WILL SKYPIX MAKE ITS LAUNCH THIS TIME?

If timing is everything, then SkyPix Corp. must be feeling pretty beleaguered. Just a few days before the digital satellite broadcast television system was scheduled to host its first media briefing at the SkyPix Earth Station in Oxford, CT, a story broke about a grand jury investigation and investor revolt involving SkyPix chairman Fred Greenberg. The news seemed to place SkyPix’s long-awaited April launch firmly in mid-air.

The company’s plans for the service are ambitious to say the least: 80 channels that the company says will deliver more than 57,000 hours a month of all-digital programming; 200 movies and special events per day, eight superstations, two news and children’s channels.

Home center. In addition to the programming benefits that the system hopes to provide, the company has designed SkyPix to be the center of home communications. The receiver box is designed to enable messages to be passed between SkyPix subscribers, with a port to connect a PC and printer.

But investors who have contributed some $44 million to the system’s startup are beginning to wonder when the future is going to arrive. The launch is a year late and according to reports, some critical problems — such as who is making and delivering the decoder chips and TV-top boxes — are apparently not yet solved.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS OPENS MULTIMEDIA DEMO CENTER

In late March, the so-called Atrium Project — a new multimillion dollar demonstration center for multimedia and educational technologies in the atrium of the Library of Congress building — opened its doors to the public. Already a steady stream of VIPs are visiting the center to sample its wares.

It contains 29 “interactive workstations,” typically a PC with a videodisc or CD-ROM drive attached, or a cd-i player, capable of demonstrating more than 200 applications on subjects from foreign languages to management training.

Librarian of Congress James Billington says the National Demonstration Center for Interactive Information Technologies (also known as the National Demonstration Lab, or NDL) will prevent the Library from becoming a “mausoleum of past culture.” Part of how it hopes to do so is by making the Library’s collections more widely available and accessible.

In 1989, the Library of Congress launched the American Memory Project, its first significant move toward using advanced electronic storage methods to put the Library’s collections in a form that could be transmitted cross-country.

Toward that end, NDL is now planning a project with GTE Corp. to test transmission of collections over fiber — both to aid the transferal of collections onto disc, and to make it easier for global citizens to gain access to the Library’s resources. (Librarians who want to participate in this project should contact the NDL’s director, Jacqueline Hess.)

In addition to the demo center, the Library of Congress has founded a Research Consortium to explore the effective use of interactive media in education. Members include the American Film Institute, the American Federation of Teachers and a lineup of universities including Carnegie Mellon and MIT.

NDL has received no public monies, relying instead on private and corporate funds, equipment and software via the Atrium Group. Members include Microsoft, Digital Equipment, GTE, IBM, Nynex, Informix, Philips and Sun Microsystems.

IMA TACKLES THE ‘RIGHTS STUFF’

Technology challenges aside, one of the most difficult problems facing multimedia producers has to do with rights — figuring out who owns what, how to acquire rights to content and how to license multimedia presentations for distribution and use.

Deciding to do something about the rights conundrum, the Interactive Multimedia Association (IMA), the five-year-old international trade association for the multimedia industry, has launched an Intellectual Property Task Force.

Like the IMA Compatibility Project, which made recommendations on cross-platform multimedia standards, the Intellectual Property Task Force will explore rights issues from the viewpoint of content owners, multimedia developers and publishers, libraries and other users’ groups and put together a framework for what the IMA calls a “rational licensing environment” that will facilitate “the efficient, confident use of all multimedia applications and environments.”

The IMA Task Force is made up of five groups. Licensing will develop a handbook that discusses all the issues in acquiring rights to content, as well as in licensing multimedia for distribution. The handbook will also include legally sound definitions, sample contracts, suggested language for contracts, a resource directory, case studies and bibliographic references.

The other groups include Technical Safeguards, which will look at encryption of multimedia products and other standards; Publishing and Library Systems, which will develop standards and policies for using multimedia products in distributed networked environments; Collectives, which will discuss ways agents help locate content material and how they should negotiate licenses to address multimedia; and Legal and Policy Issues, which will report on the state of the law and legal controversies that could affect multimedia.

According to Brian Kahin, chair of the IMA Task Force on Intellectual Property, it will take the groups about one year to research, discuss and make recommendations. If you’re interested in finding out more about the task force or participating in one of the task force groups, contact Kahin at (617) 864-6606.

LOAN GUARANTEES FOR ED-SAT PROGRAM

Montana Senator Conrad Burns, an avid supporter of a new national telecommunications infrastructure, as well as of telecommuting and other progressive measures, wants to improve distance learning to all children, regardless of economic proclivity, with S. 2377, called the “Educational Satellite Loan Guarantee Program.”

The idea is to acquire a dedicated educational satellite system by offering loan guarantees to a non-federal, non-profit public corporation to buy or lease a dedicated system.

Burns claimed a dedicated educational satellite would help lower two barriers to distance learning. “First, it will insure instructional programmers that they will be able to obtain affordable satellite transmission time without risk of preemption by commercial users,” he said. “Second, it will allow educators using the programming to have one dish focused on one satellite off which they can receive at least 24 channels of instructional programming every hour of the school day.”

Interactive technologies and distance learning, as well as the retrieval of information archives from such repositories as the Library of Congress, have the potential to revolutionize the educational process, especially in poor rural and inner city schools without access to adequate funding.

MICROSOFT TO USE FRACTAL IN TITLES

We reported in January that fractal image compression was gaining new respect in the industry. Confirmation of this comes from Microsoft Multimedia Publishing Group’s director of product development, Greg Riker, and Iterated Systems’ co-president, Michael Barnsley. They have announced that “at least one” forthcoming Microsoft multimedia title will utilize Iterated Systems’ fractal still-image compression technology, under a non-exclusive licensing agreement.

Riker says that for its multimedia titles, Microsoft looked for a methodology that can perform image decompression in software only, yet can display the pictures quickly. Also required were high compression ratios, enabling more images to be packed onto a compact disc, and good image quality. Jan Ozer, Iterated’s vice president of marketing and sales, indicated that the fractal approach not only met these criteria but bested the competing solutions, including JPEG products, on each count.

MERGER MANIA IN THE TOOLS BUSINESS

Forming what one company executive called the “largest multimedia toll maker,” low-end multimedia software developer MacroMind-Paracomp and high-end developer Authorware officially merged as of March 31.

Tim Mott, MacroMind-Paracomp president and CEO, will take over as chairman and CEO of the newly renamed Macromedia. Authorware president and CEO Bud Colligan takes on the job of president and COO. The two companies will have combined worldwide staff of between 170 to 180 people.

While financial details of the agreement were not disclosed, the companies said they had combined earnings of about $25 million in 1991 — with Authorware accounting for about $12 million. Widespread industry speculation is that the deal was designed to give both privately-held companies an extra boost in their effort to go public, which is expected to happen soon (they are, in fact, in their “quiet period” now).

Mott denied that the deal was IPO driven. “There were no considerations like that that drove this deal,” says Mott. “This merger is about being positioned for the long term.”