middleware reached only 13% of the combined subscribers. Moreover, the vast majority of the subs are with EchoStar, which has yet to take advantage of the interactive capabilities.

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