Community Television Interactive
Community Television Interactive was an interactive television station owned by Staten Island Community Television and broadcast on Staten Island Cable channel 56.[1] It was broadcast from the early 1990s until sometime in 2000 when the new Staten Island Community Television management took over and shut the service down, converting channel 56 into a full-time community bulletin board (CBB) system.
| Type | Cable Television television network |
|---|---|
| Country | |
| Availability | Local Public Access, Staten Island, NY |
| Owner | Staten Island Community Television |
Launch date | September 1, 1992 |
| Dissolved | Unknown, 2000 |
The digital signage system operated on an Amiga 2000 computer system running Response Television software from the Response Television Corporation of Iowa City, Iowa. Using a device similar to a modem, home viewers' touch tones were converted into ASCII data that the Amiga could use to call up specific screens. Screens were created on an Amiga 1200 system which served as a backup computer. Background music was provided by local public radio stations.
Unlike other forms of interactive television, CTV-i was broadcast on a single cable channel and had users interact with it by calling a telephone number using a touch-tone phone, which meant that the service was limited to one person at any given time; however, to counter this many sections of CTV-i would end with the system terminating the user connection, usually during interactive games which met a pre-determined conclusion instead of giving them the option to return to the main menu, also, the system had a timer and would end the session when time expired.
CTV-i offered users plenty of local information - such as traffic, weather, construction, lost and found, public bulletins, and pages dedicated to animal adoption. In addition, the service offered a wide array of entertainment options, including trivia, quizzes, and interactive stories - all of which were controlled by using the telephone keypad. A users session would be ended when they had reached the end of a game, or selected a wrong option.