There were various ideas, stupid and brilliant. Among the more idiotic, in this correspondent's not so humble opinion, was the idea of participatory TV shows. You've heard the idea. Everyone in the family would watch your game show if they could just play along at home. Yeah, right.

So the same brilliant folks figured that there had to be a reason people would interact, so the next idea was that people at home would play for prizes. There's no question a subset of consumers would interact to win goodies, but it was still more of a technology in search of a solution.

All this theorizing resulted in the joke, "If you combine computers with televisions, how will consumers react when their TVs crash?" But most folks figured that if this convergence reached consumers, crashing would be a disease that would've been long cured.

Not so. My TV crashed last night. And the way it did illustrates how the old idea of interactive TV has morphed into a not-yet-mature, but compelling, solution.

TV gets personal
I am a gadget addict. I'll bet that's a big surprise. That the editor of the two most successful gadget magazines should be a gadget nut is probably no shocker.

But my fetish for gadgets extends all the way from teeny handheld computers to my six-foot TV, satellite dish, three VCRs (including one that writes tapes digitally), dual-disk DVD player with full DTS and 5.1 surround, and three complete satellite receivers. Like I said, I should probably be in a twelve-step program for this stuff. It's a damned good thing I'm employable.

One of the gadgets I have is a Dish Player. This is a combination Dish Network receiver and WebTV Plus. Actually, I also have a standalone WebTV Plus, but the folks at WebTV couldn't get their arms around the idea of a person owning two devices in one home (for details, see my editorial from back in October of 1999 in Windows CE Power at http://www.windowscepower.com/issues/issue199910/ceeditorial1099001.html). So, for now, I'm using the Dish Player.

One of the coolest things about the Dish Player is that it has a "Personal TV" service. Very much like the products from TiVo and Replay, the Dish Player's Personal TV let's you pause, rewind, and fast-forward through programs and record programs to the device's built-in hard drive.