PC-TV VS. TV COMPUTING What's It Gonna Be? by Denise Caruso c. 1990 Media Letter October was an active month for industry luminaries to wax philosophical about interactive media, which is both the good news and the bad news. The fact that every single seminar and conference I attend, no matter where it is or what its focus, always has at least one panel (sometimes even with a new face) about some aspect of "multimedia" probably means this stuff isn't just the product of overactive imaginations. I take comfort in knowing that the people who are "inventing the future," as Alan Kay puts it, at least appear to be thinking about it while they're in the process of doing it. On the other hand, even the really smart ones seem to be more than a little blindsided by their own prejudices. Considering what's at stake, companies investing millions of dollars trying to find the wildfire multimedia product of the '90s might want to at least consider some of the more glaring alternatives to their points of view. Not many people in this business have sufficient powers of detachment for this kind of vision, but I did meet one at ETRE, the European Technology Roundtable Exhibition that I attended in the south of France in mid-October. He was the unassuming Kay Nishi, chairman of ASCII Corp., the largest software company in Japan, and early co-conspirator with young Bill Gates in the days when Microsoft was just starting to cut its sharks' teeth. Nishi, asked to speak on the next decade of computing, spoke at length about multimedia and painted a picture of the future that is contrary in some very fundamental ways to the usual prognostications of interactive media vendors and followers. Though I'm paraphrasing, the summation of Nishi's talk was really just a single sentence: Give people what they want and don't make them suffer to get it. This idea was also echoed in many different forms during the InterTainment'90 conference on interactive entertainment in late October, by people from a different universe that Nishi's, whose focal point is the TV screen and who have only a nodding acquaintance with computer-based multimedia. What these people are beginning to focus on, with escalating good results, is what some call "TV-based computing," or how to transform the TV into an interactive device with a very low entry point -- both financially and intellectually -- for consumers. The two worlds have a lot to learn from each other. THE DENTIST'S DRILL "Anyone who is now investing in multimedia on the PC will crash," said Nishi. "They should instead invest in multimedia workstations in the next two to three years because of their power. After the year 2000 the PC will truly be a multimedia-based machine." Now that's a pretty radical statement to those betting a big chunk of their businesses on "PC-based television," which is what some people call today's computer-based multimedia products. But look at Nishi's logic: if the idea is to give people the ability to interact seamlessly with real stuff like video and audio, sitting in front of a screen waiting for a 10 MHz 286 machine to access a CD-ROM through two or three layers of interface and operating system is not really going to cut it for people accustomed to instant remote-control feedback. Even with a fast CPU chip and maybe even a sound and video co-processor, a so-called "multimedia PC" is still fundamentally crippled without an operating system optimized for both networking (which I believe is vital to using multimedia in the real world) and coordinating a lot of different tasks. So in the near term at least, Nishi is right that workstations are better multimedia machines -- defined by the power of UNIX, which doesn't duck and cover when confronted with complex tasks, workstations are flexible, multitasking, network-capable and as fast as the system's processor will let them blaze. Workstations enjoy pushing around large discrete chunks of data types, and don't particularly care whether they're moving them inside an application, over a network or across a phone line. Though intensive multimedia product development is underway inside just about every major workstation company right now, the problem remains that workstations aren't personal, and won't be for a while. The likelihood of getting people to embrace workstations as multimedia machines in the consumer market without some fundamental design changes is like asking them to enjoy a root canal without Novocaine. MAKING CONNECTIONS Nintendo did an extensive market survey to discover why only 40 percent of 35 million households owned Nintendo game machines despite their low cost. The survey asked, "Would you have a Nintendo at home if we gave it to you?" And only an additional 15 percent said yes. Shocking! Who wouldn't want something for nothing? What's the difference between Nintendo and the other, ubiquitous home appliances such as televisions, telephones and cars? Nearly every family has at least one of those, and cost isn't the fact. A decent car starts around $10,000. TVs are around $1,000. People probably spend between $10 and $100 a month on phone bills. Nishi says the key to this puzzle is the network. TV is connected to extensive broadcast or cable networks. Telephones are nodes in a vast global network of wires. And cars are connected, too. "A car without a network of roads," says Nishi, "is like a very expensive, gasoline-powered, air-conditioned room." The clincher is communication -- the ability to move outside of your normal realm of experience. So to make a computer or a similar device a household appliance, he believes (and so must Nintendo, since its devices now sport a modem), it has to be connected to some kind of network, online or offline, that allows users to make easy, useful and/or enjoyable connections outside of themselves. Most PC-based multimedia companies, with the notable exception of Farallon, seem bent on ignoring this. Even Commodore, which is closest (in theory at least) to spanning the gap between the PC and the TV by painting an Amiga black, taking away its keyboard and giving it a remote control, says it doesn't think built-in networking is important to its CDTV product. Interactive television types, on the other hand, are completely married to a network -- a TV network, a phone network, and sometimes both. This marriage causes its own peculiar problem. Where the PC folks want to appeal to the superego of the masses, and inspire them to greater human achievements via the miracle of the personal computer and multimedia, the interactive TV folks are entrenched in mass market pop culture; they just wanna get down in the mud with our libidos and give us what we say we want -- and today, that's mostly sports and interactive Vanna White. I hate sports and I hate game shows and dialing for dollars using a 900 number really doesn't appeal to me in the least, personally. But companies who broadcast interactive programming see that getting consumer response to sports and game shows is inching them closer to something very exciting. Take, for example, TVI, the Montreal-based subsidiary of Vidéotron, owner of a cable TV franchise for most of Eastern Canada. TVI licensed some technology from a U.S. firm, ACTV (say "active"), and created a lineup of interactive programming pilot called "Videoway" for commercial operation in 40,000 homes. The basic equipment consists of a remote controller and a cable box which 85 percent of Videoway's users install themselves. It contains a cable converter, decoders for pay TV, caption-and-subtitle and videotex, video in and out (for VCR hookup) and an RS232 port. It broadcasts a wide variety of interactive programming -- from interactive news to sports to game shows to Children's Television Workshop -- from 6 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. daily. And what's the cost of losing couch potato status? About $16 over the basic $20 cable fee. TVI's Daniel Faille says they can't make enough boxes to meet demand. Is there a multimedia product on the PC side that can boast 40,000 customers in eight months with a distribution vehicle that's already poking out of the wall, right into their customer's living rooms? Yes, okay. Today it's just Interactive Wheel of Fortune and basketball from different camera angles. But TVI already has two pilot projects underway with public TV stations Radio Canada and Radio Quebec -- one for interactive literacy instruction and a similar one for teaching numeracy. Extrapolate further. Why couldn't software companies license multimedia applications to interactive cable companies or other service providers, on the same "pay-per- view" basis that movie studios do? ABOUT THOSE DESIGN CHANGES My point is not necessarily that PC-based multimedia developers are barking up the wrong tree. Obviously there are plenty of PC-based applications which wouldn't be appropriate for interactive TV -- i.e., much of the stuff that has to do with corporate multimedia, and some but not all educational products. But what's interesting to consider is that there is vast creative potential to design products containing sophisticated video and audio technology, complete with network and embedded operating systems, which don't look like workstations, and which may open many doors of opportunity for the right kinds of multimedia applications. As Nishi said, when the multimedia PC hits the year 2000, there won't be a box called PC -- "it will be a disguised personal computer." This is already happening. CD-ROM XA is a computer, but Nishi says consumers will call it a digital video disk. The PC industry will call something "DVI on tape," but consumers will call it digital videotape. A television with an optical fiber, moving data at 1.5 megabits per second, is something the PC business would call a digital video decoder. Consumers will call it "digital television." "When products like this are available, when we add some TV into (computer) boxes, this will be called a home computer," says Nishi. "Are we going to wait for the consumer electronics business to make it happen? No, we must get involved." There's no reason why the U.S. has to concede to Japan on this front. Semiconductor and software engineers will be key in designing multimedia PCs and devices. But the industry has to change its attitude. It's a pretty well- known industry "secret" that the Frox project, a smart TV championed by software genius Andy Hertzfeld and the ever-courageous Steve Jobs, crashed and burned on the drawing board. But Hertzfeld owns the rights to the operating system for the device. Maybe somebody should give him a call. WHAT DO USERS WANT? This smart TV hardware has fascinating global implications for Kay Nishi. He believes by the year 2000, such hardware will be totally international and universal -- while software will be more nationalized. "It's the two extremes," he says. "How to cope with the two together is the theme for the 21st century." The dividing line, of course, is the emotional content that's always found in individual and cultural endeavor. This premise has already been widely accepted in the world of interactive television; sports shows thrive on the thrills and agonies. But not too many multimedia content providers -- other than maybe ABC News Interactive or Scholastic Inc., and of course Robert Abel, who specializes in knife-in-the-gut multimedia dazzlers -- know how to lay emotional content on an optical disc. What do people want from software? Well, why not ask them? Gosh, what a concept. "This business doesn't know how to do market research a la Proctor and Gamble," said Blaise Heltai of AT&T Bell Labs. Heltai, a panelist at InterTainment, added that AT&T has set up a consumer lab specifically to improve product research. "We have to do better, get people more involved earlier in the design process. We need to get the consumer in before the design phase." This seems to be a foreign concept to most multimedia vendors, except for a select few (Warner New Media comes immediately to mind, but its interactive TV project isn't out the door yet, either). Now keep in mind Nishi's concept about the network, and think about another Heltai statement: "People don't care about the appliance. They want to know how you hook into the net," he said. "What we all need to think about are services and demand for those services." This call for programming, or content, that people want and will actually use has become the multimedia mantra. John Scull left the presidency of MacroMind to start a content company. Scott Mize, former multimedia evangelist, has departed Apple Computer to do the same thing. Microsoft and IBM and Apple and AT&T and cable companies and networks and print publishers and absolutely everyone ever involved in media is convinced that Interactive Anything is dead in the water if they don't rustle up a little something for people to do once they sit down to do it. I don't know what the big titles might be, but I do have some ideas and nobody's even asked me my opinion. More importantly, nobody's ever asked my mother what she thinks. I'll bet if anyone took Heltai's statement seriously and sat down with regular folks and asked what they wanted, they'd be dismayed at some of their present product directions. But everybody has to start somewhere, and there is something heartening about the fact that a smattering of both camps -- the more cerebral PC community and the pop-culture junkies -- cross-fertilized both ETRE and InterTainment'90. As both multimedia and interactive TV try to swim into the mainstream, its proponents are letting go of the idea that ignorance is bliss. The more these two worlds willingly collide, the greater opportunity both have to move interactive technology forward into a form that can really touch us all.