Like you, my Tivo calls in only to download the program guide and messages. In my case it's every night.
There's no business model for this, of course, so it won't happen. Given the priorities of the companies in the food chain--Tivo, cable television companies, media companies--no one will experiment with this for years, if ever. Wink offers a form of the "flashing alert" system for use with interactive television services run by cable companies, but it's installed in all of a couple thousand homes nationwide.
When I worked on the Time Warner interactive television experiment in Orlando in the mid-90s, we tried to program a feature like this into the interactive news on demand program we built for Time, Inc. We called it a "red rocket." A small flashing red icon was supposed to begin flashing something like "NEWS ALERT" in the corner.
The problems were endless: users would want significant controls (blink until I respond, blink for one minute, blink and download, etc) but the biggest problems were trying to establish meaningful controls--technical and editorial.
Who has the magic button to issue an alert? How many editors? What are the standards? Local? Weather? National? Sports? MSNBC.com uses their "BREAKING NEWS" banner on their home page whenever there's a drive-by shooting in LA. CNN seems to use theirs on any event that moves which wasn't planned ahead of time--kidnappings, shopping center fires, press conferences by DAs. What if I don't give a damn about the Milosovich verdict, but I really, really care about the Georgia-Clemson football game?
But, hey, the much larger issue this noodling raises is: who cares?
Who really gives a damn? If you're that interested in the news, you probably are pretty close to a computer or a television or a radio and you can just turn it on.
And the truth is, the overwhelming majority of Americans don't care about the news, in any form.
I watched a presentation by Arbitron last week of a 25,000 person survey they conducted this summer. Among people with *four year college degrees or better* the total who rated newspapers as "the most important media" in their lives was 11%.
Mike Ricemrice@elroynet.com
A far more interesting proposal would be some way to inform people who might be using their TVs, but not watching broadcast or news channels, of a breaking news event. A flashing light or icon on the TV screen or set-top box might alert someone watching a pay-per-view movie, catching up on their recorded Sopranos episodes, or just playing GTA3 on their PlayStation, that there's breaking news happening. Obviously there are standardization and implementation issues to consider (who sends the alerts, and how), not to mention the possibility of abuse, but it doesn't seem like an impossible problem.
BBC attacked for TiVo ployhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/new_media/2016264.stm
It comes down to someone's judgement on which shows are important enough to be downlaoded automatically on everyone's boxes. And TiVo, not being an editorially-focussed company, is happy to work with the highest bidder. Maybe it's this that needs to change.
Brendan.
