No longer need you be a simple couch potato… the joy of participating in interactive television is here! TVE Television Espanola – claims that more than 10,000 homes now enjoy Europe’s first interactive TV, which recently celebrated six months of operation. Around 30 programmes have been made interactive, offering more than 40 viewing hours a week. The company Interactive Television has been marketing under the name of Telepick, and will sell you a unit that is smaller that your average video and connects to the television set, telephone and mains electricity supply. Messages appear on the Telepick unit’s display, these arriving via the channel’s TV signal. Messages are answered using a remote control, so that viewers can participate in competitions, request additional information and obtain discount vouchers, for example. The Telepick unit only uses the telephone line when the viewer has the opportunity to win a prize or is participating in an opinion poll. In such cases, replies are automatically transmitted by telephone line on the Ibertex system, costing less than what it would to send a letter, wherever you may be in Spain. The Telepick unit updates its internal programmes monthly at a cost of 150 telephone units (about $5.82). Many companies have taken advantage of Telepick for advertising purposes, and viewers are encouraged to be interactive by being made eligible for prize draws. You needn’t miss the action by having to make a trip to the kitchen through hunger, because Pizza World (the boys on mopeds running around the city, going through red lights just to being a warm pizza to your door) offer, via the Ibertex network, at a touch of just one button, a free pizza to all Telepick owners in their area. Favoured types of interactive programme so far are variety shows, game shows, cookery programmes and the ghastly reality shows. You know the programme is interactive if a strange little man, grinning insidiously, appears on the television screen.
