Interactive Television is dead! Long live interactive television!

Remember when interactive television was dead? Time-Warner's Full Service Television experiment in Florida in the 1990s was a failure -- people hated it. Something about how the set-top boxes sucked, I think. So the concept went away, fading like CD-ROMs before the onslaught of the Internet.



At least, that seems to be what the New York Times remembers. Here's the part I'm talking about:

The Microsoft Home is more like a concept car, a design to dream about. Microsoft has imagined a dream house before: 10 years ago the company unveiled its first such demonstration home. At the time Microsoft's designers were intrigued by interactive television, a technology that never became the next big thing.

But, like, isn't TiVo almost exactly what we were promised in the halcyon days of interactive television? Isn't the digital cable interface, in general, what ITV was supposed to be...especially if you've got your Internet connection over your cable line, too?



Everyone was right about interactive television. And then they were wrong about it. And now they're right again.