Inglese (testo di attualità) (3847)

Esame di Stato di liceo linguistico - 2002

Tema di: lingua straniera

Testo di attualità - lingua inglese

(comprensione e produzione in lingua straniera)

It has become a familiar refrain the last decade: This is the year for interactive television. It has not happened, but media and technology companies say 2002 may be it. Really.

Cable companies, satellite television services, media conglomerates and Microsoft Corp. have all made interactive television a key part of their strategic visions. They are pouring billions into a flurry of deals.

In recent weeks, Vivendi Universal SA put $1.5 billion into EchoStar Communications Co., an investment that will allow Vivendi to introduce its interactive television software to EchoStar subscribers. Microsoft, continuing its forays into the digital entertainment world, backed Comcast Corp.'s $47 billion bid to buy AT&T Corp.'s cable unit, hoping to gain access to 23 million television households.

The big problem seems to be that viewers in the United States are slow to join the parade.

So far, Americans remain largely apathetic about interactive TV, and not many even understand quite what it is.

In the United States, interactive television - a catch-all term broadly used to describe everything from video-on-demand to digital video recorders to television commerce - has been driven more by corporate competition than by consumer demand.

"Viewers in the U.S. can't even define interactive television, much less demand it," said Arthur Orduna, vice president for marketing at Canal Plus Technologies Inc., a U.S. subsidiary of Vivendi Universal that creates interactive television technology. "No one in the U.S. has ever stood up and said, 'I want interactive television.' "

Still companies remain optimistic because across the Atlantic interactive television is already gaining critical mass in Europe, particularly in Britain. Viewers there can use their televisions to do such things as place bets on races, change camera angles on sporting events, interact with game shows and get more information on what they are watching.

But in the United States, companies have tried since the 1970s to convince viewers that they want to do more with their televisions than watch. The last big wave of interactive television experiments came in the early 1990s and included a much publicized failure in Florida by Time Warner Cable, a unit of AOL Time Warner Inc.

In part, analysts say, the different response to interactive TV among Europeans and Americans stems from the relatively higher penetration of personal computers and Internet access in the United States: Tasks that Europeans might do on the television, Americans perform on their desktop PCs.