The Problems with Interactive TV

The biggest problem with social and interactive TV is that the computer already fills that niche, and effectively.
The conventional way of interacting with a television is through the remote control. This is the first and major impediment. Introducing a new controller would add the complexity of an additional interactive layer, as well as costs incurred. This would also just pave the way for the conversion of a television into a game console, which is not what we want.
If we just use a typical television remote control, any relatively deep interactive experience ends up getting lost under a maze of menus and dozens of "screens" of information. Remember the trials often associated with setting up a brand new TV?
Currently, interactive television's (iTV/Foxtel) approach is to present viewers with a single screen. The user moving a "box" around selectable options and occasionally hitting "OK".

A recent invention is the "Media Centre PC", a small computer that plugs into your PC. This Media Centre PC has a DVD drive, so you can use it for video playback, but it also has a hard drive (to store movies and music for quick playback), and can often save a television signal into its storage for later playback.
The Media Centre TV is as close as we are likely to get to a bridging between the PC and the TV. If someone wants to fiddle with their Facebook, the only reason they would use a television would be as a big screen to see the website on!
Current video game consoles such as the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 double as media centre computers. And this is likely as far as the bridging between currently computer centric concepts (such as interactivity) and the conventionally non-interactive medium of the television are likely to get, at least in any significant sense.
Only time will tell, really.