Making Presentations Presentable Cable Television At the Crossroads; Don't Baby The Bells I/O; The chicken lays the egg; Do you believe in Magic? A new breed of artist at CyberArts Japan rolls HDTV programs; Briefs ÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐПŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸŸ Making Presentations Presentable 3 It's easy to get wrapped up in the finer points of digital video compression, cd-quality audio and seamless interactivity for those important multimedia presentations, and leave the most important part -- the way it looks to an audience -- to chance and/or inferior equipment. To date, multimedia producers have had three choices for displaying the sweat of their brow: output to videotape, a three-beam crt data projector or passive-matrix liquid-crystal display projector. All have significant drawbacks. Enter active-matrix technology, the hottest new LCD technology, now being used to make display projectors. Its higher resolution, larger color palette and faster scanning can give projected video and animation "monitor-like" quality. But looking good has its price literally. Cable Television At the Crossroads 5 With a wire into 95 percent of U.S. households that can already deliver high-quality video signals, the cable television industry finds itself courted by newspapers, telephone companies, satellite broadcasters and anyone else with a yen to be part of the Information Society. These exciting new possibilities are tempered, however, by the twin specters of government regulation and increased competition, and the industry is questioning everything about the way it does business. A visit to last month's Western Cable Television Show, in Anaheim, CA, showed that changing the way cable operates might be a very good thing. Don't Baby The Bells 9 The newspaper industry is likely to be among the hardest hit by the recent federal mandate that allows the Regional Bell Operating Companies to participate in the information services business. At a recent meeting of the National Press Club in Washington DC, Cathleen Black, president and chief executive of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, made an eloquent plea to keep the Bells in check -- supplying only the conduit for information service providers and not the information itself. 2 I/O Pioneer Max Whitby asks: Is the central premise of multimedia --interactivity itself -- flawed? 12 The chicken lays the egg Info services bloom, and EFF asks Congress to mandate ISDN for a national public network. 14 Do you believe in Magic? General Magic, Silicon Valley's hottest startup, gets unwanted press. What's the real story? 15 A new breed of artist at CyberArts A sensory treat: Holo-Video, 3d sound and Sensorama. 16 Japan rolls HDTV programs Hi-Vision supporters are showing daily hd programming. 17 Briefs GAIN partners with Matsushita; Sony stores 4 gb on erasable disc; Telecom and cable's mixed marriage; CD-I hits Blockbuster Video; First commercial vr system; CableLabs considers proposals; Computer ethics; Cross-platform cd-rom; Lucas Foundation; Society for Applied Learning Technology; Light Source ships PC-VCR software. 20 Mediascape A quick 'n' dirty overview of sampling. 24 Events Focus Making Presentations Presentable New display technology called into active service for multimedia It used to be that assembling a multimedia presentation was the hard part of the job, with hours spent synchronizing sound, video and animation, tweaking text and making sure color palettes for graphics didn't clash. While tools for creating multimedia presentations have flourished in the past year, tools for displaying presentations from a computer to an audience, particularly a large audience, have evolved much more slowly. Among the more promising of these evolutionary paths is the growing popularity and availability of color flat-panel displays based on active-matrix technology, also known as thin-film transistor (TFT) technology. Not a projector. To date, multimedia producers have basically had three choices for displaying their multimedia presentations: outputting the presentation to videotape; using a three-beam (red, green, blue) crt (cathode ray tube) data projector; or opting for an LCD (liquid crystal display) projector. Each technology has its problems. Most multimedia producers feel the degradation in quality from computer screen to video does not do their presentations justice. And video is not a viable option for those who require interactivity. Data projectors, from companies such as Barco, NEC Technologies, Sony, Panasonic and PDS Video Technology, get the job done: these devices project beams on a wall, displaying a color image that is on average up to eight feet across and that provides a one-to-one correspondence between the computer screen and projected image. But data projectors are for the most part bulky and expensive (costing anywhere from $8,000 to $22,000). In addition, the user must be familiar with the projector in order to converge the RGB (red, green, blue) beams. You need a specialist. In addition, not all computer graphics cards work with all data projectors. Since many multimedia producers don't own data projectors, an audio-visual specialist is required to help set up the system. LCD projection devices -- flat panels that are placed on overhead projectors -- are inexpensive, lightweight, portable and easy to set up. And in a time when computer users are becoming more aware and concerned about radiation emissions from crts and VDTs, LCD displays are an attractive alternative. LCDs are non-emissive; they do not create their own light, as do crts, but rather reflect and block light. But LCD projection panels have generally been limited in color (with models ranging from 64 colors up to 5,000) and considered too slow to process animation and multimedia presentations because of the passive-matrix technology they use. Enter active-matrix technology In a passive-matrix LCD display, a grid of square pixels is formed when the intersections of horizontal and vertical wires are lit up with electrical charges. But with active-matrix (TFT) technology, a transistor drives each pixel, amplifying the electrical charge. This results in a high-contrast image. Because each pixel is individually controlled, the scan rate for the panel is also much faster than with passive displays. The faster scan rate also eliminates a problem commonly associated with passive LCDs called bleeding, where a shadow shows up near light or dark areas on the screen. Every transistor counts. The major problem with active-matrix technology is also its most significant advantage: every transistor counts. On the small-screen LCD televisions manufactured by companies such as Panasonic, for instance, if a red, green or blue sub-pixel doesn't fire occasionally, you probably won't notice because the picture is constantly changing. On a computer screen, however, a bad transistor might change the content of the data -- particularly if it shows up as an unintended decimal point in a spreadsheet. To the manufacturers of active-matrix LCD panels --Sharp, Hitachi, Seiko/Epson and Toshiba (in a joint venture with IBM) -- if a panel has a single defective pixel, it is unacceptable. For this reason, the production yields on active-matrix displays are low and the price per panel is high. Manufacturers are beginning to address this low-yield problem by including extra transistors within each pixel, and in the somewhat near future, prices for active-matrix panels should come down. They aren't cheap. The Toshiba/IBM venture, Display Technology Inc., develops color flat-panel displays; a 10.5-inch display for laptops sells for about $3,000. And active-matrix displays are already being used in laptop and notebook computers by companies such as Apple, Toshiba and NEC, according to Joseph Castellano, president of Stanford Resources Inc. (San Jose, CA), whose firm specializes in electronic display technologies. "The trouble is they are expensive, with [color display-equipped laptops] costing $5,000 to $6,000," says Castellano. "Manufacturers haven't been getting good yields, so machines are available only in limited quantities. But you'll start to see more of them in 1992." Off the lap, onto the wall In the past year, two LCD projection panel vendors have released active-matrix LCD panels capable of displaying color animation and multimedia presentations. Newport News, VA-based nView Corp. has released the MediaPro, a $9,995 lightweight LCD projection panel that can display both standard color video and computer-generated graphics from up to four sources. Supports four sources. The 15.8512.752.6-inch, 8.75-pound MediaPro can be hooked up to four computer and video sources simultaneously. It accepts composite, analog RGB and S-Video signals and a computer's digital signals. It displays both Macintosh II and dos pc graphics and animations, as well as live-motion video from devices such as laserdisc players, vcrs and video cameras. The device supports international video standards, including the U.S.'s NTSC, Europe's pal and France's secam video signals. Users can easily switch between sources throughout a presentation by using a remote control wand. The MediaPro is placed on top of an overhead projector, which then projects the image on its panel onto a wall. It supports a resolution of 6405480 pixels in vga, Macintosh II and video modes. Fast enough for video. The MediaPro supports 32,000 colors and uses nView's proprietary built-in software to enhance the active-matrix display. The combination of color and nView's firmware allows the panel to display high-contrast images and offers a fast enough response time to display live, full-motion (30-frame-per-second) video with non-smearing motion, according to John Kupiec, nView's vice president of product development. "We were an early adopter of TFT technology and released our first product in March 1991 after the color TFT panels became commercially viable, not in huge quantities but in important quantities," Kupiec said. "For so many years, people have talked about the flat tv set on the wall. The active-matrix LCD will probably put that technology on the wall, and we think the first versions of it will be projected." `Monitor quality on the wall. Kupiec agrees that active-matrix technology is costly, but he notes that corporate clients -- "early adopters" themselves -- are already paying to use it for business meetings, sales demos and training sessions. "Our products are not inexpensive, but we sell a lot of product. There is a demand among people who are willing to pay extra dollars because they want a portable, lightweight display that puts monitor-like quality on the wall." MediaPro is actually the second LCD alternative to offer both graphics and video projection. In June, Proxima Corp. (San Diego, CA) began shipping Ovation, an active-matrix LCD that sells for $8,495. Weighing in at six pounds, Ovation supports up to 24,389 colors and allows users to connect it to two sources, including a pc- or Mac-based system and an NTSC- or pal-compatible video device. Like the MediaPro, Ovation is used in combination with an overhead projector; you switch between signals using a handheld remote control. The cost of the cutting edge Although LCD projection panels are lightweight and easily transportable, their cost may still seem prohibitive to multimedia producers. Kupiec and Castellano agree that costs will go down as manufacturers begin to get better yields, but that time may still be two to three years away. Another factor that may keep prices high is a recent tax imposed on foreign LCD manufacturers. Many U.S. vendors buy their active-matrix panels from the Japanese; the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) --with some prodding from the U.S. Department of Commerce, which in turn was prodded by several small U.S. manufacturers of LCDs -- recently decided to impose a 62.67 percent tariff on active-matrix displays. The tariff's intent is to discourage dumping, but since no U.S. companies are presently manufacturing the color TFT screens, no alternative is available. So, as nView's Kupiec says, "When it comes to price, we're at [Japan's] mercy." At the mercy of the overhead, too. In addition to the price barrier, no matter how fabulous a TFT display is, presenters are also at the mercy of the onsite overhead projector's lens quality and the amount of light it emits. The image created by a $9,000 TFT projection panel, projected with an old or cheap overhead, will look awful. In addition, while both the MediaPro and Ovation can reproduce the color and resolution of the computer screen, the projected image sizes for LCD panels range from six to 12 feet diagonally -- after 12 feet, the image loses focus -- with a 1:1 viewing ratio (i.e., a six-foot image looks best when you're six feet away from it, etc.). And LCD panels -- active-matrix or not -- can't amplify sound. If you have sound in your multimedia presentations, you still need to have speakers and/or a microphone hooked up to your computer to project it. Connie Guglielmo Cable Television At the Crossroads Changing the way cable operates might be a very good thing The cable television industry is finding itself at a crossroads, facing both exciting new possibilities and the twin specters of government regulation and increased competition lurking around the bend. At the recent Western Cable Television Show in Anaheim, CA, cable industry leaders shared their views, vented their anger and promoted their visions of the future. With the phone companies cut loose to deliver video, and everyone from Penthouse to the Washington Post talking "information services," one of the most important effects of the Western Show may be its cross-pollination: many industries and organizations are now thinking about how to take best advantage of the vast physical infrastructure -- i.e., a wire into some 95 percent of U.S. households -- that cable tv has to offer. But obstacles remain, both from within and without the cable industry itself. Facing the threat of new regulations Foremost in the collective mind of Western Show attenders was the recent spate of both proposed and adopted changes in public policy. These include recent court rulings allowing the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) to provide information services over the phone lines they operate, as well as the related Federal Communications Commission decision to permit "video dial tone" over the phone company wires and the possibility of government re-regulation of the cable television industry at a time when the industry is poised for growth. The cable industry is scared to death of government interference. Its public reputation has not been squeaky clean, to put it mildly: cable operators have long been accused of providing poor customer support as well as charging exorbitant fees in the absence of competition. Cable industry leaders, however, feel that the call for regulation is an attempt by broadcasters and telephone companies to handcuff the cable industry so they (the broadcasters and telcos) can compete more effectively. William Cullen, the president of the California Cable Television Association (CCTA), which hosted the Western Show, claimed that these challenges, if successful, would make cable a bureaucratized delivery system with programming "as bland as network television and telephone service." John Malone, president of TeleCommunications Inc. (TCI), the largest cable operator in the country, and a popular spokesperson for the industry, believes that the image of cable's bad reputation comes from "intra-industry squabbling" between the telcos and cable and that the regulatory efforts against cable are the result. The interesting thing is that, according to Malone, the telephone companies are not supportive of the re-regulatory efforts. In fact, Malone feels that the regulation bills before the U.S. Congress, S. 12 and HR. 213 (which will be heard in January), are backfiring on the phone company's quest to de-regulate the delivery of information to the home. The telcos wanted a freer marketplace in which to compete, not a playing field of comparable regulations. Draconian outcome. The fear remains strong among cable operators and programmers that the current regulatory sentiment in Washington could lead to a "Draconian outcome," in the words of Cullen, especially in an election year. Operators and programmers are planning public relations campaigns as well as significant lobbying efforts to stall the implementation of new regulations. According to Cullen, the various communications entities can work together to solve the "perceived" market problems without government interference. For that matter, Cullen sees no reason that anything other than side-by-side implementation of services is necessary. He sees no benefits to, nor public desire for, a system based on the concept of a single wire, or cable, into the home. He believes that hybrid systems can offer phenomenal possibilities without the phone companies spending billions of dollars to compete directly with cable. Malone agrees. He points out, however, that such efforts will only be successful if common benefits exist, and that forced competition (through public policy changes) will not foster these kinds of opportunities. New technologies and new challenges Internally, there are a number of simultaneous developments that are changing the way the cable industry does business and will change the services it provides to its customers. These changes can also have an effect on many people outside the cable world. The most significant of these changes is technical. The cable television infrastructure is moving rapidly to fiber optic cables -- digital backbones to pure digital or digital/analog hybrid systems. Combined with new digital compression techniques, this infrastructure will soon give the operators hundreds or thousands of channels to fill. Some cable executives believe that decompression will be in the home within two years. (See Briefs item about CableLabs, page 18.) Such a vast number of channels will mean a significant change in the way that cable operators do business, and those changes are already being implemented. Pay-per-view (ppv) may change cable from a subscription service to a transactional one in which the viewer pays for each service (movie, sporting event, news wire) Ý la carte, buying only those items he or she wishes to view. Studio participation. This is music to movie studio executives' ears, and money in their bank accounts. The studios, after all, lose out on the billions of dollars spent annually for video rentals. Once a video cassette is purchased, the movie's producers lose all rights to that cassette. The studios have been searching for a way to resolve this problem, and no new delivery medium will escape their participation. Barry Diller, the chairman of the Fox television network and Twentieth Century Fox studio, has even proposed televising motion pictures on pay-per-view one week prior to the theatrical release, if only to see what the market would pay for such a service. Tom Jokerst, vice president for the office of science and technology at CableLabs, stated (astutely) that the implementation of compression technologies is dependent upon programming; the technology is not going to be implemented just because it exists. Would the additional channel capacity provide enough value to justify the expensive upgrade (for both the consumer and the operator) to digital video signals? Pay-per-view has the potential to generate enough revenue to pay for the analog-to-digital conversion. However, if ppv fails, and there are those who doubt its future, then cable operators will need to do a lot of head-scratching about other revenue streams that will justify the risks and expenses of a massive conversion to digital. A programming renaissance. With compression, a digital system could send six or eight times as many channels to the home. But no one seems to believe that movies will be filling all of these channels. So the question remains: What will programmers use to fill the bandwidth? John Hendricks, president of the Discovery Channel, a leading cable programmer, said that by the turn of the century, the cable industry will be riding the second wave of programming, based on the technology provided for theatrical releases -- but local programming and information services will take the place of theatrical programming. John Malone of TCI has an even grander vision, where local computer networks, local access information and personal communications networks, in which wireless communications devices tune into the cable infrastructure for transmission of the data, combine to form a core of programming options. Are you listening, RBOCs? Tom Elliot, vice president of engineering and technology for TCI, pointed out that the cable operators have an added incentive to upgrade to digital transmission technology: it would become phenomenally expensive for anyone else to compete with them. The cable infrastructure already has a five-year head start over the telcos in this area. Beating Ma Bell at her own game After only a decade of service, the cable television industry has become one of the most essential services in the home, yet it also causes the most animosity. Consumers do not understand what exactly they are paying so much for every month. Why do they have to pay for television over cable, when television over the air is free? For their part, the cable operators feel that subscribers have not related the cost of the service with the development of the programming. John Hendricks calls cable "truly viewer-supported programming." (This statement is no doubt ludicrous to Public Broadcasting System stations, since Hendricks failed to mention advertising revenue.) Cable service providers and programmers are realizing that they must respond to the needs of the communities they serve, and they must do it themselves before they are forced to comply with regulations imposed from above. Digital compression offers the potential for cable to become even more important not just to the home market, but also to businesses, as it may offer alternatives to the communication networks provided by the phone companies. And that is exactly what makes government regulators (and the phone companies) nervous. Are the cable operators providing a public utility, as has been the assumption with the phone companies, or are they corporations providing a marketplace service? If they are deemed a utility by Congress (you can bet that regulation is on the way), the question of whether the operators of a public utility can provide the services as well as the infrastructure will become as valid for the cable industry as it is now for the phone companies. David Baron, Michael Shaughnessy Time Warner's 150-Channel Test System This month, Time Warner will be bringing its 170-channel system online in New York -- Brooklyn and Queens, to be exact -- with 50 channels devoted to pay-per-view movies. Each day, 15 different movies will be available; a total of 60 different movies will be available each month. The selections will be priced between $1.95 and $4.95 per movie, making this service extremely competitive with video rental stores. The most popular movies will be available every 30 minutes, with ten other movies shown on the hour. Users will select the movie and start time from an onscreen menu (which is rather unattractive and looks like an onscreen vcr programming interface). When it is time for your selection to begin, the tuner will tune your television to the proper channel. It will even turn on your set if you have turned it off in the interim. Future implementations will allow the user to stop in the middle of a movie, and restart at that exact spot in the next showing. The goal is true video on demand, and the technology is nearly there. Time Warner's system uses a fiber trunk, which branches off to neighborhoods or streets. No subscriber is more than four amplifiers, or repeaters, away from the main trunk, which means that the signal quality will be very good. This system is a digital/analog hybrid, but most of the pieces are in place for conversion to all-digital when the time and technology are right. The source for the system is a bank of 75 s-vhs tape decks, which begin playing on a pre-programmed sequence. While this sounds like low-end technology, in this system there is evidently no difference in the final picture when a higher-resolution source is used. David Baron Where Does Broadcast TV Fit? Broadcast television is still an important part of the cable television picture. Retransmission of broadcast tv channels is a large part of the cable operators' programming slate, and the goal of many cable subscribers is simply to get better reception of local broadcasts. But broadcast networks are realizing great financial strains as viewership declines and news organizations continue to lose millions of dollars per year. In the meantime, cable networks are gaining subscribers annually and CNN is now an international powerhouse in news delivery. New, expensive technologies such as high-definition television (HDTV) are arriving, and many people feel that the networks will not survive long into the next century. John Malone, president of TeleCommunications Inc., the largest cable operator in the country, feels that cable may offer the answer to the networks' survival. For example, why should the networks spend the millions of dollars necessary to upgrade their plants to be compatible with HDTV when they would not receive any increased revenue from such broadcasts? Why not rebroadcast programs in hd format over cable for those who want and will pay for the additional quality? In this way, the cable industry pays for at least part of the new transmission technology, the cable operators pay the networks for the programming and the consumer pays the operator for the service. This could also be accomplished with value-added transmissions -- simultaneous data transmission along with a news broadcast, for example. Malone also feels that local broadcasters view their organizations as governed by their in-house technology -- that is, they are "only" local broadcasters. If they used their facilities to create local programming to be transmitted over cable, they could realize additional revenue as well as increase their stature within the community. So far, only the Fox network has actively embraced cable television as a distribution medium. It has created FoxNet, a pay service of Fox programs and movies. Barry Diller, chairman of the Fox television network and Twentieth Century Fox studio, foresees additional Fox cable-only services that will debut in the next 12 months -- services that originate with the broadcaster, but reach the "basic" subscriber, who does not purchase additional channels or services. Some ideas that have been mentioned are an all-movie channel, a channel that provides prime-time programming from its broadcast television service at different hours (time shifting), and a children's programming channel. All of these channels would be advertiser supported. David Baron Don't Baby The Bells Keeping them out of info services is 'the fight of our lives' Cathleen Black is president and chief executive officer of the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA). This article was adapted from a speech she gave on October 7, 1991, to the National Press Club in Washington, DC. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that none of us could live without our telephones. Our banking system, our communications system, our transportation system -- just about every aspect of modern life -- relies upon the phone system. A growing dependency Any way you look at it, the phone is incredibly important. How it is used -- or abused -- is going to affect the quality of our lives. What's more, our dependency on the phone is going to grow. During the 1990s, experts expect a tenfold increase in the power and capacity of technology to distribute and receive information. A great deal of this new technology is going to rely upon the phone. Some people don't realize that the newspaper business is a full participant in this dazzling march of new technology. A few cynics might even call newspaper technology an oxymoron. But they'd be wrong. As an industry, we are experimenting with new products --both print and electronic -- that will allow us to stay at the forefront of the communications revolution. Right here, right now. This is not something we're talking about in the future. This is something that is right here, right now. For example, more than 75 newspapers now provide free interactive voice services that offer up-to-the-minute stock quotes and sports scores, the latest news and weather and other services. Many newspapers offer classified advertisers voice mailboxes to post their ads and retrieve responses. These are especially popular with personal ads. More than 500 newspapers are offering 900 numbers or other pay telephone services. And it isn't just newspapers that are embracing this new technology. There are some 12,000 other information services offering everything from complex electronic legal libraries to reports on local surfing conditions. These information services are run by cable-tv companies, broadcasters, database services and start-up entrepreneurs. The umbilical cord As amazing and wonderful as this all sounds, there is one important point to remember: This technology depends upon some sort of communications line. And for right now, that means the phone system is the umbilical cord of electronic information. That is why it is essential to the newspaper business -- and to all of the other businesses that are providing these information services -- to keep access to the phone lines fair and equal. This equal access is being threatened. On July 25, U.S. District Court Judge Harold H. Greene ruled --reluctantly, I might add -- that the regional Bell telephone companies could produce information themselves and sell it over the lines they control. An historical ruling. This ruling marked the first time in the history of our country -- or any country -- that local telephone companies were allowed to be anything other than common carriers of other people's voice and data communications. Since their creation with the breakup of AT&T in 1984, the Bells have been specifically barred from owning or controlling the information sent over their lines. And for good reason. The Bell Operating Companies have a monopoly over local telephone service. If these huge, protected companies are allowed control over both the transmission lines and the information sent, they will be able to take advantage of this monopoly position to hamper other information services. Maybe even drive them out of business. The Bells have the ability -- and the incentive -- to make sure it's their information service messages that reach consumers. How could they do this? In many subtle, but effective ways. In fact, they are already doing it. They deny competitors the latest technological advances. They delay adding features to the phone network until it is in their own best interest. They could use predatory pricing to undercut competitors and drive them out of business. They know when you're awake. Telephone companies have a huge reservoir of information about their potential competitors. They know who calls information services and how often. They can even tell when an information service is about to expand by monitoring the new lines and features ordered. The question, of course, is this: Will the Bell companies make the most of these competitive advantages? They do, and they will. It's a fact of life -- at least of the business life. Some companies that have an edge over their competition, even an unfair edge, sooner or later are going to use it. It's for this reason that our legal system works hard to prevent monopolies and to regulate the few monopolies that are allowed to exist. No one, and I do mean no one, should have complete control over anything as essential as the phone system. Abusing a unique position. If you're not convinced that the Bells would engage in unfair practices, let's look at what has already happened. Every one of these seven companies has abused its unique position. Let me give you just a couple of examples. The Georgia Public Service Commission found that Bell South had abused its position in promoting its voice mail system called MemoryCall. Operators would try to sell Bell South's MemoryCall system when the competitors' customers called for service. Likewise, when repair personnel were on service calls, they would try to sell MemoryCall. Bell South even used competitors' orders for network features as sales leads to steal customers. No dispute. Bell South also delayed the introduction of network features crucial to voice mail until it was ready to introduce its MemoryCall system. This is despite the fact that these features had been available for years and had been requested by customers. Bell South's response? It has not disputed any of these findings. A $10 million fine. Last February, U.S. West admitted it had violated the law by providing prohibited information services, by designing and selling telecommunications equipment and by discriminating against a competitor. The Justice Department imposed a $10 million fine -- 10 times larger than the largest fine imposed in any previous anti-trust division contempt case. Are they bad Baby Bells? Does this mean the Bells are evil? Of course not. But it means they are behaving the way some companies might behave. If it's to their advantage to try to get away with something, chances are pretty good that sooner or later some of them are going to try. If the Bell companies have already abused their position before they get into information services, just imagine what they'll do if they are allowed to provide these services. U.S. leads in information. The United States has 56 percent of all the world's databases, and it is running a handsome surplus in the international balance of trade in information. Revenues from information services are around $9 billion a year. What's more, the demand for this type of information is expected to increase at an annual growth rate of 20 percent through 1995. And all this happened without the Bells being involved -- except, of course, for providing the lines the information is carried on. It has happened because, since the passage of the Communications Act of 1934, Congress has encouraged diversity in the information marketplace as one of the pillars of communications policy on this country. To stand 60 years of sound public policy on its head -- to suddenly say it's all right for the biggest monopolies in the history of the world to "compete" with rivals it could crush in a week -- is to invite a concentration of media power perhaps exceeded only in North Korea . . . where there is one radio station in the whole country, and all you know is what it decides to tell you. Who you are and who you call There is one more important issue I feel I have to mention: Privacy. It's a startling fact, one we don't like to think about, but the plain truth is that phone conversations you have in the privacy of your own home are not necessarily private. When you call for car repair service, the phone company knows it. It knows how often you call your mother. How long your conversations last. That time you called the 976-LUST line -- just that once to see what it was all about -- the phone company knows it. In fact, I think it is fair to say that the Bells know more about you than the IRS and the entire federal government. And if this doesn't scare you, it should. Regulation can't stop them. Up until now, the Bells have had no incentive to fully exploit this information. But the very second they get into the content end of the information business, you can bet that they'll take advantage of every fact they know. There is no limit to how far the Bell operating companies can take this. Regulation could never stop them. With all due respect to the FCC and the state public utility commissions, there isn't a regulatory agency large enough to keep track of the billions of pieces of information that are transported through the phone lines every day. Not so comforting a tool. By dialing a few numbers, you can pretty much reach anybody, anywhere in the world . . . virtually instantaneously. Think of all the faxes you send, the computer databases you call, the horo- scopes and sports reports you hear. Think what all this means to you. It's a comforting tool, this telephone. Now think what it would mean if every time you picked it up, whether making a call or answering it, the phone was revealing something about you to someone who could take advantage of that information. All of a sudden, that phone doesn't seem so familiar and comforting. All of a sudden, our whole concept of what a phone is and how we should use it has changed. I don't know about you personally, but this new phone doesn't appeal to me. A battle of enormous importance If we don't fight the fight of our lives to keep that phone line that runs into almost every American home free and open to everyone, then we are doing a grave injustice to the American public. An unwilling judge. Judge Greene did not want to unleash the RBOCs. He had ruled earlier that they should not be allowed into information services because they posed too much of a threat to fair competition. But a federal appeals court disagreed. It sent the decision back saying he had to lift the ban unless he could find, as a certainty, that unfair competition would result. Since nothing in life is a certainty, there was no way Judge Greene could meet that legal standard. The best he could do was put a stay on his order until appeals have been pursued. I'd like to tell you that I'm confident the appeals court will heed his words and rethink its position on this issue, or that the Supreme Court will reverse it. But the fact is that there's not a lot of room for optimism. Public policy, however, is set by Congress, and that is our target. While the appeals the ANPA and 20 others have filed wind their way through the court system, we must use the time to make our argument to the House and Senate. Keep competition alive Fortunately, we are not alone in this fight. This is not just newspapers versus the Bells. We are being joined by consumer groups, cable companies, computer information services and more. Because this is the type of situation in which nobody stands to win -- except the Bells. What we want is a law keeping the Bells out of information services until a truly competitive, local telephone marketplace develops. A competitive marketplace will develop with time. It did with long distance service, and now the consumer has about 130 long distance companies to choose from. And when that competition developed, newspapers dropped their opposition to allowing AT&T into electronic publishing. $21 million for lobbying. But it will take some time for that to happen in this case, because the Bells are huge, powerful companies. The seven Bells have annual revenues of almost $80 billion -- roughly twice those of the entire newspaper business. They reportedly employ 175 people in their DC lobbying and regulatory offices alone, as well as 50 more in a joint lobbying operation. So they have more people making the rounds in Washington than ANPA has on its entire staff. And their $21 million fund created just to lobby this issue is larger than ANPA's entire budget. The magnitude of our challenge here should encourage, not discourage, efforts to bring this matter to the attention of every member of Congress without delay. Congress needs to make sure the lines of communication are kept open. Congress needs to ensure that we will all be able to enjoy a competitive communications system. Congress needs to protect the privacy of consumers. But if we let the Bells use their power to monopolize information through the phone lines, even an optimistic person like me can't help but be a little frightened. What we do, right now, starting today, can make all the difference. The American public, starting today, must give the message strong and clear -- don't baby the Bells. Keep competition alive. News The chicken lays the egg The politics of information services spur growth -- and new interest in ISDN If you do nothing more than scan the business headlines every day, you have noticed that the U.S. government -- by way of the Federal Communications Commission -- is bent on crowbarring the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) into the online information services business -- come hell, high water, or threat of monopolistic practices. Though the FCC probably didn't plan it that way, fear of what havoc the RBOCs might wreak seems to have prompted existing and potential information providers to get off the dime and start moving on plans to market such services. And it has also prompted a bold move on the part of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to kindle U.S. Congressional interest in Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), which run over existing copper telephone wiring, as the platform for a National Public Network. (See Vol. 1, No. 5, p. 8.) Too little, too late. ISDN has been shunned to date by most of the U.S. telephony community as too little, too late because running at a "mere" 1.5 million bits per second over copper (today's most popular modems do 2,400 bps), it has already been lapped, so to speak, by the incredible bandwidth possible via fiber optics. And it's true, ISDN certainly doesn't look too snappy when compared to other digital protocols, such as SONET, that can achieve speeds up to 51 million bits per second. But EFF makes the case that such comparisons are apples-and-oranges: deploying ISDN today does not obviate deploying fiber, and in fact it will ensure that there are plenty of quality information services -- flourishing in a healthy, competitive market not dominated by the phone companies -- to be shipped down fiber when it reaches ubiquity some 15 years hence. New partners, services As in any situation where companies stand to make or lose a lot of money, the nascent information services business is creating some interesting bedfellows. Sworn enemies -- e.g., cable and telephone companies and newspapers -- are cutting deals with each other. Newspapers are talking to online information providers. Magazines as politically divergent as National Review and the Utne Reader are providing online bulletin board systems for their readers. Former Minitel executives are popping up everywhere from San Francisco's new 101 Online, where they're creating a new Minitel-like service, to Motorola, where they're working on mobile data communications. For example, recently America Online Inc. (AO, formerly Quantum Computer Services) joined forces with the Chicago-based Tribune Co. to provide local editions of AO's national information services. Tribune also made a minority equity investment in AO. Chicago Online. The first new service, called Chicago Online, will be launched in early 1992, according to AO president Steve Case. Another local service, Florida Online, will be launched in the fall of '92. "Ten years ago, the concept was the 'electronic newspaper,'" says Case. "But now newspapers see online services as much more an extension of the newspaper. Some content is provided online, but the purpose is to create interactivity among readers, and to provide in-depth information that appeals to special interests, such as school-related topics, that makes it an extension of the information the newspaper provides. They are also beginning to recognize that interactivity and communication is what makes this new medium interesting. Instead of being scared of it, they're looking for ways to embrace it." Leaving us to our devices As computer storage gets cheaper and data networks get easier and cheaper to navigate, the whole idea of stored media -- even the enormous storage capacity of a CD-ROM, for example -- is called into question. Will we need CDs at all in a future where virtually all information is available online? Commodore, for one, believes the answer is yes. It is already working on ways to augment Commodore Dynamic Total Vision's (CDTV's) offerings with what's available online. Where's the intelligence? David Rosen, director of international marketing for CDTV, talked briefly about Commodore's strategy at the recent Multimedia Expo in San Jose, CA. He said Commodore is already working to figure out the logistics of the relationship between stored and online media. "Where's the intelligence, in the box or in the network?" he says. "How do you find the key to programming? How do you handle distance interaction, like online games?" To answer these questions, he says, Commodore is talking to cable TV firms and is in discussions with telephone companies to explore the possibilities of ISDN usage in the home, "via some machine or other." Resurgence of interest in ISDN Why ISDN? Well, Rosen says, what other way is there to do it? "Fiber's just a conduit, a delivery material. It's a wire," he says. "You can deliver over a fiber just as easily as you can over a copper wire. And at this point, copper wire is what's available. Other things are possible, but you have to start from where you are." Rosen's comments about ISDN echo the sentiment of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As most interested people know, one reason the phone companies have lobbied heavily to sell information services was because, they said, it was the only way they would be able to afford to undertake the massive job of installing fiber-optic wires into U.S. homes. But last month, in testimony before the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance of the Energy and Commerce Committee, EFF cofounder Mitch Kapor asked Congress to push ISDN technology into every home, office and school in the country, and not to wait for fiber to be installed into the home before setting the groundwork for an affordable national public network. Here's what Kapor proposed:  That the nation employ existing ISDN technology to enable anyone with a copper-wired telephone connection to telecommunicate affordably, ubiquitously, and easily;  That we use the existing technology and infrastructure of ISDN to begin building a National Public Network now;  That we stop waiting for the nation to spend hundreds of billions of dollars and decades to rewire with fiber optics;  That we act now to benefit from affordable connectivity for all;  That we use existing technology to gain experience in the human uses and benefits of networking; and  That this technology be priced like local voice service. The Subcommittee was sufficiently impressed to ask EFF to develop the proposal in detail, and it asked for input from the Internet community and computer industry. The impatient entrepreneur Kapor agrees that ISDN is "probably the slowest" digital protocol around. "But that's like criticizing the Mostek 6502 [the microprocessor in the original Apple computer] for being slow -- it's not the point," he says. "The best technology is not the fastest, it's what creates new classes of products for new kinds of users." In any case, he says, it doesn't matter. Even by the estimates of its most optimistic supporters, fiber to the home is 15 years away from being a consumer reality. "We're talking about ISDN in addition to, not instead of, anything else," he says. "We can't wait 15 years to get started." Not surprisingly, Kapor sees strong parallels between the fledgling online world today and the early 1980s, when then-tiny Apple started the pc revolution and Kapor made his fortune with Lotus 1-2-3. "I'm convinced that there will be a whole new class of applications and services that will be driven by individual users, entrepreneurs and others who see potential uses for a public network," he says. "It's a case of entrepreneurial impatience." It's paid for. Also, he says, ratepayers have already paid for the phone companies to upgrade to the digital switches that are the principal technical requirement for ISDN -- the process has already been mandated and funded and is well under way. "The incremental cost of offering ISDN service to consumers is quite modest," he says. "It's a question of whether the telcos see it as an opportunity to mount a platform. And the key question is, do they make it ubiquitously available as a consumer service and do they make it affordable?" Kapor says the telcos and the FCC are still working off the model of central control, where all intelligence is in the network and all services are provided by the network. "They just don't understand the arena that they're playing in, or the opportunity that exists," he says. To the moon, Alice Another factor not typically taken into account is that Europe and Japan are already standardized on ISDN. Deploying ISDN in the U.S. opens up vast markets to any firm wanting to play in the global information market. For example, at the Telecon show in Geneva in October, many Japanese manufacturers showed high-quality ISDN picture phones. People familiar with the chip technology required for such devices say that very high-quality talking-heads video over ISDN absolutely will exist. "That opens up a whole new set of applications," says Kapor. "Once VCR-quality video over ISDN happens, and if there's a fat ISDN data pipe available to everyone, the incentive for better video compression goes to the moon." Kapor says he's talked to companies such as Thinking Machines, NeXT, Sun, Shiva and Apple, and "They all know what they'd do with that kind of pipe if they had it --everything from video bulletin board services, to selling cheap Internet connections, to a bridge for corporate local area networks, to doing various types of low-end interactive multimedia." Though philosophically the EFF is aligned with the cable companies and newspapers that are opposed to telcos competing in the information services market, Kapor thinks getting them out is "not politically saleable." EFF's idea is to make ISDN deployment a condition of the telcos' ability to compete in information services, along with whatever restrictions and safeguards are imposed by Congress. An elegant solution. It's funny how elegant solutions to thorny problems are often sitting right under our noses. If the Internet community, which serves as the backbone of EFF's support, throws its weight behind the idea of a national public network based on ISDN, the ramifications for the U.S. information industry could be immense. It would solve the stultifying "chicken-and-egg" problem -- i.e., why provide services if there isn't decent conduit vs. why provide decent conduit if there's nothing to ship over it -- that has kept potential information entrepreneurs, and their clever and useful applications, off the wire. Denise Caruso Do you believe in Magic? News story calls out the dogs on high-profile startup General Magic, Silicon Valley's latest high-profile startup, has attracted lots of unwanted attention in the past few weeks. Started a year and a half ago by Marc Porat, who'd handled business development for Apple's Advanced Technology Group, and original Macintosh team wizards Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson, the firm has been a favorite target of industry rumor-mongering since its founding. Widely known to be developing a personal communication device, General Magic just got nailed by Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Japan's version of the Wall Street Journal) with a report that it was receiving a hefty new round of investments from Sony, Motorola and maybe even Toshiba, Matsushita and AT&T. (Apple Computer already owns a sizable chunk of the firm.) The report even speculated that General Magic's product would blossom into a full-scale U.S.-Japan joint venture, and that an official announcement was not far off. Follow-up reports in U.S. newspapers didn't contradict the original story, though no confirmation by Sony or Motorola was forthcoming. All those U.S. startups look the same. Jane Anderson, General Magic's spokesperson/gatekeeper, not only says the report was "highly inaccurate," but claims that the Japanese newspaper got General Magic mixed up with Kaleida, the Apple/IBM joint multimedia venture. This is not altogether weird, considering that Kaleida has said it may develop hardware specifications as well as software, and most of the players interested in General Magic are also watching Kaleida closely. Dave Nagel, Apple's director of advanced technology, and acting director of Apple's nascent consumer group, didn't agree. "The story may not have been accurate about General Magic," he says. "But it certainly isn't about Kaleida." Even more interesting was industry speculation that General Magic may decide building hardware is too risky, expensive and time-consuming to pursue to its logical conclusion. Besides, the torrential information leaks out of the company are likely to make it increasingly difficult for General Magic to keep its product plans out of competitors' hands. Software only? Some speculate the company may decide instead to license its operating system software to others building such devices. (AT&T has done significant work on "smart phones," and companies such as Sharp are working on "communicating" versions of portable information systems like the Wizard.) Scrapping a hardware plan is not an absurd strategy in a slumped economy where computer hardware is a commodity. In fact, the only way U.S. hardware manufacture makes sense now is with the very kinds of Japanese partners (or expertise) that Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported were lining up for General Magic. Denise Caruso New breed of digital artist New perceptions, experiences at CyberArts At the CyberArts International show in Pasadena, CA last month, hundreds of "cyberartists" gathered to discuss new modes of perception and experience made possible by digital technology. What was apparent was that new creative systems are setting new thresholds and standards exceeding the conventional definitions being discussed in the computer and consumer technical communities for multimedia platforms. At CyberArts, artists explored the limits of audio, visual and performance media. Holo-Video arrives One historic event at CyberArts was a demonstration by Steve Benton from MIT Media Lab, showing "the world's first holographic movie." Fresh from the Spatial Imaging Lab, the videotape showed MIT's new Holo-Video system, which transmits a digital image over fiber to a special display, creating a moving, computer-generated digital hologram. The source image is computed with a Connection Machine (the powerful parallel processing system from Thinking Machines), derived from an image created on a Silicon Graphics Iris workstation. A unique set of algorithms reduce the normal amount of holographic information to a data stream that can actually be transmitted over fiber. The dream, of course, is to be able to project such holograms into the raw space of, say, your living room. But Benton says today this can't be done without also filling the room with some kind of vapor to hold the projected light. However, MIT hopes to accomplish the same goal with rotating mirrors and specially ground lenses. The Holo-Video signal itself is actually composed of output from three lasers (since it's a color image, one laser each for red, green and blue), blasted into a rotating mirror that modulates the three beams into a viewing space -- an imaging area where the laser beams are projected and then converge through a lens toward the viewer. MIT will submit the Holo-Video transmission and compression specifications to the committee for possible inclusion in the MPEG-2 standard. Beyond spatial sound. Three-dimensional or spatial sound is another area where much interesting work is being done by a number of leading theorists and music companies that attended CyberArts. Spatial sound is the realization of dimensionality in audio perception, in the same way a hologram allows you to view an "object" from different angles. Listening to 3D sound through headphones is a hyper-real audio experience, delivering the uncanny impression of sound emanating from any precise location -- in front of you, behind you, whispering up to you, scissors rasping to cut your hair -- as opposed to in the middle of your head, which is where today's stereo sound aims. The sense of presence is heightened with the addition of a baseboard (by BodySonic Inc. of Tokyo), placed either beneath a chair or underfoot, which vibrates in the low bass registers and heightens the experience. At CyberArts, the overall impression was that a well-tuned digital signal processor (dsp) added to a multimedia platform could easily deliver 3D sound. New technology ranged from the Roland Spatial Sound processor, used in the current Michael Jackson video, to Bo Gehrig's Focal Point 3D audio DSP board for the Macintosh. Gehrig, founder of Focal Point, showed some of his ideas for an audio spatial interface, which he claims allows you to hear things in space, estimate the distance of a sound source and make commands to objects in the space without a display. Sensorama (1960) steals the show The subject of virtual reality (VR) made a full day at CyberArts, beginning with the "Existential Funhouse," an experimental, computer-enhanced participatory theater. Although Jaron Lanier from VPL Research Inc. discussed many new projects ranging from the redesign of the transportation system of Berlin to new VR theme parks in Tokyo and Los Angeles, inventor Mort Heilig stole the show by demonstrating one of the only remaining patented Sensorama simulators, first introduced in 1960 to demonstrate what he calls "experience theater." Sensorama provides a complete "multimedia" experience in which you simultaneously watch a stereoscopic 3D movie, listen to stereo sound, feel motion in a chair, smell aromas of scenes and feel wind blow by at various temperatures. Setting a public, vocal agenda Trip Hawkins, chairman of Electronic Arts and president of SMSG Inc., was the keynote speaker. He delivered an hour-long "state of the media" address, imploring the creative community to become involved with the issues of the new technology. Hawkins concluded the conference by calling a "town hall" meeting to help set a public, vocal agenda about requirements for new interactive media. Attenders voted that no current platform or standard is sufficient. The CyberArts conference raises the question, Are we planning sufficient standards for the digital future of multimedia? When the end user is a studio visual artist, someone in the film or sound industry, will we be able to deliver the peak experiences these artists are already prototyping? Mark Esserlieu Japan rolls HDTV programming For $2,100, see Sting in HD on standard TV Corny, but true: November 25th --that's 11/25, by the way -- was officially declared "Hi-Vision Day" in Japan. The Japanese government, along with major broadcaster NHK and a group of consumer electronics manufacturers, decided it was the most appropriate day to celebrate high-definition TV (HDTV)'s 1,125 lines of horizontal resolution. As part of the day's festivities, those involved announced that they'd begun testing eight hours per day of HDTV broadcasts throughout Japan in Japan's Hi-Vision HD format. According to NHK, which is providing about three-fifths of the programming, there is enough original material to last one or two months without repeats. Initial offerings included a concert by the rock-jazz musician Sting, Kabuki theater productions, and nature programs. Consumers can view these programs on standard television sets by adding $2,100 worth of additional equipment. HD hybrid. The Hi-Vision format is a digital/analog hybrid, and there is international agreement that it is probably inferior to the fully digital systems currently under consideration in this country by the FCC. The Japanese, however, are banking on the head start they would receive by programming and broadcasting now and upgrading as the market demands. There is an additional problem, though. The only available HD monitors cost $30,000-35,000. And a VCR runs a mere $150,000. Sony has reportedly sold only 300 HD television units since last December. As a result of the cost, only NHK -- and the Ministry of Postal Services, go figure -- are really excited about this development. The home electronics industry in Japan seems to have split in its support of the analog HD format. Sony and Matsushita are manufacturing monitors, but Matsushita is following Toshiba and JVC in producing and promoting the "enhanced definition" EDTV II format (called Clear-Vision, as opposed to Hi-Vision) which rates somewhere between the U.S. broadcast standard, NTSC, and HDTV in terms of resolution and picture quality, and is delivered over terrestrial radio waves (HDTV is transmitted via satellite). All of these companies are looking to the next generation of television, whatever that may be, to create new markets. Indifferent to analog. Industry sources in Japan have said that they are indifferent to analog HDTV because it is of no particular benefit to them. If digital HD with interactivity were to be realized, the market would immediately respond. The Japanese have long been willing to use a new technology for a few years and then scrap it as something better came along. This is not a philosophy that holds much sway in the U.S. It is interesting, however, to see which technologies and products become successful, and to use that information to examine the possibilities in this country. If improved picture quality alone does not pique the interest of the Japanese public, maybe a fully digital system is worth waiting for after all. David Baron and High Technology Communications Briefs It's official: multimedia pioneer Marc Canter leaves MacroMind Marc Canter and MacroMindlParacomp Inc. have parted ways. Canter, who founded MacroMind in 1984 and who for many years was the most visible and vocal industry promoter of multimedia technology, has left the San Francisco-based company, effective January 1. Canter began a six-month leave of absence from MacroMind in February, amidst rumors that he would soon leave the company. He will continue as a director and remains its largest shareholder. Canter added that his departure was a "mutual decision" made by him and MacroMind, which this year merged with graphics software developer Paracomp, also based in San Francisco. Industry sources, however, say Canter was dissatisfied with the change of direction MacroMind had taken, including its merger with Paracomp and its acquisition in November of sound tools -- the Mac Recorder digitizer and SoundEdit software -- from Farallon. Tim Mott, MacroMindlParacomp president and CEO, said that Canter's departure will have only a "minimal" effect on the company. "He has been absent from the company for most of the last year while on sabbatical and this will effectively and operationally be a continuation of that," Mott said, adding that Canter will continue to work as a consultant for the company. GAIN Technologies jumps into Unix authoring market; Matsushita is partner in development Palo Alto, CA-based GAIN Technologies, nÇ Cayenne Systems, is about to ship the beta version of its Unix object-based multimedia authoring system for large-scale applications. GAIN's products may have significant impact in the Unix world. Its joint development partner is Matsushita, the Japanese consumer electronics giant, which invested millions in the company. It recently announced its intention to use GAIN technology to control audio-visual equipment, as well as to develop HDTV programming. Though the agreement grants Matsushita certain rights to GAIN's technology, the connection is not exclusive; GAIN is free to market the products to vendors as well as users. GAIN products are built upon the paradigm of a relational database. Designed to run sans server over distributed heterogeneous networks, they obviate the need for the massive central storage a multimedia network might otherwise require. Each of the five GAIN products has a specific function. GAIN Momentum is a general-purpose system for building large-scale hypermedia applications, with complete support for SQL databases to allow fast integration of rich data types. GAIN Insight is specifically designed for computer-based training and includes course administration, feedback and remediation tools. GAIN Access is for building and delivering interactive online reference systems that navigate quickly through large volumes of multimedia data sources. GAIN Support is for authoring online help systems. And GAIN Exposure was designed to create and deliver demonstrations of any X Window system-based software. Telecom and cable mix it up in UK In what is likely to be an increasingly familiar scenario, telecommunications firm First Pacific Networks (FPN) has announced a strategic partnership with one of the world's largest suppliers of broadband cable tv equipment, Jerrold Communications Europe. The partnership will market FPN's voice-data technology for use on British and European cable networks. Once installed on Jerrold's Cableoptics architecture, the companies say, FPN's Personal Xchange technology will support the delivery of a wide range of telephone services, fax transmittal, modem communications, shared data services and video conferencing to businesses and homes over standard cable tv wires. Jerrold Communications, based in Reading, UK, is a division of General Instrument Corp. First Pacific Networks is based in Sunnyvale, CA; its products include multimedia networking systems and digital telephony switches. FPN also recently signed a deal with Hyundai Electronics Industries to distribute (and eventually manufacture) Personal Xchange systems in Korea. FPN says Hyundai plans to use the system to develop multimedia workstations, deliver telephone services over Seoul's cable tv system and build a basic telephone infrastructure in developing nations. CD-I hits Blockbuster, gets own MPEG As the result of a new agreement between Philips and Blockbuster Entertainment Co., Blockbuster -- the largest video rental chain in the U.S. -- will begin promoting CD-I software and hardware in its video rental outlets. To make things even more interesting, Blockbuster also intends to purchase outstanding shares of Cityvision plc., the largest rental chain in the UK, and Philips has the right to purchase 50 percent of those shares or an equivalent amount of Blockbuster common shares. There was no announcement made about how Blockbuster may promote CD-I. The assumption is that it will rent CD-I titles, just as it currently rents Nintendo cartriges. In other CD-I news, the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) has agreed on an implementation of its video compression standard specifically for CD-I players. Philips will now begin to develop a chip that would allow full-motion video to be displayed within CD-I titles. The chip will be placed in future versions of CD-I players or added as an upgrade to the current players. Philips claims the first video-capable players will be released in Europe in the second half of 1992, with U.S. release in October of '92. It expects the first full-motion applications -- such as interactive movies -- in early 1993. The first commercial VR system Spectrum Holobyte, the company that brought you Tetris and the F-16 fighter simulation Falcon, has joined forces with Horizon Entertainment and W Industries to create an entertainment software company called Cyberstudio -- devoted specifically to software for W's Virtuality system. Virtuality is billed as "the first virtual-reality system available for consumer use," but don't expect to rush out and buy one cheap. Virtuality is what's known as "location-based entertainment," as opposed to something you'd set up at home, and is priced as such at $55,000-70,000. The companies involved say that Virtuality systems will be placed in selected shopping malls beginning this month. Though Cyberstudio doesn't expect to launch its first original titles until early 1993, it's already working on modifying existing Virtuality titles. CableLabs gathers compression ideas Cable Television Laboratories Inc. (also known as CableLabs), along with TeleCommunications Inc. (TCI) and Viacom -- the largest cable operators in the country -- and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), have just closed the response period on their Request For Proposals (RFP) for equipment and technology for digital compression program delivery systems. The RFP calls for compression devices to enable the transmission of multiple channels or services over a single channel, be it satellite transponder, cable television head-end or public television station. The request specifies that the technology be interoperable with both today's transmission capabilities and whichever digital television systems may be in operation in the future. Since PBS signed on, the sponsoring group now includes a traditional broadcaster, not just cable operators. According to John Malone, chairman of TCI, the group expects that other organizations will soon join them in the development of this technology. He estimated that the RFP could result in a contract valued in the billions of dollars by the time it is complete. While an RFP provides no assurances that such technology will be implemented, the fact that these companies have opened their technology acquisition plans to whomever is interested in participating is a sign that, at least in the television industry, interoperability and compatibility may be the norm, not the exception. CableLabs, which was founded by a consortium of cable operators including TCI and Viacom, is the research facility for the entire cable television industry. Its charter is to ensure that different cable operators do not create independent and incompatible systems. Researchers explore computer ethics As increasing amounts of our communications are computer-mediated, not face-to-face, it's critical that we face the ethical issues around personal privacy, ownership and control of information that such communications raise. To this end, researchers at the University of British Columbia have designed a three-year research project called "Computer Ethics Through Thick and Thin," funded by an Applied Ethics Strategic Grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The project will create two "virtual" colloquia, based on electronic mail, that will differ in the information available to their members. The "Thick" group will know each other only as continuing pseudonyms; the "Thin" group will be able to access whatever information its members contribute. For a more detailed description of the project and information on how to join either group, contact Peter Danielson at the Centre for Applied Ethics, University of British Columbia. He can be reached via Internet at danielsn@unixg.ubc.ca or by voice line at (604) 822-4658. Cross-platform CD-ROM at last? The fact that ICOM Simulations, Inc., of Wheeling, IL, recently demonstrated its newest cd-rom-based video game, called Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective, isn't all that significant -- even though the game employs a whopping 90 minutes of quarter-frame, 15-frame-per-second audio and video footage. What's significant about Sherlock Holmes is that ICOM is utilizing a proprietary compression scheme that can function on six different hardware platforms: Intel-based PCs, Macintoshes, NEC's TurboGrafx-16 and PC Engine, Fujitsu FM Towns and Commodore CDTV. And, according to ICOM, additional platforms will follow. While each platform requires its own disk -- i.e., one disk will not play on multiple machines -- using one generic algorithm to compress the video significantly cuts down on development time. Certainly, it helps ICOM get titles out the door. ICOM will not be licensing its algorithm, but it wants to team up with anyone who wishes to turn their video into a disk-based application. And the more platforms you're on, the more disks you can sell. ICOM's goal is to release "as many titles on as many platforms as possible," according to John Kalb, ICOM's director of sales and marketing. Lucas Foundation aims to help teachers The George Lucas Educational Foundation, now nearly a year old, has hired an executive director and is moving forward with its charter of developing innovative ways to integrate emerging technologies with teaching and learning. Patty Burness has also joined the Foundation's board of directors, which is chaired by George Lucas and vice-chaired by Stephen Arnold (formerly of LucasArts Entertainment, now of Interactive Home Systems). Burness's last post was as chief of staff for Bill Honig, state superintendent of public instruction for the State of California. Burness says that the Foundation is not a grant-maker. Instead, it is a tax-exempt public charity that has as its charter the development of prototypes of "great interactive multimedia programs," as well as the development of teaching and learning technologies as tools for educators. "We want to show educators in the technology industry a new standard of excellence," she says. The Foundation, which already sports a full-time staff of four and a consulting team of programmers, graphic designers and production managers, intends to distribute its prototype to schools freely after it's completed, says Burness. In addition, it hopes to launch a regular training program for teachers on the value of integrating technology into the classroom. Its charter also includes the development of an electronic network for communication and information dissemination. SALT calls for conference papers The Society for Applied Learning Technology (SALT) is looking for people interested in submitting papers or making panel presentations at its 1992 Interactive Multimedia Conference, scheduled for August 26-28 in Arlington, VA. SALT has rolled three events into one date: the eighth annual "Applications of cd-rom in Education and Training," 14th "Interactive Videodisc in Education and Training" and eighth "Development of Interactive Instruction Materials" conferences. The first two conferences cover prototype applications and new technology developments, including virtual reality; the interactive instruction materials conference focuses on techniques, evaluation methodologies and design. To submit a paper or request a spot on a panel, send an abstract of 25 words and the title of the paper or panel to Program Coordinator, SALT, 50 Culpeper Street, Warrenton, VA 22186. Light Source releases PC-VCR software Light Source Inc., of Greenbrae, CA, which recently introduced the Ofoto software for the Apple Scanner, has released its second product, the NEC Video Sequencer. The Sequencer is designed to work with NEC's PC-VCR, a frame-accurate, s-vhs video tape recorder that electronically labels and "stripes" (adds frame location information to) standard vhs and s-vhs video tapes. The system also requires a Macintosh II with 5 mb of ram. It costs $595; each PC-VCR costs $2,195. Light Source's assumption is that millions of hours of video footage in corporate offices and educational institutions remain largely inaccessible. The Video Sequencer allows users to create a database of video clips, and it enables them to immediately access and combine only the pieces of video that are desired. Mediascape Digitizing Sound And Images A quick 'n' dirty overview of sampling From time to time, we will explicate the digital technologies that underlie the consumer products and industry trends that Digital Media covers. Our purpose is twofold: to build a common glossary of terms and concepts, and to help the reader identify the possibilities and the limitations that are inherent in each technology. Most devices that detect sound and images, such as microphones and video cameras, are analog devices. They output an electrical current that varies continuously in proportion to the changes in air pressure (which creates sound) or light intensity. Digitizing these signals, so they can be processed and manipulated by computers, requires converting this continuously varying current into a sequence of numbers. This process is called sampling. At the other end of the digitizing process, we have to turn the numbers back into smoothly varying currents to drive speakers and picture tubes. In any Radio Shack you can find blister-packed chips to perform the mechanics of analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion. They work fine, provided you can live with their limitations on speed and precision. Faster or more precise parts are readily available (though not from Tandy) at a correspondingly steeper price. How much speed and how much precision do you need? The rest of this article will sketch out the basic considerations. We'll begin with the simplest case --monophonic audio -- and work up to motion video. Audio: one-dimensional sampling If you plot a graph of the current coming out of a microphone for some period of time, you get a wiggly line. The line is fairly smooth; there are no sudden jumps from one level to another. (See Fig. 1.) The electrical current (vertical axis) is analogous to the air pressure on the microphone's diaphragm. Higher-pitched music corresponds to a wigglier line; louder sound gives you a larger wave from peak to trough. To make a digital representation, we sample the waveform. We divide the total possible range of current into some number of zones (the horizontal slices through the graph) and number the zones from lowest to highest. At regular intervals (the vertical slices in Figure 1), we note which zone the wave is in. The number of the zone is what's stored in the computer as the value for that sample. We do not take any account of whether it is high or low within a zone; each sample is pigeonholed with no further shades of meaning. The result is a stream of numbers, one value per sample, coming out of our digitizing circuitry in a fixed cadence. So far, we have been deliberately vague about how many zones to divide the total range into, or how often to take the samples. The reason is that sampling is a very general technique for making digital measurements of continuous processes. It works not only for sound, but also for factory instrumentation, automotive diagnostics and so on. Each application has different sampling requirements. Here's how they are determined. Beautiful to ugly and back again. As you can see from Figure 2, the sampling process radically alters the wave. No longer continuous, it jumps suddenly from one level to another, and there are no values in between the levels. Yet this jagged collection of numbers can indeed be turned back into sound; simple averaging and smoothing (called "low-pass filtering" in the audio world or "unsharpening" in the computer graphics business) restore it to a semblance of the original, as Figure 3 shows. Figure 3 shows something else. In region A, the original wave was changing slowly compared to the spacing of our samples, and here the restored version is a pretty close match. But in region B, the original was changing rapidly and the restoration is nothing like the original. To pick up rapid changes, we need to sample the analog signal very often. Even if we had taken many more samples, the restoration wouldn't have all the detail the original had, because much of the variation falls within a single zone. To pick up small variations, we need to divide the total range into many small zones rather than a few big ones. The moral is clear: for better reproduction, it pays to sample the signal very frequently and divide the signal range into a large number of zones. The Nyquist limit. In 1928, AT&T mathematician Harry Nyquist proved that under ideal conditions, you must sample a signal at least twice as frequently as the highest frequency that is present in the signal. For example, the threshold of hearing for most adults is somewhere below 16 kHz; to render sounds accurately up to that frequency, you must sample the signal at 32 kHz (32,000 times per second). Actually, because physical devices are never ideal, you should go well beyond that. The sample rate for CD audio is 44.1 kHz, while studios regularly use 48 kHz. If you fail to sample often enough, the signal will be distorted. It's not that you merely fail to reproduce the highest tones, which would sound no worse than turning down the treble control. Rather, those high tones are transformed into sounds of lower frequency called "aliases." And while there is a mathematical relationship among the original signal, the sampling rate and the alias's frequency, there is no musical relationship. Aliasing makes music sound awful. To avoid aliasing, either you must make sure that you sample often enough for the highest frequency that you will ever encounter, or you must pre-filter the input signal so that you will never digitize a frequency that is too high for your sampling rate. Good filters -- those that pass all the frequencies you want and reject all others -- are hard to make. Sampling more frequently gives better reproduction, but at the cost of handling more data. Dynamic range. "Quantization" is the process by which the audio signal is divided into zones, and the precision of that process -- i.e., the number of zones you divide the signal into -- governs the dynamic range (the ratio of the greatest component to the smallest component) of the restored signal. That little A-to-D converter chip from Radio Shack carves the total input range into 256 zones, so it can give you a 256:1 ratio of the loudest signal to the quietest. In audio terms, that's a dynamic range of 48 dB. (The abbreviation dB is for deciBel, named for Alexander Graham Bell. It connotes the logarithm of the ratio between two intensities. In the audio world, one dB represents a just-noticeable difference between two sound levels. Any 2:1 ratio equals 6 dB, while any 10:1 ratio is 20 dB. Because the scale is logarithmic, multiplying the ratios means adding the dB numbers.) In computer terms, it takes eight bits to represent 256 values, so that particular chip can be called an 8-bit converter. We could also say that the conversion is done with eight bits of precision. Similarly, a 12-bit converter gives you a 4,096:1 ratio (72 dB). CD audio uses 16-bit samples -- each sample is a 16-bit number -- giving a 65,536:1 ratio (96 dB), which is greater than most human ears can distinguish. Practical concerns. A real-world digital sound system does a little bit more than the simple sampling and quantization we have just described. First of all, we really want stereo sound, so we will digitize each channel separately; the output data stream will alternately have a sample from the left channel, then from the right channel. For quadraphonic sound, we'd need to digitize four channels, and the data stream would alternate channels 1-2-3-4. Second, we will probably want to encode the stream of numbers to provide error detection and correction. This involves computing check-digits and weaving them into the data stream. Just before converting the data back to analog form, we recompute the check-digits; if they don't match the originals, we have detected an error. Clever coding methods may even tell us which bits are wrong. Third, we'll want to add control codes so we can skip to the beginning or end of a piece, show the elapsed time and so forth. (We'll address these issues in a future article on CD data formats.) Image sampling: slice, then dice We talked first about sound because the rules that apply there are quite general and work for any one-dimensional waveform: we chop a signal at regular intervals and quantize each sliver. This concept can be extended to a two-dimensional signal such as a still image. All we have to do is slice the image into strips, then process the strips one after another. We handle each strip as if it were one-dimensional. (Right! Slice, then dice.) The clearest illustration is the television "raster," the scanning lines that form the onscreen image. Every kid has looked closely at a TV screen and noticed that it is made of several hundred discrete, closely spaced lines. Along each line, the brightness varies more or less continuously. (See Fig. 4.) You can digitize this signal exactly the way you would an audio signal. A waveform is a waveform; the sampling rate and the dynamic range are still the main factors to consider. Color images are analogous to stereo sound, except that you have to do everything by threes (for the red, green and blue primary colors) instead of left-right pairs. Each color is sampled separately by placing a filter between the image and the light detector; all the detector measures is the intensity of the light that reaches it. But what if you're digitizing prerecorded analog video that's spooling off a VCR and not directly from a camcorder, you ask? If we're getting the data from a VCR, the light has already been detected by the camcorder. So we're just looking at a varying voltage waveform, which we can digitize pretty much exactly like audio. Red, green and blue are multiplexed together into a single (very complex) waveform; for compression, we have to then demultiplex. Thus, for each color component, the intensity of a sample can be represented as a single number. Representing intensity. As with sound, the number of bits you use to represent intensity can vary for different applications. Practically speaking, the human eye has a hard time seeing differences that are less than one percent, but to be on the safe side we will want to render half-percent intervals, for a total of 200 different intensity levels. Since seven bits can only represent 128 levels while an 8-bit number can represent 256 levels, that calls for digitizing with 8-bit precision. Mind you, that's eight bits per color; each sample is thus 24 bits in all. This 24-bit color is the standard for photorealistic reproduction. (With 32-bit computers, each sample often carries an extra eight bits that can be used for special effects information such as transparency.) There are some changes in terminology between sounds and images. For example, the sampling rate for sound is related to the highest frequency (pitch) in the audio signal, and is expressed in samples per second (hertz, or Hz) because sound is a time-based signal. The equivalent for images is called the "scanning resolution," and is expressed in dots per inch or per millimeter. The Nyquist rule now comes into play twice: once when you decide how many scan lines to slice the image into, and again when you dice each line. The highest "frequency" in the image is spatial and is set by the smallest object and the sharpest edge. The aliases due to undersampling are jaggies and picket-fence effects, which are most visible in near-vertical and almost-horizontal thin lines. Motion video: onward to 3D From still images to full-motion video is a very short step. A moving picture is a sequence of stills, now called frames. As before, it is possible to undersample the scene by capturing too few frames per second. The grossest undersampling causes jerky motion and flicker; to prevent this, the frame rate ought to be at least 20 frames per second, even for slowly moving objects such as talking heads in a videoconference. A less obnoxious form of aliasing is the wagon wheels that seem to spin backward; to really prevent that effect, you'd have to shoot several hundred frames per second. However, by reintroducing the time element, we have added a host of practical problems. The first is cost. There is very little time for quantizing each picture element. Take U.S. standard NTSC video as an example: each frame lasts of a second and has 525 scan lines. Each scan line thus lasts a mere 64 microseconds. There's not much use in digitizing more than 500 samples per line, but even so, that only gives 128 nanoseconds (billionths of a second) per sample. Circuits that can react that fast are pricey; we ain't talking Radio Shack here. The second problem is that all this sampling and quantizing generates a phenomenal amount of digital data -- one minute of digitized motion video takes up approximately 1,300 MB of hard disk space. However, a fair amount of this data contains redundant information that can be squeezed out for storage and reconstituted later. High-quality compression is the single most important technological feat to be achieved for the future success of digital video. Next month's Mediascape will discuss various existing still and motion picture compression techniques, as well as those still on the drawing boards. Peter Dyson I/O Readers Respond What's wrong with this picture? Max Whitby, Founding Director The MultiMedia Corp. Back in February 1991, an interesting meeting took place over two days at Laguna Beach in Southern California. It was a small conference organized by Bob Stein from the Voyager Company and Steve Gano from the Apple Multimedia Lab. The event was held under the auspices of the Aspen Institute and sponsored by the Markle Foundation. At the meeting, around 20 producers and authors of interactive multimedia gathered to discuss the state of our emerging art. A small number of works were shown, and the focus of the conversation was almost exclusively on design. It was a rare and valuable opportunity to put aside for a while questions of technology or marketing and to consider the new medium simply as a form of communication in its own right. Maybe it won't work It soon became apparent during the early discussions that a ghost was haunting the proceedings like the unhappy spirit of Banquo in Macbeth. The ghost was endlessly repeating the same refrain, discouraging anyone from being too enthusiastic about the new medium. The ghost was whispering: "Interactive multimedia may not work." We are now several years into the current wave of computer-driven multimedia development. A great many talented refugees from the film, television, print publishing, videodisc, games and software industries have been plugging away at this new genre now for quite some time. At least a hundred projects have been completed: some as published products, others as one-off r&d design examples shown at trade shows and conferences. Effort, enthusiasm and millions. The stark truth is that, despite such an intense period of effort and enthusiasm on the part of a diverse and talented group, and despite millions of dollars spent developing multimedia products, the end results are frankly disappointing. As someone said in opening remarks at the Laguna Beach conference, there is as yet not one shining example of interactive multimedia that can be held up high with the unequivocal pronouncement, "This is what all the fuss is about!" Perhaps we need a little longer to come up with our equivalent of Birth of a Nation. Perhaps the current machines are still not powerful enough or sufficiently specialized to deliver the right experience. But is it also possible, as the ghost was trying to warn us, that the central premise of the new medium may be flawed? Fine fledglings. Let me immediately acknowledge that some fine and important work has certainly been done. Robert Winter's Companion Series to Beethoven's 9th Symphony and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Cosmic Osmo, Spaceship Warlock, The Visual Almanac, Life Story, Guernica, Ulysses, Treasures of the Smithsonian and Verbum Interactive (to name but a few) are all powerful and successful examples of the fledgling genre. But if we are honest, we must acknowledge that most of them are flawed in one way or another: by slow access times, by complex and confusing interfaces and above all by the need for an eloquent and persuasive demonstrator to show them off to best effect. To use in anger The experience of seeing these projects presented by their creators (in effect a linear performance) is often much more satisfying than sitting down to use the product and getting angry. Excellent as these titles are in their very different ways, none of them yet seem to me to fulfill the fundamental promise of interactive multimedia. Perhaps this "fundamental promise" is merely a delusion: a false expectation of what can be achieved on a computer. But if so, I believe it is a widely shared delusion that lies at the heart of the instant appeal that the very idea of interactive multimedia has for so many people. The basic premise of combining the two most powerful communications technologies of our century -- television and computers -- must surely lead to a new medium greater than either of its two component parts. Engaging and interactive. Speaking personally, it was precisely the exciting appeal of this marriage that persuaded me in 1988 to divert my career in broadcast television towards the uncharted but alluring territory of interactive multimedia. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I had a simple vision of what successful new media products would be like. They would have all the engagement of good television, but, thanks to the computer, they would also be interactive: people could explore any aspects of a given subject by moving seamlessly through a landscape of information with the help of appropriate software. 'Hopelessly naive' Looking back, this premise now seems to me so hopelessly naive that today I have considerable difficulty even formulating it! Having spent a good part of my life in film cutting rooms and video editing suites, I should hardly need reminding of how much effort and attention goes into constructing a coherent narrative path through a story. Yet, in interactive media there is an unstated assumption that such careful preparation can safely be discarded. Indeed, I have sometimes heard it suggested that the editorial viewpoint expressed in a linear medium like film or television is undesirably dictatorial, and that interactive multimedia at last promises to give the viewer unfettered access to "pure information." Who wants pure information? In many ways, this is, of course, pure nonsense. If I stop to think about it, most of the time when consuming information, I want that information to be selected and organized so that I can comprehend it efficiently. I want it presented to me in a meaningful order by someone knowledgeable. Usually, I do not wish to be forced to make executive decisions every few minutes about what I might like to see next. There are exceptions to this rule. If I am approaching a subject in an educational or research context, then it can be very valuable to "take apart" the information with which I am being presented. Then I will welcome the ability to discover related material or to go back to extended sources. Then I will be happy to make a high level of input to direct my learning experience. The linear experience But at other times, when I am being entertained or simply informed, linear presentation has much to recommend itself. Above all, it allows me to enter an active state of psychological engagement with the material (unfairly maligned as "couch potato mode") which is highly efficient and which is disrupted by the need to make frequent choices. For myself, as I continue to produce interactive multimedia titles, I am returning to the linear as the foundation for much of my work. I do not claim that this is the only way forward: Moss Landing (an intriguing prototype produced by Fabrice Florin at Apple Computer) and Spaceship Warlock (by Reactor Inc.) both succeed by raising the interactive stakes and immersing audiences in their different worlds with virtual-reality-like interfaces. Nevertheless, I believe there is much to be done by using the interactive potential of the computer to enhance fundamentally linear experiences. Pedro Meyer's "I Photograph to Remember," which at its heart involves no interaction, is a powerful inspiration in this regard. The challenge now is to extend the medium with limited interaction that preserves the emotional integrity of the narrative form. Perhaps then the Laguna Beach ghost can be laid to rest. The London-based MultiMedia Corp. is an associated company of the British Broadcasting Corp., producing and publishing multimedia titles. Events 1992 Internation Winter Consumer Electronics Show Jan. 9-12, Las Vegas, NV Electronics, Industries Association (202) 457-8700, fax (202) 457-4901 If you aren't convinced the times they are a-changin', note that John Sculley, chairman of Apple Computing, in this year's CES keynote speaker. Uniform '92 Jan. 20-24, San Francisco, CA Smith & Shows (415) 329-8880, fax (415) 329-1408 Leaving the unsexy Unix operating system out of the digital media picture may be a big mistake, since Uniform topics inclue ''The Dawn of Mixed-Media Computing,`` ''Graphical User Interfaces in Multimedia Computing`` and ''Visualization and Multimedia Software.`` Western Communications Forum Feb. 3-5, Ananheim, CA National Engingeering Consortium (312) 938-3500, fax (312) 938-8787 This is the Big Show for telecom engineers, though you certainly don't have to be one to attend. If you really want to see how the telephone companies operate--i.e., the people whoe do the work--be there. AECT/INFOCOMM Feb. 5-9, Washington DC Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) (202) 347-7834, fax (202) 347-7839 Not all the sessions are about interactive technologies, but this conference looks to be a fair sample of what's being used in the nation's classrooms. Hypermedia, interactive instructional technology, telecommunications and satellite communications, media center management and the lates research will be demonstrated and presented. SMPTE Advanced Television and Electronic Imaging Feb. 6-8, San Francisco, CA Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) (914) 761-1100 or (212) 505-9900 If you want a front-row seat at the cutting edge of the ''collision or convergence`` blade, a SMPTE conference is the place. This 26th annual event will offer an educational workshop and cover data compression, mass storage, video/audio workstations and fiber-optic and satellite transmission of digital data.