You spend enough time thinking about internet television, and you start assuming that the interactive possibilities of the new medium would be obvious to anyone – especially someone in the business.  Every now and then, though, you get a reminder that the traditional linear model is so deeply ingrained in everyone’s way of thinking about what television is supposed to be that sometimes even the industry doesn’t quite see the forest for the trees.

Take Direct TV, for instance  – as a tennis fan, I was looking forward to their “Mix Channel” coverage of this year’s French Open, in which the viewer could choose between up to six concurrent matches.  And it didn’t disappoint – it was especially nice to switch between matches during the early rounds, when there are so many matches to choose from.  What I also liked was that via a button on the Direct TV remote, I could pull up a text menu showing the draws, match scores, and the schedule for the next day.  This was a terrific (and appropriate) use of technology, I thought -  and better yet, a glimpse of the kind of interactivity we all can look forward to over the next few years.

What interested me, though – and what the point of this post is – was what I noticed when I checked back with the mix channel one afternoon after play for the day had ended in Paris:  of course there were no live matches to choose from, but the pop-up text menu was disabled as well! Evidently someone at Direct TV hadn’t imagined that anyone would be interested in any on-demand textual information about the tournament if there wasn’t good old-fashioned video to watch at the same time – when on the contrary, that would have been the perfect time to check in on the day’s match results and/or the schedule for the next day.

Just another example of the industry taking the trouble to build something great, but not taking quite enough time to think of how the user might actually use it – and another example of the inertia of linear television thinking.