What is the difference between Enhanced and Interactive TV? These terms have been used almost interchangeably by the industry. The ETVCookbook takes the broad view and considers Enhanced TV to be any new service that cannot be delivered with a regular TV and remote control. Didn't interactive trials years ago prove that Enhanced Television is a bad idea? The trials in Ohio and Florida years ago proved two things. First, users did indeed value many of the demonstrated applications. Second, the technology costs at the time were far too high for such systems to be economically viable. Today, the picture is very different with the cost of advanced set-top boxes reaching the critical price point of $200. If it is such a good idea and prices have come down, why is it taking so long to get Enhanced Television off the ground? The industry has yet to reach a critical mass with any single content standard and associated platform. Even the largest content developers are waiting for defacto standards to emerge, so they do not have to author for multiple systems. In addition, there is no deployment of sufficient size to prove the viability of a business model to support the necessary infrastructure. Why so much focus on Cable by content providers? Networks would be happy to develop enhanced content for broadcast receivers, but there is no deployment of enhanced receivers of sufficient quantity. (WebTV Plus is the largest, with perhaps 500,000 receivers nation-wide.) By contrast, cable systems nationwide are deploying digital set-top-boxes by the millions. Cable seems to be the only viable contender for mass deployment in the near future. Does commercial television have any interest in ETV, and if so, why? ABC has taken perhaps the strongest interest in ETV, with synchronous enhancements for popular shows developed initially for the PC as a bridge to single-screen enhancements. Commercial television sees ETV as a way to strengthen the value of advertising by adding interactivity during commercial related to either the commercial or the surrounding programming. What has PBS done with ETV? PBS was an early leader in Interactive Television. Multimedia content was nationally data-broadcast during Ken Burns' Frank Lloyd Wright documentary. PBS pioneered the use of ATVEF Transport B for DTV delivery of national and local enhancements and developed models for "walled garden" content. Revised Tuesday, 22-Jul-2003 14:58:49 CDT - j © 2000 - 2003 Local Enhancement Collaborative & .