AT&T VP banks on visual products communication

Video products will have more influence in the 1990s than personal computers had in the 1980s. This was the message delivered by Curtis J. Crawford, VP, AT&T Microelectronics, at a recent meeting of the International Disk Drive Equipment Manufacturers’ Association (IDEMA) in San Jose, CA.

Crawford believes that the union of the entertainment, computer and communications industries will result in a flood of digital visual communications products that will require orders of magnitude increases in storage density, processor speed and memory size over technology available today. In the slow-moving, pre-electronic days, saying that a technology was two or three orders of magnitude away from practicality used to mean you were talking about wild-eyed science fiction; in the overheated ’90s, it just means that strategic planners will add that technology to their short list of things they had better “do something about” in the next two-year plan.

Business first. In digital video, Crawford said, almost everything we do during the next 10 years has the potential to create a new market. He thinks business will be the early adopter of desktop video as an effective time- and money-saver for those business meetings that would ordinarily require getting on a plane. A great many more meetings should then take place because they’ll become easy and cheap enough; that, in turn, means improvements in market responsiveness, productivity and the bottom line.

But the key to a useful videophone product, Crawford believes, is document sharing; being able to look the other guy in the eye may aid communication and relationship-building, but you rarely get on the plane without a briefcase full of papers. And if you can’t easily show the other person those papers (viewgraphs, slides, videos, flip charts…) on the video screen, and point to things on them and mark them up, and make copies — well, then you might as well call the travel department again.

WORKING OUT THE SOCIAL CONVENTIONS

Crawford says video phones will make their way into the home after people get used to them at work. As a society, we’ll need even more time to work out the basic social conventions, products and services that people will need simply to avoid looking awful when someone calls.

AT&T, MCI, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph and others have already announced videophones. But until their frame rates increase enough to allow “real-looking” full-color images, the MTV generation will find them more distracting than enabling.

Image compression/decompression hardware will tide us over until wideband fiber optics solve that problem for good in the next few years. After that, Crawford expects video products to penetrate society rapidly. Five years after their introduction, he expects digital cable boxes to sell at the rate of four million per year, digital broadcast satellite receivers at one million, high-definition televisions at two million, digital VCRs, laserdiscs and camcorders at four million.

But he thinks the kids will produce the really big market numbers: six million networked interactive video games and 12 million CD-ROM video games per year! By the end of the decade, Crawford expects video phones to be completely accepted and selling in the tens of millions per year. You think your kids spend a lot of time on the phone now? Wait until you see your phone bill when they can show each other clothes, pictures, swap music videos and play multiplayer video games on the phone.

William T. Park