Interactive TV, making a buddha out of you.

There is an interesting thing called Interactive TV. Nowadays, it has lot of mind share in Cable world. The whole food chain is very busy churning out iTV specs, tools, white papers, conducting seminars, workshops and doing everything else that makes it a dynamic field.
iTV is all about making the TV interactive. It does so not by making the TV interactive but, adding another component called set top box, which is like a PC with VCR like looks. The funny part about the set top is that you can not put the TV set on top of it, it will get crushed, unless you use an Entertainment Center (Do you think it is funny? You can ask TBS Superstation!). The not funny part is that these modern set top boxes always lag a modern PC by a decade in terms of hardware and software available on them.
Coming back to the point,
Today, if one watches a soap or game, he or she is completely involved in it. Or at least the producers want it to be like that. Success of a show is gauged by how involving it is. The idea is the viewer does not flip the channel and they can show the ad. If you thought purpose of cable company is show entertaining programs, get it right. The purpose is to show ads. They use sports, news, soap, reality show and all to fill the space between advertisements. Any way, a good show captures all the attention of the viewer. So if Jack and Jill are fighting over who will clean the kitchen after the party, A good director will make the viewers empathize with Jack or Jill.
But that will change with iTV. A typical application that iTV experts have been trying to get going since last couple of years is being able to conduct polls in real time, thankfully none of such application has gone beyond the state of being hacked-demos yet. With such applications, the user can have their say about the bout between Jack and Jill. This is the time when buddha jumps into the story.
A important theme in Yoga is the ability to split your brain into to two, one performer and the other observer. Buddha is a state of such Yogic achievement. iTV will enable all of us to become buddhas by making up for the observer part. So when you will be watching the Jack and Jill fight, while iTV will be observing you watching the fight. And suddenly when you are about to feel strongly about why Jack should the cleanup, iTV will pop up a question, Do you think Jack and Jill will make out after the fight? Select A key for Yes and B key for No.
You can't be non opinioned about this? Can you?
So iTV has a malign unintended consequence of detaching viewer from the show he is watching but a benign unintended consequence of fast track to becoming buddha.
Can't complain about this.