In the rush to IPTV that seems to be driving AT&T to acquire Bellsouth and Verizon to dump rural New England customers, telcos seem to be missing some dimensions. More than a decade ago, in 1995 in Wired, and in 1992 in Journal of Communication v42 n4 p73-93 Fall 1992, Jonathan Steuer pointed out that communication services could be grouped not only by vividness (for which old-style TV rates pretty high and HDTV rates higher), but also interactivity. Broadcast TV doesn’t rate very high on interactivity, no matter how high definition it is.

YouTube pushes TV higher in interactivity, but not by increasing the definition; instead by making it easier for more people to produce or at least excerpt TV, and for everyone to see it. And that’s why interactivity matters: it increases participation.

Yet another dimension is depth or complexity of information, for which TV is notoriously low. More on that later.

It’s not clear to me that the boob tube, no matter how high def, is the main thing people want; if that were so, why do studies continue to show people shifting their time from TV to the Internet?

-jsq