Red Button Is Thriving - NMA July 2010
by Nigel Walley, NMA - Jul 29th, 2010
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Something sad in the world of new media made me think of Lithuania this week. When the Russians invaded the country in 1940, the Lithuanian ambassador to the UK managed to transfer the title of its embassy to his own name so the Russians couldn’t expropriate it. For 50 years the increasingly frail old man and his little team opened the embassy every day and literally kept the flag of Lithuania flying.
Most importantly, he would send out monthly press notices to let the world know he was still there, defying all those people who said Lithuania didn’t exist. In 1990, Lithuania regained independence. The new government gave the ambassador a medal. A proud old man with a tear in his eye had kept the flame of independence alive.
I thought of him this week when I got my monthly email from a friend at the BBC giving the latest red-button figures. That afternoon I went to a TV conference and listened as various industry figures who should know better discussed why the red button had died. There was an embarrassed silence when I told them more than 4m people interacted with Glastonbury content last month, 7m interacted with the World Cup red-button service and another 4m interacted with Wimbledon. You tell me of any new media initiative that wouldn’t die for those numbers. Yet the TV industry is desperately trying to ignore them. In the meantime, my friend will go on sending out press releases, defying all those people who say red-button interactivity doesn’t exist.
The odd thing is, we’re at the point where the red button should be getting really exciting. TV companies are plugging broadband into the backs of set-top boxes like crazy and the ability to use the red button to bring up all sorts of web-fuelled content is upon us. But what do we get? TV apps. Let’s be absolutely clear: the current generation of TV apps are crap. Ignoring the fact you have to turn off the broadcast stream to use them, you can watch paint dry while they start up. The problem is the software industry doesn’t understand TV, and TV creatives don’t get software. Future TV should be a world where you can move seamlessly between video to rich media. The only people who have ever come close to achieving this are the red-button teams at the BBC and ITV. Right when we need them most, we’re trying to deny their existence.
Project Canvas should be their moment. Yet even in the BBC there’s a sniffy ‘we’re not having any of that red-button nonsense’ thing going on. The development teams are tying themselves in knots to avoid the phrase ‘red button’ in front of senior management. I heard someone say they’d “use colour buttons to shortcut to VOD and rich-media content”. When the bigwigs had left the room I whispered in his ear, “Did you mean red button?” “Yes,” he said, “but don’t say that in front of them.”
At some point in around 50 years’ time, our industry will rediscover TV interactivity and we’ll hold a ceremony for my friend at the BBC. An old man with a tear in his eye who kept the flame of TV interactivity alive.
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