Interactive Television Market Grows

Interactive television (iTV) will add TV-based gaming, television commerce, and interactive or direct response advertising functionality to cable programming, the additional channels will create new revenue streams. The State of Interactive TV 2005 report from Kagan Research, looks at adoption rates of the nascent platform.

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Currently, 34.1 million households subscribe to iTV service, the number of subscribers is expected to reach 69 million by 2009, more than half of U.S. TV households.

Revenues for electronic transactions for games, television or t-commerce (television commerce), and interactive advertising are estimated to reach $2.4 million by 2009. Kagan Research estimates the interactive services segment will generate $780 million in operator revenue in that same period for cable, digital broadcast satellites (DBS), and telcos.

To prepare the State of Interactive TV 2005, Kagan Research reviewed operator profiles for the major U.S. providers of multichannel video packages and how they intend to deliver iTV services. The report looked at companies like Cablevision, Charter, Comcast, Cox, Insight, Time Warner, DirectTV, and EchoStar.