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If you find all those crawls, bugs and lower-third-of-the-screen promos to be really annoying, get past it. TV executives say they're here to stay.
And if you do find them annoying, it probably says something about you-like, you're old and cranky. Well, if not old, at least older, according to research conducted by Frank Magid Associates. The Magid research found that a majority of younger viewers find onscreen "enhancements" to be "very to somewhat appealing." It's the older crowd--ages 55-plus-that find such visuals least appealing.
But whether you love them or hate them, or just don't care, credit the computer age for bringing you what Magid's Jill Rosengard says is an increasingly "nonlinear television experience." It's TV as a Web page, which has always been about bombarding the Net surfer with as much information as possible packaged in boxes, columns and scrolls, she says.
And such on-screen visuals will get more complicated and more integrated with the TV viewing experience over time, television executives say. Michael Hirschorn, VHl senior vice president, news and production, envisions a time when viewers may be able to manipulate the crawls and tickers once they have interactive capability.
AT&T Broadband President Bill Schleyer says TV screens will only get busier but viewers will be able to set up their own criteria for what they receive. "There will be more multi-- tasking between the Web and TV."
Just two months ago, CNN's Headline News did a radical makeover of its on-screen look, fully embracing the cyberspace, non-- linear look. Its new screen is split into two sections, with video and headlines on top and weather, travel advisories and stock information on the bottom. The new look also features multiple anchors, who get camera time every 15 minutes. On Sept. 11, the network instituted a full-time crawl to keep up with news of the terrorist attacks.
Teya Ryan, executive vice president and general manager of CNN Headline News, says, "It's the right direction to go in. We're a society that is absorbing information in a way that we never imagined we would be doing. We have a whole new generation of news viewers that have been trained on the Internet that are used to that."
Much of this has been going on...