Random Apple Memory
Apple’s continuing quest to “fix TV” began more than 20 years ago, remembers Adam Banks
Interactive TV in the early 1990s? Well, sort of. Plus, what to expect next issue…
In the early 1990s, tech was all about multimedia: the convergence of computers and entertainment. CD-ROM, the hybrid format that allowed programs and video to be delivered on audio discs, brought moving pictures to PC and Macintosh screens in an exciting new genre of software bridging the gap between games and films. But the big money was still in television, and Apple CEO John Sculley wanted a piece of it.
The ingredients of a digital TV service would be a network supplying interactive content, and hardware to receive it. Apple already had hardware, and the Power Macintosh Quadra 605 (the “pizza box Mac”) was quickly dressed up as a set-top device. You can still read its manual in Apple’s official user document archive ( bit.ly/inter_tvbox). Using the supplied remote control, users would select, play and pause programs from an “interactive video service.”
Apple’s first partner to provide such a feed would be British Telecom (BT), the giant UK company formed a decade earlier by the privatization of the country’s telephone service. The Interactive Multimedia Service, described by BT as the world’s first truly interactive video-ondemand trial, was tested in 1994 across 2,500 households in English suburbia.
A contemporary promotional video ( bit.ly/bt_inter_tv) shows the Interactive Television Box accessing not only a range of TV shows, but also Nintendo video games, implying a partnership of which few other records exist. Trials also began in the US in 1995, and legend has it that as many as a thousand boxes were installed in Disneyland hotel rooms.
But the technology was too immature for standards to be established, and neither this nor any other multimedia broadcast platform caught on. It would be a different revolution – the rise of the web – that eventually changed TV forever.