THE PUBLIC SERVICE VALUE OF INTERACTIVE TELEVISION

Abstract

‘Red button’ interactivity has become an important feature of the UK's digital television landscape, with the BBC launching over 150 such applications in 2004 alone. Simultaneously, interactive television has become an important site of fulfilling public service remits and providing public value by the BBC. This paper examines the place and purpose of the BBC's interactive television services in the newly developing public service landscape. The paper focuses on the dialectic between the rhetoric of choice that has accompanied digitalisation and the public service remits of universalism, civic value and education to interrogate two prominent cases of the BBC's use of interactive television: news programming and the coverage of the 2004 Athens Olympics. In so doing, I propose that such interactive applications promote choice as a public service value that is both problematic for how public service obligations are fulfilled and how television studies conceives and understands the television text. As a result I suggest that by paying attention to the specificities of television's form, we can usefully draw on new media scholarship to understand the interactive, non‐linear television text as ‘fragmented’. In turn, analysing these interactive applications as a form of textuality we can usefully term ‘fragment’, I argue that whilst choice is not an inherently problematic public service value, its privileging in news programming undermines existing notions of the genre's public service fulfilment.