Remember when we used to simply watch TV? Being an active television viewer used to mean wrestling your sibling for the remote, or reaching for chips and a cold beverage, but in the age of the Net Generation this simplistic outlook on television has been relegated to the ranks of the VHS and dial-up networks. Net Geners demand multi-directional entertainment, they don’t simply want to have programming beamed toward them, they want to interact with it, they want control over what is presented to them, and they want to access it on their own terms.

Shopping on your computer while watching television not long ago thought to be at the cutting edge of the cultural and technological movement is now passé. To satisfy the demands of the Net Gen we must now be able to instantaneously purchase the products placed in our favorite shows right through the television, all the while having the ability to control and view our home TV in real time through our smartphones and laptops. Making all of this possible are two new technology heavy-hitters; Backchannel Media and the increasingly popular SlingBox by SlingMedia, two companies that are helping to blur the lines between television and the Internet.

If you haven’t heard of Backchannel Media you’re not alone, but my bet is that you’re going to start to hear a lot more about it. Currently the company offers its service for free, and suggests that it can be set up, in “about as long as it takes to register for an e-newsletter”. The way it works is that by registering your digital cable box via the serial number, the service can then interact freely with your digital television. What exactly does it do you ask, well essentially what the service does is create an online portal that corresponds with your television viewing profile, and allows you to interact with effects within the televised programming that may be of interest to you. For instance, a viewer watching their favorite sitcom may be interested in a Dell computer shown on-screen, if there is an online sale at Dell’s website, the service will display a small icon with the computer. If the icon is selected the sale’s homepage will be saved to the viewer’s corresponding portal so that they can shop for laptops at their earliest convenience. Similarly, while watching a newscast, a viewer could choose to select an information icon to have articles pertaining to that news story saved directly to their portal for more information on the topic (see image below).

Where once we could rely on television as a brainless, pacifying form of entertainment, the cries of the Net Gen for better, faster, more interactive have created an entire secondary market of products that have turned a traditional medium into an all encompassing entertainment superpower. Companies like Backchannel Media and SlingMedia have turned the once modest television into an interactive, mobile, and multi-tasking medium, giving it new life among an increasingly demanding generation of consumers.