The availability of digital TV to a mass-market audience at an affordable price would seem to presage an explosion in exciting digital content and advertising formats to add to the mix of extra TV channels and digital radio stations.
But, on closer examination, it isn't necessarily so. The BBC, BSkyB and Crown Castle joint venture only goes so far.
As this week's news analysis (see p13) shows, there is now potential for interactive TV to move on to a serious cash-generative level. Channel 4 is testing a service that allows users to enter credit card details and make payments while remaining within an interactive advert.
Unlike usual formats, where the user has to shell out to a separate application, a prototype ad being carried out on behalf of the British Red Cross charity to encourage donations facilitates interaction there and then.
But the application is still only available on one variety of interactive TV - Sky digital - and will not be accessible from within Freeview.
So visions of all UK viewers being able to press the red button on their remote control as the credits roll on programmes to purchase, say, the DVD of The Office, or the book to accompany Nigella Lawson's latest cookery series, are still quite a long way from coming to fruition.
The problem lies with that pesky old return path problem and limitations of set-top box operating systems: two issues that seem to have held back interactive TV ever since the first com was dotted.
Neil Cashman, chief technology officer at Channel 4's development partner, GOiNTERACTtv, suggests that the advertising community could "bash heads together" to get this moving along more quickly. But is there really any incentive or imperative for them to do so?
Freeview was set up to be a free-to-view offering. But to install a return path, it is usually necessary for the provider to insist that the customer plugs in the relevant technology to their telephone line - as Sky digital does with its own service. If the customer does not do this, then the system doesn't work. So they do it.
But there's no such imperative with Freeview because, as its name suggests, there's no subscription element to the offering. It's not a commercial offering, it's a distribution platform.
And it's not in Sky's interest for the Freeview service to be too successful, as it will detract from its own premium, subscription services.
There's still no one in the market with sufficient drive and incentive to make interaction via TV work. And until there is, we will be waiting for true TV interactivity to go mass-market for a long time to come.
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