TV is so much a ‘lean-back’ experience that most people with a functioning cortex stopped doing it about five years ago.
Today’s invention is a set-top box TV add-on which senses when an ad-break is in progress and takes control of the display in order to insert web-based content instead. This could simply be static material, relevant to the preceding programme, selected from web pages using eg Autonomy.
A more advanced version might take the form of a simple quiz in which sentences from the dialogue of the programme just watched could be inverted as questions and displayed as on-screen web-based tick-boxes, selectable using the remote. Prizes could be offered for correct answers -which would increase the level of attention to programme content and lessen the waste of time involved in just passively watching television.
