Interactive services memories

I think Sky News Active was gone by 2013 along with Sky Text

Beehive Bedlam!!!!

We had NTL Digital Plus installed in 2000. The interactive option was slow, bulky and liked to crash. Trying to use the remote control to type things was painfully slow. The best thing about it was TwoWay TV, that had some good games on it, as it was Cable you didn’t need an additional connection to the internet.

After a massive software update (I think it was called Liberate 1.2), the interactivity power was increased. This meant that things like play along Fifteen To One arrived on Channel 4, which was fairly decent.

I completely avoided the interactive era of the 2000s with Sky and cable boxes. As close as it got was using a premium rate number to access teletext pages on ITV and C4.

I did contribute to Mailbox on the Paramount Channel's teletext service though, a precursor to internet forums.

Details of ITV Digital's offerings in the screen grab attached (from the excellent onhistory website).

https://media.onhistory.co.uk/documents/itv-interactive-mailing.pdf

I don't remember bothering with interactive WWTBAM, seems that it had to be simulcast on ITV2 for the interactive.

Yeah, there was a desktop version of Beehive Bedlam too, but that seems to have gone offline with it redirecting to Sky Vegas.

Beehive Bedlam was the best, but the one problem with Sky...

Used to drive me insane. I can't actually remember where (e.g. which channel) this took place. I think it was an overnight loop on 999?

There was that one where you had to get your drunk mates across the road before they either got run over or p*ssed themselves.

Does anyone remember the interactive service from stv. Mrs Mack headed the campaign.

I remember having a set of these:


Neat idea as they were slightly more responsive than a standard remote and allowed for multiplayer. Supportt was limited though and I can't actually remember any of the games you could play multiplayer!

They also dabbled with Online Multiplayer at some point too - I recall it working pretty well, but as with most interactive services it was ridiculously slow over the dial up modem and was overtaken by mobile gaming and apps.

The live feed service from BB2:


The BBC of course though on Freeview at least the only ones really in the market and although simple their original offerings had much more thought put into them than later efforts, being reskinned for each event.

Connected TV obviously now offers more potential but surprisingly of the main players only the BBC are really pushing it even though it could potentially offer easy access from within the channels to their on demand platforms and extra video streams when required for the commercial terrestrials. 4Music does offer access to three channels on Freeview, and strangely QVC offer a few extra channels via theirs but use a different interface on two different channels - QVC itself has a proper multiscreen but the other channel (36 IIRC) has a scrolling based menu.

Agree on it being Sky Channel 999, which used to be (maybe still is) the channel the box would default to after a powercut etc, which is probably why I remember seeing it? I *think* this loop was played 24/7 rather than just overnight for a good while - definitely recall seeing it in the middle of the day!