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. 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 system.
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.