You'll be able to read books, play games and even answer the telephone through your TV set.
And the future could be here in a matter of months.
You won't believe your eyes, but tonight you're going to see some interesting things
and you're going to show you all the fun you can have with interactive television watch.
MUSIC
Get ready to be zapped.
Warp speed onto the so-called information superhighway.
It turns out the key to this high-tech digital information age is literally already in hand.
Your remote control and TV set will put you in the driver's seat.
The television set is going to be a window. It's no longer going to be a screen.
And there are going to be things coming into that window into your home,
which are going to be very exciting because you want them there.
So forget about 40 or 50 couch potato channels. Forget about the networks and pay channels.
Interactive TV lets you channel surf through hundreds of selections
and in a sense programming your own TV network.
You decide what music videos you want to watch. You order the movie you want when you want it.
You pick the products you want on the shopping channels.
You not only watch sports, but play along against friends across the country.
And video phone calls finally become reality. And that's just the beginning.
Oh, hi Mary Ann. How are you doing?
Good, Bill. How are you?
They say that there's going to be 500 channels of television.
You know, when there's 500 channels of television, you know, the TV Guide is a phone book.
It's a high-tech intersection of four things that make interactive TV possible.
The TV set, cable television, the computer, and telephone.
All rolled into one, they form this new interactive technology.
Interactive TV could be a revolution. It could be a revolution in the way we're entertained.
It could be a revolution in the way that we transact.
It could be a revolution in the way that we communicate.
So, not only will you be able to have movies on demand, but you can choose by actor or director or genre.
CDs and music videos can be ordered and sent digitally to your home.
Video games will pit you against friends anywhere in the country.
With learning and education, interactive TV seems to promise a large number of applications for people of all ages.
Not to mention new interactive versions of magazines and newspapers.
Home banking and classifieds are just a click away. And you can even leave video messages.
As designers and entertainers, it's our challenge to provoke them to want to pick up that remote control and start interacting with this thing.
If we can do that, great. If we can't do that, then we've kind of failed on our purpose, in a sense.
It is still too early to say exactly how much viewers will have to pay for all of these video choices.
As we mentioned, the experiments start in the next few months,
and you should be seeing interactive TV all over our area in the next few years.
So, it's pretty exciting. Hard to understand it all, though.
I was going to say, will you come over to everybody's house and explain how to do it all?
I'll be the manual.
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