One of the things we had to do early on at LemonTV was to create a standard for scripting interactive TV programmes. Unfortunately for us, no one had done it at that time, mid-2000, and we found to make the interactive productions cohesive, it was vital that the shooting crew knew what interactive programming was happening around the piece and vice versa.
When I read the press release from GoldPocket about their work with Final Draft, the scripting-worlds standard editing software, I was very excited, but having read through the spec I’m less so. It appears that they only currently support what I feel is pretty dull interactivity, Leaderboard, Poll, Questions, Statistics and TextBlock. Where GoldPocket win is that the interactive commands can be exported direct from the Final Draft script into their iTV software.
It’s a good deal for GoldPocket and a small step in the right direction with, I hope, much to follow.