What's My Online?

By James Poniewozik

No element of the social contract is more fundamental to our way of life than the sacred covenant between the TV set and our butts. We secure the latter firmly to the couch; the former vouchsafes to deliver a stream of car chases and oh-no-they-locked-themselves-in-the-walk-in-freezer episodes. This arrangement has seen us through the cold war, presidential scandals, even the final season of Roseanne. But this week a new interactive music-trivia show on MTV aims to upset that tradition by introducing a third party: the keyboard.

webRIOT (weekdays, 5 p.m. E.T./P.T.) is, frankly, a fairly unremarkable quiz show: four contestants watch videos and answer rapid-fire questions from the relentlessly mugging Ahmet Zappa, on a set that's a cross between Sprockets and a Sega video game. What is interesting about it is its viewers. In each of its daily airings (one for each coast), as many as 25,000 of them will compete simultaneously, online, to post the fastest correct answers in order to win prizes like MP3 players and plaster their names on TV on the high scorers' list.

MTV has cybered up its programming before: Total Request Live takes e-mail video requests, and the network has held high-profile online auctions (as has Rosie O'Donnell, who's about as edgy as a Koosh ball). And Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire all have independent game sites. But webRIOT hopes to be the first to succeed with a broadcast in which online fans are integrated into the format.

The network cites its own research to claim that the time for TV-online convergence has come for its audience: 56% of 12-to-24-year-olds with computers have a TV in the same room. But the knock against "interactive TV" has been that it's an oxymoron; no one's agitating for a choose-your-own-adventure version of Martial Law. webRIOT hopes to score with a sort of cheap-'n'-dirty, Scud-missile interactivity. The game (accessible at www.mtv.com requires no special hardware or complicated interface; players simply use the keyboard as a buzzer. And, notes MTV programming head Brian Graden, successful game shows already have an "interactive" element: yelling at the TV. "They create the illusion that you are faster and smarter than the contestants," he says. "It's all about play-along."

Advertisers hope such TV-PC shackups will ultimately allow them to direct players to online deals or to synch TV commercials with click-to-buy options. With a traditional commercial, says Aram Sinnreich, an analyst with Internet research firm Jupiter Communications, "the most the advertiser could hope for is to eventually send the user to the store." But webRIOT's online surfer-viewers are virtually at the store today, and the future implications make advertisers salivate. webRIOT is already selling on-air and online ads as a package.

Of course, the immediate goal of this experiment is an old one: get kids to watch MTV. Though only a percentage of the hoped-for viewership will play at once, the show will help MTV stay on top of trends like Internet use, which is essential to keeping the music channel relevant to kids. The format rewards loyalty; in a sweepstakes at the end of the season, webRIOT will give away a Ford Focus to one lucky online player. The more games you play, the better your chances.

For any game-show fan who has bitterly counted the prizes he or she should have won instead of those idiot contestants!, the chance to compete directly is alluring. On the other hand, there is a second-class element to webRIOT online: the TV contestants win bigger daily prizes (all-expense-paid vacations, for instance) and watching a show just because your name might appear on the air is a tad close to Romper Room. But, says MTV Online vice president Rick Holzman, viewers downloaded more than 750,000 copies of the game software before the show's premiere, and while he says MTV's Internet servers have undergone heavy testing, you almost suspect the network hopes the system will be shut down by an overwhelming, buzz-creating crush of gamers. "If there's a failure," he says, "we hope it fails spectacularly."