Last week I had my first inter-active-view and it was mind opening.

I sat down in the Bakery (see note below), the Livestation development office in London, in front of a steaming cup of tea and Jemima Kiss, the Guardian media/tech correspondent turned blogger and Uber Twitter-er to talk about iPhones, live TV online, Tv2.0 and quite a few other interesting things.

The most exciting thing was that this chat was being broadcast live on Livestation to anyone who cared to tune in. Unlike traditional TV channels, this channel was available anywhere in the word to anyone with a broadband connection and a free Livestation account.

When we set out almost 2 years ago working on the Livestation idea, it did not occur to us that the main dimension on which we could have innovated the most was on the interactive services around live broadcast.

Sitting in front of Jemima chatting about the future of TV while viewers from around the world were asking interesting and provocative questions and voting on contextual polls, gave the interview a completely new dimension. It didn’t feel at all like it was just the two of us talking. It really felt like having an open conversation with a lot of other people. And the most amazing thing was that it felt like they were all there with us, in the same room.

We could chat, respond and interact with them as if they were there. And this thanks to two simple tools we developed in the past few weeks: live chat and live
panel. Live chat is a channel-based chat room environment which allows viewers to join an interactive discussion around a live channel. This is available on all channels but it really comes to live when used in the context of live interviews/debates.

Al Jazeera has been experimenting with this tool in the last weeks during the high profile Riz Khan Show (generally on at 8.30pm Monday to Thursday) where Riz interviews high profile guests and a producer from the show joins the Livestation live chat room to allow viewers to have their questions passed on air.

Live Panel is a simple service that leverages our real-time 2-way messaging system to deliver multiple choice questions to anybody tuned onto a specific channel and reports the combined results of the poll in graphical format to all participants within seconds.

I heard these tools were working very well but didn’t really experience them first hand until last week.

Being on air live where the audience becomes an active part of the broadcast is absolutely amazing.

We had viewers from all parts of the world (the broadcast was at 5pm GMT to allow people from most time zones to join in) engaging and asking some excellent and provocative questions with a pace that was comparable only to “first person” situations where the audience is there asking questions and having an opportunity to add more details or refute answers given by the guests.

This is why I like to think this was not an interview but my first ever inter-active-view, an interactive interview where the viewers are there with you.

This brings me to the following idea: television means litterarly “viewing from far away” – tele is “far away” in Greek and vision is “to see” in latin. In the early days of television, its role was indeed that: show you what was going on in other parts of the world without having to travel there. Later on, TV executives worked out that they could use this newly created medium to distribute pre-recorded content but in the beginning, television was predominantly live.

So, what does it really mean to put TV online? Is it simply about giving access to traditional TV on IP connected devices? Surely that’s useful but it’s hard to classify that as TV2.0 as that’s more like giving extended access to TV1.0 on different devices.

What I think TV2.0 should be about is turning tele-vision into tele-presence. This is the really exciting novelty and opportunity brought about by the net. It’s not simply watching TV on your computer or your iPhone – that’s cool but not Tv2.0 in my view – but it is interacting with the broadcast, changing the way to develops live, on air; it’s having an impact on news and events without having to be there. It’s being able to influence how an interview with the former Prime Minister of Iraq develops on the Riz Khan show in Mumbai or Doha without having to be there in person.

I can ask uncomfortable questions, I can express my opinion using live polls or I can post a link to a recent article on a famous paper showing that the current guest being interviewed said exactly the opposite of what he is saying now just a few days ago in another interview.

The interview with Jemima is available here.

Welcome to the dawn of TV2.0. Be there now.

==========

The Bakery derives its name from the original name of the P2P research work carried out by Ant Rowstron and Miguel Castro at Microsoft Cambridge Research Labs which was called Pastry.

Skinkers acquired the IP from Microsoft and as the engineering team started working on Pastry we felt that The Bakery was the most appropriate name for it. The original work from Ant and Miguel is here.