Two days ago I wrote about the reason why IPTV must be interactive. And it’s simple – people expect it to be interactive.

I also pointed the great speech Clay Shirky gave at Web 2.0 Expo. I came across another one – this time on TED Talks, where Peter Hirshberg gives the relationship of the computer and the television.

Here’s a short transcript from the beginning of this talk:

Peter: Let’s listen what happens when they get to the portion of the discussion on television.

Kid 1: Well, I think it’s important, but like, not necessary. Because you can do a lot of other stuff with your free time.

Peter: Which is more fun? Internet or TV?

Kids: Internet

Kid 2: I think one of the reason why we put the internet before TV is because nowadays we have TV shows on the computer and you can download them to your iPod.

Peter: Would you like to be the president of the TV network?

Kid 1: That would be so stressful.

Kid 3: No.

Peter: How come?

Kid 3: Because they’re gonna lose all of their money eventually.

And another one close to the end of it:

Peter: So to wrap up, I want to throw it back to Marshall McLuhan, who 40 years ago was dealing with audiences that were going through just as much change, and I think that today, traditional Hollywood and the writers are framing this perhaps in the way it was framed before, but I don’t need to tell you this – let’s throw it back to him.

Marshall: We are in the middle of tremendous clash between the old and new. The medium does things to people and they are almost completely unaware of this. They don’t really notice the new medium that is roughing them up. They link to the old medium because the old medium is always the content of the new medium. As movies tend to be the content of TV and as books used to be the content of movies. So every time a new medium arrives the old medium is the content and it is highly observable, highly noticeable. But the real roughing up and massaging is done by the new medium and it is ignored.

Interactivity is key.