“My TV is the family Oven/Toaster/Grill”:Personalizing TV for the Indian Audience

Interactive TV is a new, exciting entry into the drawing rooms of Indian families. By examining current and nascent interactive TV services we trace ways in which they are deployed, received and consumed in the Indian home. From ethnographic probes we offer observations from Indian domestic contexts in the threshold of adopting interactivity as part of everyday TV viewing. We foreground India as a new and primary emerging site adopting interactive TV and to expand attention from the predominance of designing for Western cultural contexts. We develop a specific focus on personalizing TV, a dominant media attribute of interactive TV, conflicting with conventional viewing patterns in the Indian home. We note emergent challenges for interactive TV adoption patterns, particularly for personalization, in the Indian home. Here, TV is viewed as a) Comfort media b) Shared media c) Media for family bonding and raise concerns for viewer preferences around personalizing TV.