PARAMOUNT, AT&T PLAN INTERACTIVE PROGRAMMING

Paramount Communications, Inc., and AT&T recently announced plans for Paramount to develop interactive television programming using an authoring system developed by AT&T. The first programs to be created will be Interactive Entertainment Tonight and Sports News Desk Interactive.

The authoring system, developed at AT&T Bell Labs, will ultimately enable traditional film and video producers to format their products for an interactive video network, be it cable, telephone or satellite, according to AT&T. The system is designed to work with the AT&T interactive television technology now being deployed in Viacom’s Castro Valley project.

“We looked at every authoring system there was, including Apple’s EZTV, Microsoft, IBM, 3DO,” explained Paramount Technology Group president Keith Schaefer. “None were perfect, but AT&T was further along with development and the most flexible to work with our television producers and designers in the Media Kitchen.” Schaefer said the two companies will combine efforts to develop the system further.

Despite the fact that the authoring system runs on a Sun workstation and requires proprietary hardware, Bill Schell of the Bell Labs technical staff, says it is so graphically oriented that there is no need for a programmer. The environment is visually oriented, making interactive programs more “pleasing to the consumer because it looks like television today, as opposed to text-based authoring tools which most [interactive systems] are based on,” said Schaefer.

While Paramount plans to rely on AT&T for its authoring system, many developers, including the Time Warner Interactive Group (TWIG), are spending time and money to create their own systems, based on the particular needs of both the software and intended playback device or devices.

TWIG, in fact, has virtually stopped creating new software titles while it builds an authoring system that is designed to be used by the creative entities within Time Warner, and to work over the company’s interactive television systems. This could be a strategic advantage for TWIG, as its system will be optimized for the networks that it operates. Unlike Time Warner, Paramount does not maintain television or telephone networks.

AT&T’s system may later be commercially available to other producers.

ATARI DEBUTS 64-BIT GAME MACHINE

The former king of the video game market wants to reclaim its title. Atari Corp. of Sunnyvale, CA, the leader of the video game industry in the late 1970s to early 1980s, recently introduced a 64-bit game machine called Jaguar. The $249 machine became available in New York and San Francisco markets in mid-November and is slated for a complete roll out in the U.S. and Europe early in 1994.

While we haven’t yet tested Jaguar for its ability to handle graphics and live game action, its 64-bit processor is the fastest on the market. The technology will allow Jaguar to display true color graphics and 3D environments as well as to play 16-bit CD-quality audio, according to Atari.

More than 20 developers have signed on to create game titles for the CD-ROM-based entertainment platform, according to the company. Four titles were released with the introduction of the platform. The first titles for the player include Cybermorph (developed by Attention to Detail), which is bundled with the unit, Crescent Galaxy (developed by Atari), and Raiden and Dino Dudes (both developed by Imagitec Design). Time Warner, which has a stake in Atari, will make its library of video clips available to Atari and its licensed publishers for use in software for Jaguar. Titles for Jaguar are expected to range from $39 to $69.

Atari says it is developing future options for Jaguar, which include a double-speed CD-ROM peripheral to be released in 1994 for $200, as well as an interface that will allow play over phone and cable lines, and a virtual reality helmet.

With Jaguar, Atari is hoping to leapfrog its competition and garner a significant slice of the $5.3 billion U.S. video game market. (This is revenue it could desperately use. It recently announced a third-quarter loss of $17.6 million. Restructuring costs and writeoffs of older systems were citing as contributing factors.) Jaguar processes more than 100 times as much data at one time as 16-bit systems from both Sega and Nintendo — market leaders — and is twice as fast as 3DO’s 32-bit machine, according to Atari. Both Nintendo and Sega announced their intention to develop new game machines based on a 64-bit processor. Nintendo and SGI recently announced a joint initiative, called Project Reality, to develop this faster machine, which they expect to be available in 1995. (For more details, see Vol. 3, No. 4, p. 27.)

Also eyeing this market is Sony, which recently announced plans to introduce a home video game machine in Japan in 1995. The 32-bit, CD-ROM-based machine is to be launched by a newly formed subsidiary called Sony Computer Entertainment. With game players of superior capabilities already being introduced, Sony’s machine may arrive too late to have an impact. No pricing details were released.

APPLE, EDS, REDGATE IN SHOPPING PILOT

To learn more about consumer expectations of interactive home shopping, Apple Computer, EDS and Redgate Communications are teaming up on a two-month interactive CD-ROM-based program called En Passant. As part of the pilot, which went into effect earlier this month, the companies plan to distribute approximately 30,000 interactive discs to a select group of registered owners of Apple CD-ROM drives.

En Passant CDs include 21 catalogs from retailers, such as LL Bean, Land’s End, Williams-Sonoma, Tiffany & Co., The Apple Catalog, Patagonia and Pottery Barn, as well as interviews and video segments. Items can be searched by catalog or topic. Several catalogs include interactive features such as fashion coordination, on-screen color changing, and video and audio product descriptions. In addition, the discs contain QuickTime video interviews with medical, fashion and management experts plus articles from Elle Decor and Wall Street Journal Guide to Understanding Personal Finance.

Consumers can use the discs to browse catalogs and other materials, but not to place orders, which requires calling an 800 number being used to track usage and buying patterns. The caller will then be transferred to the retailer of his or her choice.

At the end of the trial, Apple’s New Media Division (lead sponsor of the trial), EDS, which is providing operations and systems technology, and Redgate, which is supplying management, market research and sales promotion, plan to analyze the results to determine what types of CD-ROM-based material to develop. Future plans include expanding the service to the Windows platform.

While the implications for such a service to be placed on a network are obvious, Apple says its plans to date involve only CD-ROM. (Apple predicts there will be 10 million CD-ROM users by 1994.) Online services are still too limited in their ability to display graphics, video and other information, according to Ian Diery, VP of Apple USA. Apple made no comment about whether the trial might expand into an online offering or whether the pilot would be incorporated into its interactive television projects.

DEMAND FOR VIDEO ON DEMAND

AT&T, TCI and US West released the results of the first half of a combined pay-per-view and video-on-demand service trial that took place over the past two years in Littleton, CO. While it is not surprising that online video rental “stores” will be a popular attraction for two-way TV systems, what was surprising was the level of usage for true video-on-demand service.

Participants in the Viewer Controlled Cable Television pilot were offered one of two different services: scheduled pay per view or video on demand. The two services were offered to groups of 150 households. After a period of time, the groups switched. That is, one group was offered video on demand and the other, scheduled pay per view. The cost per movie ranged from 99 cents to $3.99, with video-on-demand services costing the premium. Customers were not charged additional fees.

On average, video-on-demand services were used a whopping 12 times more than the national average for traditional pay-per-view movies. Customers paid the premium on price to see a movie on their own schedule, and purchased more movies than normal. The typical customer in the VCTV trial bought two and a half movies per month, compared with the national PPV average of 2.6 per year. In addition, 70 percent of the trial participants used the service each month.

Phase Two, which calls for trial participants to have access to both the PPV and VOD services at the same time, will run through the first quarter, 1994.

ANOTHER ALLEN ACQUISITION

Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder, has bought an 80 percent share in Ticketmaster, one the largest ticket processing event marketing companies in the world. Much as Barry Diller wasn’t buying QVC to sell faux jewelry, Allen didn’t acquire Ticketmaster to just sell concert and sporting event tickets.

“Ticketmaster is an important vehicle for the informational and technological highway of the future, and complements my existing suite of technology companies,” said Allen in a prepared statement.

Put Ticketmaster together with Allen’s other holdings, including software company Asymetrix, interactive media developer Starwave, wireless network services company Metricom, and R&D thinktank Interval Research, and you get the picture of someone who is quietly amassing the resources and the facilities to become one of the major forces in the interactive future.

In addition to those companies, Allen has a large stake in America Online, which (coincidentally?) recently began offering subscribers in Chicago access to Chicago Cubs tickets and merchandise through a joint venture with… Ticketmaster. Allen also has a stake in Houston-based Telescan, a designer, developer and operator of online services.

The guts of Ticketmaster are a very sophisticated transaction processing facility, which handled 52 million transactions last year. If the future of online services and interactive television is transaction processing, Allen just bought himself the capability to start at the top of the game.

ITV INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION FOUNDED

Joining the ranks of the Interactive Multimedia Association, the Interactive Services Association and other industry groups promoting interactive media and technologies, the Interactive Television Association recently opened shop in Washington, DC.

Andy Sernovitz, ITA president, says the association was formed in response to the need for information on ITV developments and issues on Capitol Hill and among companies in the field. “This is the most competitive, fluid, fast-changing market in America,” says Sernovitz in a statement. “But because the players and products change almost everyday, it is also an industry that is often misunderstood and very hard to follow.”

ITA’s mission is fourfold: to provide members with information on the industry and developments; to coordinate political action and lobbying efforts on federal, state and local legislative and regulatory levels; to communicate developments in interactive television to consumer organizations, public interest groups and the media (not that ITV needs to be further hyped in the press); and to facilitate networking and communication among members of the ITV industry.

Perhaps the largest part of the ITA’s work will be to act as a lobbying group for the ITV industry in Washington. “There is an incredible eagerness on Capitol Hill to change the regulatory environment and make decisions regarding ITV, but members of Congress are lacking the information and direction” they need to make decisions, say Sernovitz.

Although no members have joined the association yet, ITA says it’s talking with AT&T, Bell-Atlantic, Time Warner, Edison Electric Institute, Hewlett-Packard and Citicorp, among others. Membership fees are $2,000 (standard), $500 (individual) and $5,000–10,000 (founder).

APPLE TO INTEGRATE MPEG INTO QUICKTIME

In a move that Apple watchers have been expecting, the Cupertino, CA-based computer company recently announced its intention to support the MPEG digital video standard in its QuickTime system software for interactive media.

Since QuickTime was designed to be modular, especially with respect to compression technologies, it was only a matter of time after MPEG products began to appear on the market that Apple support the standard.

Apple representatives have said that the company will build MPEG into future versions of QuickTime, much the same way JPEG (the still picture compression standard) is implemented today. Unlike JPEG, which can operate in a software-only environment, MPEG requires additional hardware to compress a video stream. (MPEG decompression can take place using a software-only codec.) MPEG-compliant hardware products are expected to be on the market by mid-1994.

MPEG, an acronym for the Moving Pictures Experts Group, is a compression algorithm that was established by the International Standards Organization to be a unifying digital video standard. MPEG was designed to facilitate the use of video on CD-ROM. An MPEG 2 standard, which is still under development, is being designed for digital television, cable and satellite broadcasting. (For more information on MPEG 1 and 2, see Vol. 2, No. 7, p 20) 

>I/O
>READERS RESPOND
VIDEO GAMES FOR FEMALES?
Hidden dollars in the interactive market

Heidi Dangelmaier has conducted research on developing interactive game titles for companies including Sega and The 3DO Company. She has a Master’s degree in computer science from the University of British Columbia and is a computer science Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. Her E-mail address is htd@cs.princeton.edu.

Over the last year, I have come to the conclusion that video game companies are simply disinterested in doubling their profits. Just to size up the facts: females predominate the population at 52 percent; there are more than 15 million girls between the ages of 4 and 12 in the U.S. alone; young girls regularly write companies like Sega requesting more “girl games.” You can’t help asking, “Why aren’t these companies making more products for females?”

I could understand this phenomenon if someone had irrefutably demonstrated that digital media is inherently uninteresting to females. I might even sympathize if there were one epoch in the history of video games when companies earnestly invested large sums of money in the female market, only to be firmly rejected at great monetary loss. Since I have seen no evidence of either situation, it simply follows that companies are content with their existing profit margins.

Why else would they resist those more than 500 million 4- to 12-year-old girls (if you tally in Western Europe and Mexico), who have equal buying power to boys and so few products that coincide with their interests? The only other reasonable (and I do not consider prejudice reasonable) cause for resistance would be that companies have not made an intelligent effort to understand the female market.

What qualifies as an intelligent effort? An intelligent effort makes decisions about market potentials based on substantiated information. An intelligent effort recognizes, respects and accounts for the differences between females and males in its evaluation. An intelligent effort is honest enough to take responsibility for the sway it holds over the current market demographics.

Why aren’t companies making more products for females? For the last year, I have been on an enterprise to bring multimedia products to females. To achieve this agenda, I broached this question at many of the major game companies. One common response was, “Our primary market (boys) might feel alienated if we make products for girls.”

Firstly, such a response is very prejudiced; its motives favor the interest of one gender over another and are as unjust as the pleas of groups that rallied together to protest female membership in Little League. These groups were afraid of the damage the male ego might suffer if they were ever defeated by the females. A secondary flaw in the reasoning of companies using this response is that it hasn’t been supported with statistical evidence. I wasn’t provided any study that concluded boys’ interests in video games would be negatively affected if products were made for girls.

“Girls don’t play video games,” was another common answer I received to the question of why companies aren’t making more products for females. This justification doesn’t take into account that the current selection of products offers very little stylistic diversity, and the diversity that does exist is more reflective of the play patterns of males.

By not considering game content in their evaluations, companies are implying “games are for boys.” Companies are correct in assuming that there are strong divisions between what a given gender is and is not likely to take part in. But they are not correct in assumptions that females intrinsically dislike video games.

Are video games sex-typed as male? Research has shown that gender divisions can either evolve from cultural sex typing, or they can be born out of differing physical capabilities. Sex typing asserts gender appropriateness of objects and activities. An example of a solidly established sex typing: Guns are for boys, jewelry boxes are for females. Sex typing is based on traditional sex roles, and is essentially impossible to uproot or reverse.

Sex-type awareness is important because researchers have consistently demonstrated that children request same-sex stereotyped toys, and tend to play with these toys rather than toys stereotyped for other sexes. Not only do children begin to make such sex-typed choices before the age of three, but parents have demonstrated a propensity to purchase and encourage play that abides by traditional stereotypes.

Studies demonstrate that video game systems are not sex-typed. There are activities you can perform on these systems that are more appealing to boys. But there are also activities you can perform on these systems that are more appealing to girls. One study in the journal Sex Roles indicated that 85.7 percent of females sampled had no negative inclination toward video game systems and agreed that video games can be fun. This result was not significantly different from attitudes expressed by men.

Do females inherently dislike video games? Two other studies from the same journal surveyed sex appropriateness of common items and activities among boys and girls. Computers and video games were statistically demonstrated to be considered culturally neutral. Things given similar neutrality ratings were cameras, playground equipment and plastic horses. Another analysis looked at the use of computers in three different areas: gaming, programming and applications. Males used the computer predominantly for gaming and programming, but less for application-oriented tasks; whereas females used it in the exact opposite way. Activities supported by applications such as writing, drawing or electronic mail are not sex stereotyped, and coincided with female interests.

Companies cannot justly argue that it is because video game systems are sex-typed male. Toy choices may be influenced by factors other than culturally perceived sex appropriateness. Children can select toys based on the child’s physical characteristics. Are females equipped with the physical skills needed to use a video game system? Absolutely! Females have full ability to perform the hand-to-eye coordination required to operate a controller.

Scientists have demonstrated that different skills are improved with different types of toys. Toys for boys tend to emphasize more visual and spatial tasks that involve depth perception and the solving of mazes or puzzles. Because many video games emphasize these types of tasks, they reflect a bias toward boys. There is no reason that other skills, such as procedural thinking, which is more like following a recipe or pattern and which girls excel at, could be the basis for challenging games as well.

Does advertising discourage female game use? Any game company that makes decisions based on the premise that “girls don’t play video games” employs anecdotal rather than thoroughly analyzed behavior. Why aren’t companies making more products for females? A common answer is “We don’t make gender-specific products.” For video game companies to evaluate the potential of a female market fairly, they must take responsibility for any gender bias they are perpetuating through their advertisements.

Gender-biased marketing influences purchase demographics. Eugene Provenzo, in his book Video Kids, Making Sense of Nintendo, dedicates a chapter to quantifying the alleged “neutrality” of the industry. In doing so, he analyzed 47 of Nintendo’s most popular cartridges. Assessing the graphic compositions of the cartridge covers, Provenzo calculated that there were 115 males pictured and only nine females.

Three of the females shown were in overtly subordinate positions. Images that females see contribute to their self-conception, ability and status. Dreams are formed partly from the image of the roles other females play. Rarely seeing females in video games, or seeing females play only passive roles, diminishes the likelihood that a female will play the game. Ad slogans like “Game Boy” or “Gamegear: Separates the men from boys,” tell young females that they are an afterthought in the video game industry.

Titles for females make sense. Gender is not a burden to tow, but an intriguing human dynamic that can bring texture to interactivity. Companies like Sanctuary Woods should be applauded for taking a step in this direction with its title Hawaii High, a girl’s adventure title with a strong female lead character.

Girls do have preferences, and they are willing to vote for their interests with their buying dollars. Anyone who does not know this yet is clearly unfamiliar with Bantam’s bestselling Sweet Valley High series, which sells primarily to pre-teen females. Within the first three years of publication, more than 34 million books were distributed in the U.S. alone, and the series was translated into 15 languages.

To conclude, I remind people involved in the emerging technologies that video game technology is often a child’s first and most intimate exposure to computer technology. It would be a grave mistake and a huge hindrance to the futures of our daughters, if we take something as flexible as digital technology and encourage it into becoming the dominion of males.

Heidi Dangelmaier