For years, people have been talking about the interactive television platform of the future. Personally, I can remember when Warner cable had a division called QUBE and they trailed an interactive television platform in addition to some of the first new next wave services to be delivered by cable. While it wasn’t a total flop, as many of the technologies have made it to the cable and satellite television services we have today, the interactive part of QUBE just never really went anywhere, it was costly to produce the two hours of programming five nights a week.

It seems that Microsoft has discovered how to change all of that and it has found with the interactive show 1 vs. 100 that they do have a serious hit on their hands. The success of this show is leading to the development of new programming that will be coming to the Xbox 360 in the future.

While no one is saying what might be next, ideas of what could be coming are all over the place. The advertisers and sponsors seem to be anxious to get behind additional programming, as what advertiser/sponsor would not want to get their message out to 23 million people in a difficult to reach demographic?

Our sources tell us that the announcement of a new interactive programming offering will come before the end of the year. It is more likely that owners will see something in the way of testing before the end of the year. There is strong suspicion from our sources that such a new offering might use Natal as part of the way to interact with the program. We think, however, that the use of Natal might be pure speculation.