According to a New York Times article, viewers are shown programs—and ads—they can respond to by using remote controls to click on icons they see on their screens. Each click sends a signal to the viewer’s personal portal—basically, a site where everything the person has expressed interest in is aggregated. Then, the viewer can look up more information there the next time he or she goes online.

For example, someone who clicks on an icon embedded in a spot for a local car dealer can send to a personal portal a link to the dealer’s website or to the site of the car brand. Backchannel Media—which hosts the portals on its server—refers to these response opportunities as “clickable moments.” Linking TV and the Internet can be “a game-changing technology,” says Michael Kokernak, who shares the title of chief executive at Backchannel with Daniel Hassan, because it represents “a huge shift from how stations operate today.” The Backchannel system is one of several experiments with interactive television, which seeks to blend the ubiquity and convenience of traditional TV with the interactive qualities of personal computers.

Here’s a recent newscast that discusses the program:

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