Welcome to Lowpass! This week: Trivia games as an interactive TV success story, and Roku’s efforts to to take the pain out of adjusting your TV settings.

I’ll be briefly at CES next week. My goal is to spent most of my time on the show floor to check out new products. Feel free to drop me a line if there is anything I should be taking a look at!

Unlocking interactive TV’s potential, one question at a time

Remember Bandersnatch?

It’s been five years since Netflix released the ambitious interactive Black Mirror spin-off, signaling at the time that it wanted to take interactive TV programming beyond kids titles.

Bandersnatch and its mind-bending branched narrative made headlines at the time, but the overall reception of Netflix’s interactive titles has been decidedly mixed. That’s according to the company’s recent massive viewership data dump, which shows that interactive programming for adults has largely failed to catch on, save for a few notable exceptions.

• Bandersnatch itself is still attracting some attention; Netflix subscribers watched a combined 2.9 million hours of the standalone branched episode over the first six months of 2023.

• Other interactive spin-offs of popular Netflix shows targeting adults fared far worse: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. the Reverend was watched for just 300,000 hours during the same six months, while the horror-themed Escape the Undertaker clocked 400,000 hours.

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