UX of ITV: The User Experience and Interactive TV (or Let's Stamp Out Bad Remote Controls)

I prefer to watch our flat-panel HDTV in the dark, and usually I watch something I've DVR'd.  Because of the nature of my remote control, I often have to interrupt the immersive experience, turn on the light, poke at the buttons, and start over again.


Not long ago, I had the flu and I thought I'd try out the interactive channel from my satellite TV provider.  My interactive experience was about the same as interacting with the DVR!

What the satellite TV company offered was not really ITV.  It was BIRC.  Bad Interactive Remote Control.  You know what I'm talking about.  In the era of the WiiMote, most of us still have to interact with our TV systems as if were 1982.

There is hope!
A good number of researchers are working hard to make the UX of ITV, including mobile TV, a reality.   If you are reading this post, you most likely will appreciate some of the articles and links below:
Konstantinos Chorianopoulos. Research Methods in Interactive TV (pdf)
(Konstantinos Chorianopoulos is a lecturer and  Marie Curie Fellow in the Department of Informatics at the Ionian University, Corfu, Greece.  He founded UITV.INFO,  a site that has research and information about interactive television.)
Enhancing Social Sharing of Videos: Fragment, Annotate, Enrich, and Share (Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Multimedia) Pablo Cesar, Dick C.A. Bulterman, David Geerts, Jack Jansen, Henrick Knoch and William Seager (This research paper includes a discussion of the concept of "personal secondary screens" on mobile devices that display information that can be shared and annotated while watching content on a large display.)


Sample of presentations and workshops at EuroITV 2009:
The Connected Home Redefines the TV Experience  Jan Van Bogaert (Alcatel-Lucent) 
The Internet Revolution Will Be Televised   Rich Exekiel (Yahoo! Conntected TV)
Needs, emotions, experience!  Marc Hassenahl (Folkwang University)
Marian F. Ursu, Pablo Cesar, and Doug Williams.Enhancing Social Communication and Belonging by Integrating TV Narrativity and Game Play
Rodrigo Laiola Guimaraes. Telling Stories and Commenting on Media:  The Next Generation of Multimedia Authoring Tools (pdf)
Ana Vitoria Joly.  Designing iTV Interfaces for Preschool Children
Claus Knudsen and Roel Puijk. Television and Presence: Experiments in interaction and mediation in a digital environment

Marianna Obrist, Henddrik Knoche, Damien Alliez Tutorial: User-Experience in TV-centric Services: What to consider in the Design and Evaluation?(pdf) 
David Geets Tutorial: Designing and Evaluating the Sociability of Interactive Television (pdf)
Artur Lugmayr Tutorial:  Ambient Media - An Introduction by Case-Studies(pdf)
Janez Zaletelj, Mladen Savic and Marko Meza. Real-time Viewer Feedback in the iTV production.
Skylla Janssen. Interactive Television Format Development – Could Participatory Design Bridge the Gap?
Jan Hess and Volker Wulf. Explore Social Behaviour around Rich-Media: A Structured Diary Study 
Dimitri Schuurman, Tom Evens and Lieven De Marez. A living lab research approach for mobile TV

RELATED 
Ana Vitoria Joly. Design and Evaluation of Interactive Cross-platform Applications for Pre-literate Children.  IDC 2007 Proceedings: Doctoral Consortium
Ana Vitoria Joly. Interactive Cross-platform Environments for Young Children (pdf)
C. Hesselman, W. Derks, J. Broekens, H. Eertink, M. Guelbahar, and R. Poortinga, "Facilitating an Open Ecosystem to Enhance Interactive TV Experiences", Workshop on Sharing Content and Experiences with Social Interactive Television, co-located with the European Interactive TV Conference (EuroITV2008), Salzburg, Austria, July 2008
R. Kernchen, P. Cesar, S. Meissner, M. Boussard, K. Moessner, C. Hesselman, and I. Vaishnavi, "Intelligent Multimedia Presentation Delivery in Ubiquitous Multi-Device Scenarios," IEEE MultiMedia (IEEE MM), 17(2), April-June, 2010 [in print]
P. Cesar, D.C.A. Bulterman, and J. Jansen, "Leveraging the User Impact: An Architecture for Secondary Screens Usage in an Interactive Television Environment," in Springer/ACM Multimedia Systems Journal (MSJ), 15(3): 127-142, 2009

P. Cesar, D.C.A. Bulterman, and Luiz Fernando Gomes Soares, "Introduction to special issue:  Human-centered television-directions in interactive digital television research"  ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, October 2008

Somewhat Related
My preliminary thoughts about  Adobe's Open Screen project