Interactive TV!

Indonesians are obsessed with "interactive TV". There're all these TV programmes with like live opinion polls where people can send in SMSes or call in with their opinions. These range from the slightly cool (see picture and caption below), to the immensely kok - on MetroTV news every night, they have "interactive news" where they display all the stories for the night on the screen and viewers get to vote for the story they want to watch first. And then after every story that's been shown, they show the same screen with the remaining stories and get the viewers to vote again for the next story. How kok is that?! I mean what is the fucking point? They end up showing all the stories anyway. Even more kok, they have viewers who call in to choose the next story to be shown and they say things like "Ohygod I'm on TV! Uhhh... I will choose... the story about the earthquake victims in East Java because I think it's like.. So. Important. that we give adequate coverage to their plight." Fucking boh liao right? Then sometimes the connection is not good. Then the newscaster goes "Hello? Hello? Bapak? Are you there? Ok we've lost the caller, let's see what the next caller will choose... Hello? Caller number 2? What story would you like to hear Bapak?"...

Bet you won't see that on BBC.


On the MotoGP programme on TV7 here, they have this weird video game thingie where two callers get to race with each other on a split-screen by pressing the keys on their mobile phones. "Press 2 to accelerate, 8 to brake, 4 to turn left and 6 to turn right".