‘Apple’s role in this mess is the agnostic’

Even for the technologically sophisticated crowd at Digital World, Mike Liebhold, Apple’s manager of media architecture, is what’s called “out there.” “I am going to talk about a future that doesn’t work yet,” says Liebhold, who has been working on aspects of the National Information Structure with “cable TV, research types and the telcos.”

Not surprisingly — based on his current endeavors — he stressed the need for cooperation among the warring factions in the digital world, saying each has a piece of the puzzle but can never create the full picture on his own. “Let’s get real here,” he said. “We must form alliances among ourselves to push this thing.”

TOTALLY WIRED

This thing, of course, is the “wired” home.

According to Liebhold’s vision of the future, consumer devices supporting a wide variety of transmission vehicles — from ISDN to cellular data networks to high-bandwidth digital TV — will crop up in four separate areas of the home.

He emphasized that we must not get “stuck into thinking everything is going to happen in the living room with a remote control.” The areas to watch include the home office, the kids’ room, the living room (now the “home entertainment center”), and — a new area for interactive media — “that little room off the kitchen where we keep the Yellow Pages and bills.” In there, says Liebhold, will be some sort of “third or fourth full-motion videotext information device.”

These four different areas assume different needs, and will require interoperability. In Liebhold’s future, all manner of information will be delivered over a single, compound media delivery system. “Make TV a meta-format that can accept a wide variety of things,” he says, echoing Apple chairman Sculley’s keynote comments about giving television a second chance.

ENTER COOPERATION

This advanced, somewhat utopian scenario requires cooperation. Neither the telephone nor the cable companies — not even the computer companies — have enough of the pieces to form a whole pie. What is needed is a “hybrid network,” a partnership between the cable and phone companies. “Think about the cable network and the telephone network as an integral communications fabric,” says Liebhold, a fabric that is critical for delivering interactive, multimedia applications.

After all, the telephone networks do not have the bandwidth to do full-motion video, nor are the prospects high for seeing it anytime soon. They also operate on a regulated rate structure that is completely inappropriate for the range of services from simple voice, or POTS (plain old telephone service), to multiple channels of video and audio.

Catch-22 rate structure. For example, if the tariff on telephone services continues to be based on voice communications, as it is today, it will be prohibitively expensive to send video over a phone line. If the fees were based on video services, the phone companies would be giving away voice services — its core business today — for free.

The cable networks, for their part, are primarily one-way services, without switching capabilities. The cable operators are also highly leveraged, which means that apart from well-publicized experiments, there will probably be little widespread deployment of interactive services.

And, neither operation knows how to operate interactive service. “People in this room can do it,” he emphasized. “Use the best of both media and keep in mind interoperability.”

A FUTURE THAT DOESN’T WORK YET

In addition to espousing a future that doesn’t work yet, Liebhold advocates patience with the standards process, which some believe will further delay interactive services. But at a time when we are seeing the “compression algorithm du jour,” Liebhold urges industries not to “standardize on what we haven’t developed yet.”

He foresees high-powered digital signal processors, or DSPs, in the television set that could be programmed to include each new improvement as it is developed. This thinking is in line with the work being done by the Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers (SMPTE), which has already developed standards to identify and display different digital video signals, including decompression instructions (see Vol. 1, No. 10, p. 14).

So where does Apple fit in? “Apple’s role in this mess is the agnostic,” says Liebhold. It is playing both sides of the fence in order to provide and provoke new services, at least initially for the Macintosh and the company’s Newton line of digital assistants. Again Liebhold sounded a John Sculley theme, and one that the Japanese have been exploiting successfully for some years now: “Let’s cooperate to compete.”

Janice Maloney, David Baron