3.1 Introduction

The technological developments in information and communications technologies have led to a convergence of speech/audio, data, text, graphics, and video and thus to multimedia applications. At the same time, people in modern society are becoming more and more individualistic. As a result, service providers are forced to focus on individual consumer demands. Since interactivity allows them to obtain individual feedback from their customers, technological convergence and social individualization lead to the development of interactive multimedia services.

The technological convergence also affects several traditional service-oriented sectors of the communications industry, namely the entertainment, information, telecommunications, and transaction sectors: As their products are integrated, these sectors are becoming more and more dependent on each other. In Chapter 2, the layer model is used to identify the several actors activities in these sectors. This chapter describes the changes in their activities within, as well as between, sectors and explains the aspect of market power in the economic value-added chain.

3.2 Convergence among traditional sectors

Four traditional sectors that play an important part in the development of interactive multimedia services in the context of DTV are the entertainment, information, telecommunications, and transaction sectors. The entertainment sector s services are aimed at individual consumers in their home environment. Examples are television, pay TV, and electronic games. The information sector provides services that normally require the user to take the initiative, and the user, rather than the service provider, selects all information. This entails, for example, online/off-line services and database retrieval. It should be noted...