In a country that has a very strong media culture, millions of people with their own views, burgeoning TV reality show audiences, it is hardly surprising that the television industry is going through a major digital revolution and opening up exciting design spaces for a truly ubiquitous, interactive and popular medium. It may not be wrong to connote that the lack of broadband penetration, somewhat poor PC penetration and television sets being the second most ubiquitous device after mobile phones, has been partly responsible for the disruptive development in the television viewing space. "Terrestrial TV has the widest reach with a huge 81.4% of the Urban Indian population watching at least once a week. Cable and Satellite TV too has become a regular part of urban life, with a 45.8% share for Cable and Satellite TV. Terrestrial TV has the widest reach among all media in Rural India with a huge 41.9 per cent of the population watching TV at least once a week." - NRI Worldwide Post liberalization, Satellite TV changed the face of home entertainment in India. More recently a wave of direct to home digital channels are bringing in ‘active’ viewing that demands more participation from the viewer and provides more choices in terms of the content. With the imminent launch of IPV6 TV, it is now looking red hot. So will IPTV be a success? "The primary reason for minimal IPTV uptake is the low broadband penetration in India. Without a mass-market broadband usage in place, the Indian IPTV subscriber base will struggle to exceed 1 million in the next four years." - Neha Gupta, Gartner Consulting.

"Interactive TV is becoming the new order of media and should be available in India, at a reasonable price in five years." - Shubha Madhukar. Domain-B.com. Read the full article here

From the tech and business savvy elite to the lower end of the emerging middle class, the TV revolution reaching out to everyone. In the Indian television scenario there has been a remarkable surge in interactive programming, reality shows, audience voting and citizen journalism apart from the regular share of entertainment and information. This hugely popular, always-on, always-connected, ‘customized content providing’ device could have tremendous potential for the mass market affordable computing in India. Nova net PC, from Hyderabad, India based ‘Novatium’ is a complete desktop with in-built internet access,chat webcam reaching users’ home just like cable TV service. A network home computer means you get the benefits of a PC without worrying about maintenance ,security and upgrades at a low cost. Novatium sells net PC for $100-just within the reach of India’s growing middle class.This price is less than the children machine XO.The monthly rental plans begin at $10 with a broad band connection. Read more… The emerging patterns of TV viewing is an important direction as to how this ‘computing through television’ will influence the user and system behavior. User behavior is definitely changing very rapidly: People are spending less time at home watching TV fixed to a monitor. As some popular reality-TV formats have proved, the integration of wireless devices (mainly SMS and WAP and even radio) can become an extension of the TV experience outside the home. If fact the three different media, TV, mobile and radio, actually come together to form an almost seamless experience.

These reality-TV programs show another phenomenon: how TV opens doors to members of the public who are interested in having a primary role. Democratization is taking place … as TVs develop mechanisms to increase viewer participation and feedback. These trends can be characterized as the evolution of viewers to participants. This movement is being fostered by the diffusion of interactive TV technologies. - Anxo Cereijo Roibás, University of Brighton and Riccardo Sala, Faculty of Design Politecnico di Milano

In another exciting project addressing the Digital Divide, Dr. Raj Reddy of Carnegie Mellon, an internationally acclaimed pioneering researcher in artificial intelligence is developing a $250 device that does a whole bunch of things: It’s a computer, it’s a TV, it’s a DVD player, it’s a videophone - it’s a PCTVt. Reddy is hoping his project — with backing from Microsoft and TriGem, the Korean computer maker, and in partnership with the Indian Institute of Science, the Indian Institute of Information Technology and researchers at the University of California, Berkeley — can prove that it is possible to bring IT to impoverished communities without depending on philanthropy. Because his low-cost computer doubles as a TV and a DVD player, Reddy believes that he will be able to use it as a vehicle to take computing to populations that until now have been excluded. Read more The technology could turn TV sets into virtual online computers able to send e-mail and texts, download films, or make hotel and airline reservations. Advertisers could send commercials directly to subscribers with viewing habits that suggest a potential customer. Though still in its infancy, iTV or interactive television opens the door for true participation and niche markets. Particularly for an emerging market like India, this could have deep impacts, cascading into many potential utility services and infotainment for the huge number of existing cable & satellite TV viewers (More than 80-100 million households have Television! Multiplied with the average family size in India, that number looks awesome 400-500 million. China has about 900 million). Source: IndiaStat.com Though few of the critical challenges remain in the fact that with so much choice comes the difficulty of building necessary infrastructure and appropriate interfaces that transform the ‘passive’ viewing into ‘active’ and ‘participatory’ transactions. For all you know, the ‘entertainment’ factor could actually pull it off, as it did in case of the Internet.