PRESS RELEASE

February 12th 2001

Doctor of Arts Dissertation: WWW, multimedia and theories of screenwriting offer starting points for development of Interactive Television Programs. Also virtual communities and home shopping provide ideas.

Kari Jääskeläinen's publication is the first doctoral dissertation from Scandinavia's leading Media Laboratory, The Media Lab of University of Art and Design, Helsinki.

In his dissertation Strategic Questions in the Development of Interactive Television Programs Kari Jääskeläinen has studied the questions that a person developing interactive television programs should ask him self. The research was carried out by selecting promising strategies from other types of media, such as www, multimedia, film and TV, virtual communities and home shopping. These strategies were then presented to about one hundred ITV professionals from companies like Warner Brothers, Eurosport, Reuters, AT&T and BBC.

The most important issues in ITV development according to the study are the visual values, aesthetics and the user interface of the program. Also it is important to consider carefully who is the audience of the program and how it can interact with the program and what type of input will be collected from it. One should also consider how user generated content could be incorporated to the program and how www could be used as a marketing vehicle for the program.

A small surprise was that such essential issues from film script writing as the three-act structure and a happy ending were not considered important.

There are however big variations in the planning of different ITV genres. E.g. the interaction between audience members is important in computer game type of ITV genres but not in interactive advertising. In advertising on the other hand are important such questions as: How can we increase the audience loyalty, how can home shopping be combined in the program and how could the program generate transaction fees?

The dissertation provides planning models for altogether six different ITV genres, which are: interactive advertising, video game type of ITV programs, news on demand, electronic program guides, distance learning applications and background information of other TV programs.

The complete dissertation is available at:
http://www.uiah.fi/julkaisut/jaaskelainen.pdf

More information:

Kari Jääskeläinen
tel: +358 40 501 7627