Via Putting People First, I found out the Ethan Zuckerman’s blog report of a speech given by Herkko Hietanen (his Copyfraud blog here) at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Isn’t the piece below a remarkable synthesis? 😉

The medium isn’t rising to its full potential, isn’t providing consumers with programs when and where they want them. To set the scheduled for what you want to watch, you need to be at your television. And there are frustrating geographic restrictions on programming […]  it lacks interactivity with broadcasters and other viewers. It forces consumers to sit through irrelavent commercials.

Hietanen is an affiliate of HIIT-Helsinki Institute of Information Technology, with which I had the good luck to cooperate at MobiLife times. His talk, as discussed by Zuckerman, expands on the big theme of so-called “social television”, and the limits of past experiments on the field, e.g. because social interactions might be placed not squarely on the TV screen while the show goes on, but before or after it. This is very much one of the core assumptions of the research ideas sketched in Vertigo.