Not just a remote possibility

For compulsive shoppers, a new television channel may now hold even more terror than an episode of the X-Files. This week Open, the digital TV service, will broadcast its first interactive commercial, enabling viewers to sample the advertised product with a money-off voucher and try out a recipe.

Launched in October by a consortium of companies including BT, BskyB and HSBC, the channel now reaches more than 2.5 million UK households via their satellite dishes, and a recent survey showed that nearly half access the service at least once a week, using it to send e-mail, access information and games, and buy goods. Sales generated by 25 retailers, including Dixons and WH Smith, peaked at more than £1m just before Christmas, and online retailer, Gameplay, claims its revenue from the TV channel has overtaken that from Internet e-commerce.

Alec Livingstone, Open's technical director, has spent most of his working life at BT, where his first job, in 1972, was to test microprocessors for the network. Today, age 52 and a self-confessed techno-freak, he enthuses about the piles of calculators and mobile phones stacked in his drawers; back then, he was also obsessed by discerning minute differences in performance.

In the early 1980s he ran a research team in Japan, and on his return, found BT being privatised - and himself recruited by its chairman into a think tank to advise the board. "There were four of us and I was responsible for technology," he recalls. "It was a bit of a task; 'Will you just look after technology while we try and sell the largest company in the UK?'"

He fast gained a reputation as a fixer. "I was asked to look at a particular product BT was launching; Callminder. They were having trouble with the supplier and I concluded they should use in-house technology. That took me into product management in one fell swoop. Getting your hands on something like Callminder, something that people know and use, has a good feel about it.

"It went back to the kind of stuff I was doing at the start, not just doing something because that was the way we had always done it. I'm quite good at asking the really obvious questions that nobody ever feels quite brave enough to ask. With Callminder, we were trying to figure out what worked. The way you navigate through a service is important, and it sounds easy to say until you've heard a bad menu. The system has to be intuitive, to have a direction. You must never end up back where you started."

In 1992, he heard about a new BT idea: a digital TV service. Gordon Kerr, a systems engineer, had noticed that television data compression was compatible with another technology, ADSL, with enough bandwidth to enable the delivery of broadcast-quality pictures through a telephone line. Livingstone joined the project and two years later, it was ready for trials. On offer were 200 hours of old BBC comedies and 50 movies. Livingstone recalls: "The night before we were putting the final touches to it. It's taken for granted now, but getting that amount of bandwidth from telephone wire that's been in the ground for 10 years, and trying to stuff broadcast quality pictures down cable five miles long - you can't believe it will work. When it did, it was exhilarating."

Soon the retail opportunities of interactive broadcasting became obvious, but the big obstacle was still cost; consumers weren't willing to spend on set-top boxes for transmission of information. Then BskyB stepped into the equation, with its satellites offering plenty of bandwidth and access to millions of homes. Livingstone led the team building the Open hardware, software and network platform, joining the company as chief engineer in 1998.

He refutes the idea that television, the opiate of the masses, cannot compete with the PC. "They're complementary and there's a degree of overlap. People are going to send e-mail one-liners to their kids through their televisions, but if you're the sort of person that gets big e-mail attachments, you'll go to your PC. If you want to buy a pizza in the middle of watching rugby, you'll use Open even if you've got a PC."

There are still some obvious drawbacks: a low-resolution picture, and the slow return of keyed-in data via modem, not satellite. Using the remote control for long text messages could get annoying, too, though keyboards are available and set-top boxes are free to Sky subscribers, albeit with a £40 installation fee.

Livingstone believes users will leapfrog hurdles. "It's a no-brainer design concept. If you want to take e-commerce to a mass audience, you want to use the most commonly available display technology and input device in the world - TV and remote control. Regardless of how technophobic people are, they will use that. If you can make e-commerce so simple to drive, you're giving it to an audience that until now was cut off. It's a colossal enabler for those with no keyboard skills to join the e-revolution."

The channel operates like a shopping mall, selling space - or bandwidth - for sites and adverts, and striking revenue-sharing deals. "The challenges for us are keeping up with expectations and capability. Our ideas are dominated by the set-top box and we're at a very early stage of development and refinement," says Livingstone. "As they get better we'll be able to do clearer things; the point is to make the screens as entertaining as possible."

Another aim is to repersonalise the e-revolution. "I used to talk to my kids, then we started to send e-mails and now we communicate by SMSA [Short Message Service] in less than 80 characters, which is a frightening and dehumanising progression. The one thing that TV will do is put pictures into e-commerce. You'll be able to see your mum on there. You could talk to your bank manager. It all comes back to people."