DIGITAL WORLD ‘93
• A PERSPECTIVE ON THE NETWORK
Seybold Seminars CEO Jonathan Seybold, publisher of Digital Media, reiterates what the “digital world” is really all about: building a highly complex, global computer network. In this essay, Seybold looks back at this year’s successful Digital World — which took place at the end of June in Beverly Hills — in the context of the job that lies ahead: creating a network infrastructure that can help create and truly support the commerce and the cultural requirements of human communication for the next century.
• THE PEOPLE CREATING THE DIGITAL WORLD
Program director David Baron opens this section, which covers each keynote speaker at this year’s conference by putting into perspective the chaotic events of the past year. (These events include one that happened right as we were going to press: the departure of Nat Goldhaber from Kaleida Labs’ presidency and his replacement by Michael Braun of IBM.)
Though little real action has been taken, what’s clear is how far we’ve come. To paraphrase Richard Green, president of CableLabs, it was indeed remarkable to hear people engaging in serious discussion about the real commercial ramifications of our rapid transition to a digital world.
Even more heartening, more than one keynoter expressed equal concern with the social and cultural changes that this transition will wreak. Speakers from six industries, addressing an equally diverse audience, presented an impressive snapshot of where we are, and where we are headed.
• A DIVERSITY OF VIEWPOINTS
Conference sessions addressed virtually every issue of the digital convergence, from PDAs to public policy to data security to interactive television prototypes and platforms. Some fascinating new technologies were demonstrated, but most interesting was the number and variety of demonstrations and discussions by and about new media products. Besides an entire day devoted to the topic of content, the Writers’ Guild of America sponsored a three-day tandem conference called the Creative Cafe, where artists and technologists met to discuss the issues that are changing the way they work.
• JOHN SCULLEY
Apple Computer
• ROBERT CARBERRY
IBM Corp.
• CRAIG MCCAW
McCaw Cellular
• RICHARD BROWN
Ameritech
• BRIAN ROBERTS
Comcast
• MITCH KAPOR
Electronic Frontier Foundation
• RICHARD GREEN
CableLabs
• NAT GOLDHABER
Kaleida Labs
• ALFRED SIKES
The Hearst Corporation
• PUBLIC POLICY
• PDAS: WHAT ARE THEY GOOD FOR?
• INTERACTIVE MEDIA FESTIVAL
• DIRECTORS ON TECH.
• PROJECTS, PROTOTYPES
• TECH. IN EDUCATION
• MEDIA COMPANY STRATEGIES
• DATA SECURITY & PRIVACY
• NEAT NEW STUFF
• ITV DEBATE
• LEVERAGING THE DEAL
• LOCATION-BASED ENTERTAINMENT
• CREATIVE CAFE
• CONTENT: WHAT ARE WE CREATING?
• EVENTS
THE PACE OF CHANGE WILL ONLY INCREASE’
Program director David Baron launches DW 1993
When we started the Digital World conference four years ago, it was difficult to explain to people that the worlds of computing, consumer electronics, telecommunications, television, entertainment and publishing were merging.
Not long ago, each of these industries had its own distinct markets, business structures, relationships, lingo, regulations, infrastructure, personnel and products. However, those distinctions are vanishing, lost in the changes that have been brought about by advances in digital technology. It is no longer possible to think about any of these individual entities without understanding the effects on or by the others.
That’s what we’ve been calling “the convergence,” which now seems like old news. But the changes we have experienced since 1990 are far from done. In fact, what has happened during the past four years — even the past four months — is setting the stage for what is to come. The pace of change will only increase.
A GREED THAT’S BRED OF UNCERTAINTY
Intel Corp.’s president and CEO Andy Grove said at last year’s Digital World that greed was the central motivating factor in this so-called convergence. Not only was he right, but he didn’t go far enough. The motivation is not merely financial greed; it is not the greed of “first to market,” or selling more units than your competitor.
The greed of the digital world is the greed that is bred by uncertainty. The chaos of today will ultimately settle into new industries, with new relationships, and new business practices. But despite all the hype and posturing by all the players, we still don’t have any idea what those new industries will look like.
Look to the long term.>> There is no divine right of passage here. There is no Hero’s path to follow. This is a time of turmoil and growth, and for those who choose to participate, it is a unique opportunity to change the status quo, to form new methods of doing things, to determine new power structures, to create the new vocabulary for the next generation of communications. And once we emerge from this chaos, once the new businesses and markets and relationships take shape, they will not change again for a very long time.
That is why it is so critical that we consider our direction now, while we are all still in the position to do the Right Thing — not just for short-term gain, but for the long-term prosperity of our companies, ourselves and our society.
David Baron
‘THIS INDUSTRY OF HANDHELD PRODUCTS WILL BE BIGGER THAN THE PC MARKET’
John Sculley, Apple Computer
After 10 years of running the show at Apple Computer, chairman John Sculley — who recently relinquished his posts as CEO and chief technical officer of the seminal Silicon Valley computer company — announced at Digital World his plans to pursue his “real love, this new emerging world of digital technologies.”
That said, he kicked off Seybold’s fourth annual Digital World conference with a glimpse at some of Apple’s most recent forays therein, including the first-ever public showing of the Apple EZTV navigational system for interactive television.
THE ‘FEEL’ OF THE FUTURE FROM APPLE’S POINT OF VIEW
Sculley primarily gave examples of “what [the digital world] is going to feel like” through demonstrations of Apple technologies that are moving toward products, such as the Newton personal digital assistant (PDA), and some that are available today, including the company’s new cross-platform multimedia authoring software called Media Toolkit.
But it was Sculley’s demonstration of EZTV, Apple’s “user interface” for the interactive television sets of the future, that really captured the attention of the audience — many of whom had come to see for themselves how much of the buzz around ITV was real vs. how much was hype. “ITV is coming, but we all have a slightly different idea in our head about what it is going to feel like,” Sculley said. He then proceeded to reveal the look and feel of ITV according to Apple.
An EZ remote.>> Sculley said EZTV could be thought of as the user interface that can sit inside a settop box. Key to Apple’s navigational system for interactive television is a handheld remote controller that closely resembles in size and shape today’s standard TV remote controller.
But it will enable viewers to do far more than flip channels. Aside from the normal “TV guide” applications, some of the functions of EZTV include the capability to find out more about a program, mark a program for future viewing and/or to be recorded to a VCR, download news or weather from an online service, see a review or a preview of a film you’re interested in watching, and then perhaps order the movie as a pay-per-view selection.
Sculley browsed all these options using the remote. Later during the conference — at the Great Interactive Television Platform Debate — Gaston Bastiaens, general manager of Apple’s Personal Interactive Electronics division, demonstrated the potential of operating EZTV using Apple’s Casper voice recognition technology (see p. 39).
Let’s get personal.>> EZTV will allow viewers both to personalize their viewing patterns and to provide them with “a lot of flexibility for browsing around,” said Sculley. Twelve different live video windows can be displayed on a single screen so that itinerant channel surfers can jump from channel 47 to channel 3 with one click.
Sculley demonstrated electronic home shopping using a combination of Apple’s virtual camera techniques (first demonstrated in the Apple Virtual Museum CD-ROM), QuickTime and HyperCard software. The combined technologies enable application developers to create synthetic scenes that home shoppers can then walk around. “You feel as if you are there, but you are doing this all electronically,” said Sculley. (We question this assumption. A simulated mall hardly feels like being there.)
For those who believe in retail therapy as a way of life, Sculley demonstrated an application that will allow home shoppers to create customized malls stocked with their favorite shopping haunts. In some instances, such as when considering a software purchase, consumers can try before they buy, “sampling” the application at home, according to Sculley.
CD-ROM ARRIVES, AS A TELEVISION PERIPHERAL
Interestingly enough, Sculley believes the birth of interactive television will, in part, provide the needed push to finally launch the CD-ROM market into critical mass since many of the shopping applications, in particular the electronic catalogs, could be distributed inexpensively on CDs. These discs could then be accessed from CD-ROM drives attached to home television sets with EZTV built into the settop box. (VCRs, online services and laserdisc players could be controlled from EZTV as well.) Apple sold 50,000 CD-ROM drives last year and expects to sell one million more this year, according to Sculley.
While Sculley said EZTV is starting to look very real, he was coy about where Apple stood in terms of building the relationships with communications and content companies necessary to take it from prototype to product — except to say Apple is working on that particular issue. “We did not just start thinking about all this today,” he said. “We have been working on not only the user interface, which I showed today, but also on the architectural issues on what do you do with headers and descriptors and bitstream protocols and things of that sort which are a key part of the navigation architecture.”
Sculley said he expects to make several key alliances by year’s end.
BUILDING THE TOOLS TO BUILD INTERACTIVE PRODUCTS
To simplify the process of creating interactive applications, Sculley debuted Apple’s Media Toolkit, a set of object-oriented authoring tools developed for both non-technical producers and more technically astute programmers. According to Sculley, content producers can create interactive titles by direct manipulation of the objects or media on screen. Programmers will be able to use Media Toolkit differently, since it is compatible with scripting languages, including C+.
The final assembly.>> Media Toolkit works with existing applications such as Macromedia Director and QuickTime for Windows. It will be shipped with templates that can be easily modified. As Sculley was careful to emphasize, content is preserved independent of the application, so developers are able to modify the medium itself without losing the structure of the application — something that is very difficult to accomplish with today’s authoring tools. (This is also a benefit of ScriptX, Kaleida’s scripting language. See stories, pp. 18, 37.) Each project is stored as a template to which digital media can be added for fast production.
The toolkit supports multiple platforms, including Newton, QuickTime for Windows and the Macintosh. Media Toolkit will support Kaleida’s ScriptX when the cross-platform technology becomes a commercial product.
NEWTON IS GETTING ‘CLOSER TO REAL’
Sculley tried to quash the many rumors about delays in the shipment of Apple’s Newton technology. “Newton is coming along just great,” he said, although he provided no concrete information about delivery dates or final technical specs such as battery life. (As we went to press, we learned Newton will likely be launched on Aug. 2 at the Boston Macworld show.)
Michael Tchao, product marketing manager for Newton, once again demonstrated the technology’s handwriting recognition software that can translate both cursive and printed script into computer text. He also demonstrated its substantial built-in communications capabilities that allow a Newton to fax documents from the device and to “beam,” or transfer information, from one Newton to another via infrared technology.
A whole new model.>> Based on an entirely different model from its highly proprietary Macintosh technology, Apple is creating broad alliances with hardware partners to make Newton the kind of standard that the IBM PC became in the 1980s.
“I would predict long term that this new industry of handheld, highly customizable, object-oriented products, which are extremely scalable and inexpensive, will be a market that will be bigger than the PC market,” said Sculley.
Apple continues to support third-party developers who want to create custom Newton applications. Sculley emphasized that the technology is scalable and could someday find itself not only in PDAs and TV settop boxes, but also in display telephones or built into the dashboards of automobiles. (This, of course, will put it into direct competition with Microsoft’s newly announced AtWork technology platform. No surprise there.)
The Newton PDA was expected to go into “golden master,” a record industry term for “ready to be reproduced en masse,” by the end of last month and Sculley said it is very close to real.
TIME TO STEP BACK AND LOOK AT THE BIG PICTURE
As for his new responsibilities inside Apple, Sculley made it clear that it was time for a change for him personally and he endorsed the decision to put Michael Spindler in the chief executive officer’s seat. “If you look at my personal life for the past 15 years — five years as CEO of Pepsi and the last 10 for Apple — that’s a long time to be running things,” he said.
“Quite frankly, the thing I really love is this new emerging world of digital technologies. It is going to be extraordinary. It’s incredibly confusing. Nobody is quite sure where it goes. But we know it is going to take a huge amount of time to sort out what the possible options are. I want to do that.”
Janice Maloney
‘TRYING TO CREATE A NEW FAMILY OF BUSINESSES’
Robert Carberry, IBM
Robert Carberry is president of Fireworks Partners, a multimedia business and investment unit of IBM Corp. He presented one of the conference’s more humorous moments when he rolled a two-minute videotape showing on-the-spot interviews with individuals at a trade show who were asked the question: What is multimedia?
Things that make you go “ummm.” Nobody had a really good answer to the question. While it was a hoot to hear the hemming and hawing, their responses were — and are — an important reminder that in order to create critical mass for these emerging technologies, someone has to be able to tell us not just exactly what these devices and applications can do, but why we should care about them. People who don’t work for Apple or IBM or Microsoft or Sony might actually want to buy a “PDA” or a “smart television” or an “interactive entertainment CD-ROM disc,” if only they knew what they were good for.
TO LEARN THE MARKET, IBM CREATES SCENARIOS
In order for IBM to reach these potential consumers, the company has attempted to define this emerging marketplace through “the paradigm of vignettes,” according to Carberry. In other words, IBM has created specific scenarios in the home and office that show how these technologies might work.
Carberry presented four computer-simulated vignettes of the future — and, we have to say, badly simulated, especially considering that the company sells an enormously expensive Power Visualization System for just such high-end imaging applications. Between each scenario, Carberry outlined which of the technologies shown in the animation are either in prototype at IBM or are real products today.
Desktop video conferencing.>> In the first, which technically is not far from reality, the personal computer has evolved into a voice-activated, flat-panel display with touch-screen capabilities, a video telephone and connections to online information services built in.
To date, IBM can deliver, at least in part, on the promise of personal video conferencing and the customized news service. The IBM VCS-1 technology enables person-to-person communication over local area networks through standard phone lines. According to Carberry, the company is working on improving the quality and speed of the video.
Gigabit over fiber.>> IBM is also working on “collaborative video conferencing” that can link up to 2,000 parties simultaneously. Carberry briefly demonstrated three people using the system that operates over a one-gigabit wide-area network (WAN) running over fiber. (IBM has deployed one of these WANs in a test with Rogers Cable.)
IBM has also begun to deploy — on a smaller scale — its personalized online news service called NBC Desktop News, which was created in collaboration with NBC (see Vol. 2, No. 7, p. 25). Four pharmaceutical companies in New Jersey are to date the only test sites for the service.
The economics are here.>> The benefit of such services, said Carberry, is that once a site is operational, other services can be installed and operated at a much lower cost to the user. And, Carberry said, IBM will soon be able to deliver both the speech-recognition technology and the type of flat-panel displays shown in the simulation.
FORGET DICK TRACY; IT’S MAX SMART’S SHOE PHONE
The second vignette had all the qualities of an episode from the old TV series Get Smart. The main character of the animation is in the airport waiting for his flight. He opens his “wallet” — really a pen-based personal digital assistant — and begins jotting down notes about his business trip. Then he pops a credit card-size disc into its side, and a voice-activated language lesson begins. Then the wallet starts to ring. The character flips it over and it becomes a phone. Somehow, while he is talking, he is also taking copious notes on the other side of the device.
Right.
Carberry said this simulation isn’t as fantastical as we might think. IBM has prototyped a personal digital assistant that is the first in a series of devices that will fall under a new umbrella group within IBM called InTouch. The first device, which will go into a market field trial later this year, is slightly larger than a cellular flip-phone and is based on touch-screen technology. The initial prototype will be able to maintain a calendar and receive weather information, sports reports and real-time stock quotes.
LIFE IN THE AIRPLANE WILL NEVER BE THE SAME
People who fly are a captive audience, so to speak, and IBM has decided to use them as a focus group. In the third IBM vignette, our simulated man, who is now in an airplane, slides a credit card along the side of a screen installed in the seat back in front of him and a menu appears with the names of major newspapers, movies, games, drinks and fee schedules. The character, with a touch of a finger, can select from the menu.
Reality is not far afield. Both USAir and American Airlines, in conjunction with IBM, have installed computers into the seat backs of a limited number of their airplanes. According to Carberry, these test planes are no more than local area networks with 270 nodes, allowing individuals to share information, access multiple video titles, shop, play bridge together, and, if they’d like, maintain phone contact to the ground throughout the entire flight. He said that it would soon be feasible for people to have “electronic mail access straight to the seat back.”
To date, IBM’s airborne research has been limited, but Carberry says a large number of people are selecting the merchandising applications to shop electronically. (Yes, but do they buy?)
THE MAN FROM COUCH POTATOE
Similar to Apple, IBM has its own version of the virtual mall. And, similar to Apple, the company went for cute when naming this particular emerging technology group (at least for the sake of Carberry’s presentation): Consumer-Oriented User-Connected House Division (that would be COUCH). And of course, in conjunction with COUCH’s launch, Carberry announced the development of a handheld device to help consumers navigate the electronic mall. It is the POTATOE, for “Personal Online Terminal and Transaction Operating Environment.”
While Carberry did not detail IBM’s plans in this area, he said IBM believes it is important to understand the difference between an individual who is ready to buy and one who is ready to shop.
“When you are ready to buy, you know what you want and don’t want to go through exotic navigation,” Carberry explained. “But if you are shopping, you might like a reference person or collaborator to help you make decisions.” To that effect, IBM is working on ways to enable friends based in different locations to go on a virtual shopping spree together. It is good to note that IBM is also developing a debit card that has a limited cash value, so that parents can set limits for their children, for instance, when they are not home to watch them.
INTERACTIVE MUSIC KIOSKS SLOW TO CATCH ON
In closing, Carberry turned to the on-demand entertainment system IBM is developing with Blockbuster, Soundsational and New Leaf. The concept is to install interactive entertainment kiosks in music and video stores so consumers can press music or video CDs while they wait (see Vol. 2, No. 9, p. 8). The companies involved believe these new systems will dramatically reduce manufacturing and distribution costs.
Perhaps more importantly, though, these kiosks are an excellent vehicle for selling related products such as concert tickets or T-shirts, both of which can be purchased while the discs are being pressed.
Wooing the content owners.>> “The approach we are taking is to go to the content owners and say, ‘We know you own the content; we know you have the rights; we know you have the relationships with the retail outlet and artist, and we don’t want to get in the middle of that’,” Carberry said. IBM and Blockbuster were publicly humiliated after the announcement of the Soundsational system, when record companies pointed out that neither had asked their permission to use the new distribution system. “The technology is such today that we can take a substantial amount of your distribution cost out. Come try it.”
So far there has been only one taker — a Russian rock band called Snow Hat.
Laying the foundation.>> Carberry is not discouraged. He sees this as a time of infrastructure and alliance building. “We are putting collections of businesses in place,” he said. “Once these infrastructure businesses are established, one can simply take and change the content and the retail outlet and create a whole new other family of businesses. That’s what we are trying to do.”
Janice Maloney
‘AN ICE AGE OF INFORMATION THAT WILL KILL A FEW DINOSAURS’
Craig McCaw, McCaw Cellular
Craig McCaw is founder, chairman and chief executive officer of McCaw Cellular Communications, the nation’s largest cellular telephone company and the fifth largest paging company. Typical of his refreshing, back-to-basics style, McCaw had no glitzy presentation to deliver.
He had only one slide, made from an old Gary Larson “Far Side” cartoon: A driver glances in his side-view mirror, which is completely filled by the image of a huge eye. The caption reads, Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. “And that,” said McCaw, “is us.”
McCaw said that wireless communication technology is going to play a major role in developing the multimedia pathway into our homes and offices. Equally important, he believes that wireless will be the link that keeps us connected to our world when we’re in between the two.
THE ART IS TO MAKE ALLIANCES MEANINGFUL
In an atmosphere of promiscuous deal-making, McCaw believes that the art of an alliance is to make it mean something. His example: McCaw is still hammering out the terms of a far-reaching deal with AT&T that was announced almost a year ago and still has not been finalized. “We are trying to get it right before we actually do it,” he said.
Very few of the superpowers of the digital convergence share this philosophy. McCaw said he’s been amazed at the sheer volume of alliance announcements. (We listed more than 300 in our last issue.) The activity appears so random, he said, that it looks like companies are doing the equivalent of “picking softball teams and going into global competition with them.”
McCaw doesn’t see today’s deal-making yielding more than five successful global alliances. And he warns against the most common goal of alliance-building: when companies that make up the old guard join forces to try to escape the inevitable.
GENE-SPLITTING WON’T MAKE A NEW INDUSTRY
“This is a new ice age for information, communication and entertainment, and we do believe it will kill a number of dinosaurs,” said McCaw, who called alliances among the megacorporations “gene-splitting” to stay alive. “If you mate a brontosaurus with a stegosaurus, you’re not going to get a pterodactyl or a tyrannosaurus rex.”
In addition, he said, too many alliances are cast in the executive suite, with no buy-in from middle management or the employees who actually have to turn words into action. “We are very skeptical that (alliances) lacking that fundamental alignment can really come to anything in the long term,” he said.
Wireless is overlooked.>> Perhaps part of his concern comes from the fact that wireless communication has been largely overlooked in the gold rush to interactive TV and services. Today, the objective for every company in the emerging technology industries is to find a multimedia pathway into the home and into the office. McCaw believes that wireless has to be part of that process.
Although wireless may not be the obvious enabler that fiber-based communications is thought to be, McCaw said it is a pivotal technology because it does something today that we already know people both need and want: it allows them to conduct business and pleasure from wherever they happen to be.
The nature state.>> McCaw calls this a return to our “nature state” as nomads. He believes that personal computers and other sophisticated technologies continue to overlook these basic human needs, and he doesn’t see the trend changing as we move into the world of high-speed networks. “For the benefits of fiber to really come to fruition, you have to include the human being in the process, and that means (supporting) human beings in their nature state.”
Hundreds of years ago, being nomadic was much more rooted in the physical world: nomads did what they chose, moved as they wished, and took their environment and their possessions with them.
A custom infrastructure.>> In a digital world, where much of what we require in daily life comes over a network, McCaw believes communication-centric digital assistants such as those being developed by Apple (Newton), General Magic (MagicCap and Telescript), EO and others help fulfill our requirements as data nomads.
The technology built into these devices is capable of delivering the power to communicate in almost any environment: two-way voice and data links, paging, seeking and delivering specific information based on custom profiles, finding information in one place and delivering it to another. In a nutshell, these devices will soon be able to provide people with the ability to take with them their own, personalized infrastructure for information, communication and entertainment.
The power to communicate.>> It is for these devices that McCaw is building his network. His plan, which he says is shared by many others in wireless communication and some telcos, is to build a flexible, economical, multi-tiered network that can support you and your digital assistant wherever you happen to be, doing whatever you happen to be doing. This is the concept behind AT&T’s new EasyLink network as well (see story on General Magic, Vol. 2, No. 10/11, p. 3).
BANDWIDTH ON DEMAND MEETS THE NEEDS OF DIGITAL NOMADS
“We have ideas that include choice, bandwidth on demand,” he said. “It’s not the notion of a telephone or cellular phone that has a fixed amount of capability, but one that will allow you to choose how much bandwidth you need and how much to pay for it. It obviously has to be very economical to accomplish the kind of paradigm shift we believe is possible.”
The pursuit of bandwidth on demand can be seen in almost every project that McCaw undertakes. The company is still aggressively pursuing the widespread adoption of its Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) specification that enables wireless data communications for PDAs, automated vending machines and portable data terminals. The technology allows the transmission of packets of data during idle times on the cellular voice channels (see Vol. 2, No. 12, p. 22). McCaw says the company plans to launch commercial CDPD service this fall at Comdex in Las Vegas.
Digital cellular.>> McCaw has already implemented commercially the first digital system in the United States for cellular in Florida, and, he said, the company is moving rapidly to be “100 percent digital capable in the U.S. by mid-next year within our networks.”
McCaw also has a fully digital, nationwide, air-to-ground system already in service; it is the first one in service in the country. According to McCaw, the company has set up 85 ground stations and has access to 600 planes already; by this fall the company plans to have deals in place so that passengers on a cross-country flight could be connected during the entire flight and never drop the call. (Now that’s a bill we wouldn’t want to get.) Obviously this service requires cooperation on the part of a whole series of local area networks and mobile networks.
BRINGING PEOPLE INTO THE PARTY
In closing, McCaw said that focusing only on multimedia and services that can be delivered over fiber misses the point, which is finding a way to deliver services that people actually need and want. His mission is to offer an alternative for individuals who would like to return to a nomadic lifestyle where there is no boundary between work and play.
McCaw is also aware of the importance of good alliance-building, despite its random nature today. “We’re part of a certain number of global alliances, and we’re working on a lot more ourselves,” he said.
Bringing two worlds together.>> Aside from trying to figure out what’s happening in a playing field that appears to change daily, he said, the challenge for a communications company like his is to figure out how to bring together the two very disparate worlds of telecommunication and computing. They’ve been conducting themselves by rules that are diametrically opposed: the world of telecommunications has always operated under imposed standards and regulations, while the computer industry has created itself based on success in imposing de facto standards.
If McCaw can figure out how to make these two worlds work together in a way that benefits customers and helps create this new nomadic industry that he dreams of, he’ll have accomplished more than most people ever conceived of. As he said, “There’s a lot happening.” He obviously intends to be part of it, whatever it turns out to be.
Denise Caruso, Janice Maloney
‘THE PROMISE … WILL BE REALIZED ONLY IF WE IMPLEMENT IT WELL’
Richard Brown, Ameritech
Ameritech isn’t often cited as a company on the cutting edge of the digital revolution, but it may have the boldest vision of any of the regional Bell operating companies. The Illinois-based RBOC shocked the nation some months ago when it proposed to the Federal Communications Commission that it would give up its local telephone monopoly in exchange for permission to compete in providing video on demand and long distance services.
In essence, Ameritech has offered to separate itself into two parts. One would provide (on an open and equal basis) switched local communications infrastructure. The other (which will buy services from the first) will offer local phone, video and interactive services as well as long distance services. Anyone who wants to compete with this second company will be able to buy as much or as little of the services provided by the first company on an equal basis.
Intellectual vs. natural resources.>> Ameritech vice chairman Richard Brown has been the chief architect of these proposals. Brown believes that we are at the point in history when we will “shape and deploy the most powerful technology in the history of human civilization,” based on high-speed, two-way, switched networks. These technologies will encourage the use of intellectual resources rather than scarce natural resources; they will change education, health services and social relationships.
Like most of the Digital World speakers, Brown acknowledged that mass market entertainment and shopping applications will provide the financial incentive for building the essential framework.
However, he said, once the basic infrastructure is deployed, the same technology that makes possible video games and movies on demand can transform the way we work and learn, and help solve the crisis we face in medical care. The new networks will enable new applications such as telemedicine, telecommuting and distance learning. They will be a means of providing vital personalized services to socioeconomic and geographic regions that never had such services before, help save billions of dollars in resources, and ease strain on the environment.
Brown exhorted the audience to look beyond the entertainment market, where most people are looking for quick returns on infrastructure investment. “We will miss an historic opportunity if we fail to see the bigger picture for digital technology,” he said.
FIBER TO THE HOMES — OF FOURTH GRADERS
Brown detailed an Ameritech project where fiber-optic cable was installed in the homes of 100 fourth graders to connect them with the audio-video center at their local school.
One Saturday morning, assuming that the kids would be watching cartoons, the Ameritech technicians went out to perform service checks on the system. To their surprise, the workers found that every access link was tied up solid for many hours. The system was such a success it was kept open all summer long.
Though he knows no “normal” student would deign to agree with the statement, Brown takes this as evidence that “in an interactive network, school is never out.” Not only is information available at any time, but the network can make the same information and educational resources available regardless of neighborhood. Tax base no longer is a measure of educational opportunity. (Of course, it is not clear what this might mean in terms of reallocation of resources within communities.)
Beyond “universal access.” The privatized local U.S. phone system has been built on the promise of “universal access” — low-cost access to the network for everyone who asks for it. Brown envisages what he calls “Advanced Universal Access”: a nation in which every home, office and school has reasonably priced, ubiquitous access to the gamut of digital media — from full-motion digital video to news and other kinds of information services — priced as phone service is priced today. We presume that this means that access by low-income or low-use families is at least partially subsidized by the rates paid by heavy volume users, as is the case today via the phone networks’ common carrier status.
We are not certain how you would implement this in the kind of open, competitive world that Brown envisages, except perhaps to dictate that all other communications networks — including cable, wireless and direct broadcast satellite — be made common carriers as well. (It seems only fair that if these companies want to play on the phone company’s turf, they be asked to play by the same rules.)
But don’t hold your breath.>> “The pie is still in the sky,” said Brown. “The door-to-door broadband network is a long way off.” He does believe, however, that there are significant services that can be deployed today, before there is a fully implemented digital highway. “There are interim steps that can get us most of the way — not all of the way — to where we want to go.”
HOW PHONE SYSTEMS ARE BETTER THAN CABLE
Because the first applications of the digital network focus on entertainment, and because the 1984 breakup of AT&T forbids the regional companies from operating video delivery services in their service areas, national interest has focused on the existing TV delivery system — the cable industry — as the natural first providers of such services. However, Brown believes that the established telephone systems have some distinct advantages over cable.
The telephone companies already have national connectivity; the phone system’s architecture was designed from inception for two-way, switched, point-to-point communications; and the network backbone is already digital, with digital services moving rapidly down the wire toward the home.
In addition, as telephone service in the United States has become critical to the conduct of commercial and social life, phone systems have been increasingly mandated by law to provide high standards of reliability. To date, no similar requirements have been placed on the cable industry. (See Part I of our piece on interactive TV, Vol. 2, No. 12, p. 3.)
The ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) communications protocol can provide switched digital interactive services over copper today, although Brown admits that ISDN is not adequate to provide on-demand video entertainment. Another digital protocol called ADSL (Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line), however, can provide two to four video channels over standard twisted-pair copper wires.
CAN COPPER REALLY COMPETE WITH COAX?
We pressed Brown on this point. The advantage that cable has over the phone companies is that it already has coax cable, rather than twisted-pair copper wire running into subscribers’ homes. Brown acknowledges that the phone companies are not going to replace the “last mile” of copper with fiber cable anytime soon. Does he really think that digital video images delivered into the home over copper wire under real-world conditions will be good enough to compete with digital cable?
He hedged. He hopes that further technical advances will make twisted-pair competitive with cable for the crucial last mile. But he didn’t guarantee that this would be the case.
No sworn enemies.>> Perhaps partially because of this, Brown does not profess to see the cable and telco industries as mortal enemies. Bringing fully switched broadband service to every door is an enormous job — one that Brown believes will require the shared resources of cable, telephone and satellite industries.
(Interestingly, Brown did not mention the computer industry as a needed partner. We hope this is an assumption on his part and not a strategic oversight.) To accomplish such a massive goal, he said, “will require full capital deployment of resources — all of our technologies, expertise and imagination…. It’s also a job that will require full competition at every part of the existing network for price, efficiency and variety.”
It is the latter requirement that led Ameritech to petition Congress to allow Ameritech to offer video and long distance services in exchange for opening up its local monopoly to competition. Brown explained that the proposal, which is for the Ameritech region only, not the entire country, was intended to act as a “laboratory for bold change in access to local exchange.”
THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN IS NOTHING
In addition, it would take far too long to try to have the policy changed on a national level. “The worst thing that could happen to the telephone industry is nothing,” Brown said. “Without some fundamental regulatory and public policy changes, investors are not going to pony up the dollars it takes to bring that infrastructure to the consumer.”
History will be the judge.>> Brown presented a cautious (realistic) picture of the time and effort it will take to deploy a fully digital, switched broadband network. But he is quite convinced that we must start this effort as quickly as possible — and that we should think about what we are doing, and what the consequences will be.
In a call to the conference audience (later echoed by Mitch Kapor and many of the attendees in following sessions) Brown warned that “the promise of the digital revolution will be realized only if we implement it well. History will judge our generation on the values we bring to this powerful new technology.”
David Baron
PLACE YOUR BETS AND ‘PAY AS YOU GO’
Brian Roberts, Comcast
Brian Roberts is the president of Pennsylvania-based Comcast, the fourth largest cable operator in the United States, with 2.8 million customers.
Comcast is the second largest cellular network operator outside of the telephone companies. (McCaw Cellular is the largest.) Widely diversified in the communications business, Comcast also sells combined cable-and-telephony services in the United Kingdom (competing with state-run British Telecom) and is a majority investor in Barry Diller’s home shopping channel, QVC Network Inc. The company also recently agreed to purchase 150,000 digital cable boxes from General Instrument for delivery in 1994.
In a fascinating contrast to Ameritech’s vice chairman Richard Brown, Roberts laid out the fundamental reasons why he believes the cable television industry is best positioned to lead the way in creating tomorrow’s broadband information and entertainment networks. In the process, he also highlighted the difference between his “here and now” focus on what sells and Richard Brown’s focus on the greater good for society.
DRIVEN BY COAX AND COMPUTERS
The convergence of the telephone, television and computer is being driven by two factors: the cable industry’s massive installation of coaxial cable — 98 percent of the country’s 93 million so-called “TV households” have physical access to cable services (though only 60 percent of them subscribe) — and what Roberts called “the breathtaking pace of computer technology development.”
In addition, Roberts said, he believes the entrepreneurial spirit of the cable industry will continue to drive this convergence — implying that the telephone companies are too old, stodgy and complacent to make a difference.
According to Roberts, the economics of implementing a broadband network heavily favors the cable industry because the addition of services for the cable industry can be incremental, whereas the phone companies require large-scale plant upgrades before new services can begin.
OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF A COMPLEX PROBLEM
In what appears to be a great oversimplification of a complicated problem — and one that is echoed by many cable operators revving up interactive TV test sites — Roberts proposed that some advanced entertainment and information services can be added just by delivering a new settop box. “It’s pay as you go,” said Roberts of the cable industry’s strategy. “It’s not ‘build it and they will come’.”
Most cable operators are talking about significant investments to upgrade their backbone systems to digital fiber, so from the industry’s perspective, it’s not quite pay as you go. In addition, in order to keep the cost-per-box at a reasonable rate, cable operators must order sufficiently large numbers of settop boxes from manufacturers like General Instrument and Scientific Atlanta to achieve economies of scale. This also requires cash — and a leap of faith that the operators will have enough customer demand to install the number of boxes they order.
But Roberts believes those investments can easily be paid back from revenues generated by providing services that are almost certain to win consumer approval — movies on demand and interactive home shopping.
(This, of course, is exactly what Ameritech would like to do: take a cut of the revenue generated by movies on demand and home shopping to pay for the cost of upgrading its plant. However, since the phone network is considered a public utility, it cannot do so without a change in the regulatory structure — a burden that the cable industry does not bear.)
FOR THE CONSUMER, IT IS ‘PAY AS YOU GO’
From the consumer’s point of view, however, interactive services are “pay as you go.” A customer who wants nothing more than basic cable service gets just that. A customer who wants new services, such video on demand and interactive shopping, can ask for a new set-top box and will be charged higher fees accordingly.
Most cable operators say that $5–$10 per month of additional revenue is sufficient justification for spending an extra $100 per box. Assuming pricing that’s competitive with video rental stores, this translates to approximately two or three pay-per-view movies a month.
Desire vs. hyperbole.>> Roberts elaborated on this idea during the question session after his presentation. What happens, he asked, when (he did say “when,” not “if”) the phone companies spend $200 billion upgrading their plants, and no one buys into the new system or services?
They are asking government to allow them to pass a percentage of these costs on to their customers, Roberts said, regardless of the change in usage. He believes the role of government should be to balance the “desires and hyperbole of industry,” not enable spending without return.
(Phone companies are forced by law to ask government’s permission to raise their rates, whereas the cable industry has been able to do so at any time it wants with no government intervention, much to the obvious chagrin of cable customers. The Cable Act of 1993, recently passed by Congress, forces cable operators to limit rate increases.)
Snuffing video rentals.>> Roberts claimed the cable industry, which has revenues of $22 billion per year, would spend only $15 billion to upgrade its system to fiber and go after the $10-billion-per-year video store business. Roberts called movies on demand an “intuitive offering,” and believes that it’s a “reasonable revenue shift” to assume. In other words, movies on demand is the only application for fiber to the home that anyone will care about in the short term.
“I don’t know that people want to sit around at home with virtual reality helmets and talk to somebody in Chicago…. I live in the here and now, and I think the regulators have to do the same thing,” Roberts said. “So I can’t see writing off perfectly good equipment to go after telemedicine commuting [see Richard Brown's comments]. Maybe it’s there, and maybe it’s not. You’ve got to start slowly, that’s our point.”
A PHONE COMPANY THAT HELPS UPGRADE CABLE SYSTEMS
To drive home his belief in cable’s supremacy over the phone companies for interactive entertainment services, Roberts cited the recent investment by US West in Time Warner Entertainment. Instead of investing $2.5 billion in its own physical plant, the regional Bell operating company instead decided to help upgrade Time Warner’s cable systems because “it was a better investment.”
(Ameritech’s Brown responded during the question session, saying that the US West investment makes sense only because it is prohibited from making a good business case in its home market due to the cross ownership ban. This ban excludes the regional Bell companies from owning cable operations in their home regions. Brown wants to try to change the policies so that true competition can take place, for both telephone and video service.)
Look, ma, no Bell.>> Despite his apparent disregard for the viability of the phone system to deliver interactive entertainment, Roberts said the real task is to ensure that the national system is interconnected, with shared facilities and interoperability.
Comcast is a part owner of Fleetcall, soon to be renamed Nextel; its corporate goal is to become the first national wireless cellular system. The company is also a partner in Teleport, an alliance to provide alternative telephone access to office buildings through the local cable infrastructure. Its partners in this venture are TCI, Cox Cable and Continental Cablevision. It is through this venture that these players are hoping to leverage the cable infrastructure into the corporate market. Interoperable systems would enable Comcast to integrate its cellular and cable operations.
To demonstrate this point, Comcast initiated a conference call across five different locations: a car, hospital and office in New Jersey and two locations in London. The call used cable, cellular, alternative access and personal communication systems and completed the phone call over existing highways and switches without ever interfacing with Bell switching facilities.
As this demonstration shows, the cable industry’s goal is not just interactive entertainment, but full telecommunications. Apparently its desire to provide telephone service is fine, but the phone company’s move into traditional cable services should wait.
Effective competition.>> Roberts believes that a model already exists for a migration from today’s (partially) regulated environment to a truly competitive market for local services. He is willing to live with current regulations (including programming restrictions) until there is “effective competition” in the market. Then, he would expect restrictions on products and services to dissolve and competition itself to become the best regulator.
What is “effective competition?” Previous FCC rulings in this area have defined this as the point at which a competitor (presumably the phone company) is physically able to provide interactive digital services to 50 percent of the customers in a market, and is actually serving 15 percent of the customers in that market. With the present-day regulatory structure, Roberts knows that competition so defined will be a long time coming. For the foreseeable future, cable operators will have a substantial edge — which is as he wants it.
David Baron, Denise Caruso
‘THE NIGHTMARE COULD BE REALITY UNLESS WE TAKE INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY’
Mitch Kapor, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Mitch Kapor left behind a successful career as a corporate executive (as founder of both Lotus Development and ON Corp.) for many reasons, but one of the most compelling was his vision that cyberspace — that odd “no-place” on the network where electronic communication and commerce take place — was turning into this century’s version of the Wild West.
Federal agents were seizing computer equipment without search warrants, corporations were monitoring what employees thought were private electronic communications, and crackers and viruses were polluting what had been for many years a relatively placid environment where researchers and computer junkies had created a new kind of community.
So Kapor and a couple of other like-minded individuals founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990, and it’s probably safe to say that they are much busier than they’d hoped to be. Bringing to light the vast potential, both upside and downside, of a national information infrastructure based on broadband digital networks is turning out to be more than a full-time job.
Most recently, intense public discussion about a national interactive TV network has Kapor waking up at night in a cold sweat. To launch his excellent presentation at Digital World, he described his nightmare.
MITCH’S NIGHTMARE: MORE OF THE SAME IN EVERY WAY
In Kapor’s nightmare, a new national broadband network, probably operated by the cable television operators (but no promises), will deliver “the same crap” that comes over today’s systems — not because there aren’t people with new ideas for interactive programming, but because the network remains closed to innovative people with (perhaps) radical ideas.
Driven by what Kapor called the same “hard head” example, people who have devised thoughtful and fun ways to utilize the new technologies are unable to gain access to the network. Instead, “we end up turning into a generation of interactive, button-pushing couch potatoes,” no better off than we are today.
Quashing competition.>> In Kapor’s nightmare, fair and open competition is effectively quashed at the application (i.e., TV programming) level, since all the “big guys” will have gotten together and built “an open platform of a sort.”
These so-called big guys — a group, Kapor said, not unlike the rumored Cablesoft alliance between Tele-Communications, Inc., Time Warner and Microsoft — would control the fundamental software for the nation’s information infrastructure, thus controlling access to the network, control that would serve to advance the interests of those companies’ stockholders first and foremost. “Open interface subverts the truth of a closed network,” as Kapor succinctly put it.
Diversity and access are key.>> While Kapor admitted that his nightmare was stark, he feels it could too easily become reality unless we begin to take individual responsibility for our actions in developing this network.
He left the audience with three principles and practical suggestions for how we should proceed. The key ideas are diversity on, and access to, the network. “If the new media are going to be the conduits for commerce, entertainment, education and social intercourse, we’d better get it right,” Kapor said, and getting it right includes both technology and public policy.
CITIZENS, NOT USERS, WILL BE CUSTOMERS ON THE NET
The first principle put forth was the need to change the way we all view the users of this network. With people planning to use the network to change the way we all live, users are no longer merely subscribers or consumers — although they are both — but they are citizens. “Them is us, too,” Kapor reminded the audience.
Civic-minded, or power monger? Kapor called “wacky” the phenomenon of very civic-minded people, who have families and live in neighborhoods they care about, who cast off their cloak of civic duty and transform themselves into corporate power and glory mongers when they step into their offices. “We have some individual responsibility for where we put our creative efforts to work — for what kind of world we are creating,” he said.
Publish and subscribe.>> Kapor’s second suggestion was to make sure to “bake in” a diversity of uses and multiculturalism in the national information infrastructure and into any system architecture or policy regime involving the network.
The critical component in realizing this goal is making sure that users — citizens — have access to and at least partial control over what goes over the net. “We cannot put a stranglehold on who has access to the system — who gets to be a producer or provider,” Kapor said. In other words, anyone must be able to subscribe to network services, but similarly anyone must also be able to publish on the network as well.
CULTIVATING THE GARAGE BANDS OF CYBERSPACE
Kapor was first to raise an issue that became the unofficial theme of Digital World: “How are we going to create the garage bands of cyberspace?” In the music business today, all you really need is a cheap synthesizer to be a hit. By the numbers, this doesn’t happen often.
But it is how most new bands start out — and from the ferment of cheap available tools come the artists of each new generation. Cheap electronic components and garage-based hobbyists gave birth to the personal computer industry as well. Interactive service and product producers need to have those same opportunities.
Outcasts and weirdos.>> While some in the audience may have thought Kapor stretched the analogy a bit — claiming historical precedent for supporting “outcasts and weirdos” since the founders of our country were kicked out of England — the need for equal access is a crucial issue.
On a smaller scale, the problem is already evident today in the comparatively high cost of multimedia production systems. Financially successful movies have been produced for less than $10,000, and hit records for even less, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone producing multimedia whose computer system alone cost less than that.
So, are the new networks going to require that any folks who want to put themselves on the wire, so to speak, have a specific brand name of hardware or software system in order to tap in? Will they have to make deals with network owners? Or, as Kapor hoped aloud, “are we going to define the architecture in such a way that there are [TV] set interfaces and anyone could put their cheap-jack hardware on it as long as it matches the interfaces?”
CHANNELIZED VS. SWITCHED: WHO CONTROLS THE CONTENT?
The question of open access led into Kapor’s third and final question: Are we going to have a channelized or switched architecture?
In a channelized architecture — the architecture that today’s TV system is based on — a large pipe is divided up into many smaller pipes, or channels, each dedicated to a particular stream of data.
A switched architecture — the telephone system, for example — enables a point-to-point connection via a series of switches that routes the call/message/information from one location to another.
In a switched system, there is no one place to find a particular service or programming source. In the same way that you make a phone call today, you could go directly to an information source anywhere on the network. Think of the difference between how you access a television program versus how you make a phone call.
A false sense of channel scarcity.>> According to Kapor, a switched architecture reduces the amount of bandwidth needed going to the home. If you have three televisions in your home and each of them is capable of directly accessing a desired service or program, you theoretically need only enough bandwidth for three channels.
Therefore, there are a lot of possibilities open without replacing even the telephone’s twisted-pair copper wire. (This fits with Richard Brown of Ameritech’s idea that fiber should be laid as close to the home as possible, but not necessarily beyond the “curb,” as they say.)
Killing diversity.>> The interactive TV scenarios painted by the cable industry naturally point to a channelized architecture. This is the simplest for cable operators to implement, and it supports applications they know will be profitable, like video on demand and pay-per-view.
Kapor believes that following this path will effectively kill diversity, as the control of those channels will be in the hands of the few, and “a new regime of channel scarcity” will develop.
Based upon Kapor’s experience in the personal computer business (and Comcast president Brian Roberts’ presentation backed him up), these architecture decisions have historically been based strictly on maximizing profit and maintaining the power base of the status quo.
A NEW BEGINNING, OR MORE OF THE STATUS QUO?
The question then remains: Will there be a transition to switched systems, or has the template already been laid for the future?
For Kapor, switched architectures won’t develop if John Malone, the president of Tele-Communications, Inc. (the country’s largest cable operator, enormously powerful both because of its size and its deep investments in content and programming), doesn’t see a spreadsheet that convinces him that there is more money to be made with a switched rather than channelized architecture.
“If the dollars don’t add up, that’s not going to happen. It is just that brutal,” Kapor said. The only remaining option for resolution of the problem is the government, a scenario with which Kapor is equally uncomfortable.
No solutions, only hope.>> Kapor offered no solutions for his nightmare, only a hope that the technology is heading in the right direction. Cheap processing power enables many applications to be delivered over copper wire; there are multiple data highways under development — including the phone system, direct broadcast satellite and cellular data networks — which will encourage competition and bring down the price of delivering digital media over those highways. Therefore, what is most needed (and most difficult to develop) is a sense of individual responsibility to create the future in a way that best serves the citizens of the United States.
Later presentations by Geoff Holmes of Time Warner and Richard Green of CableLabs made it clear that the cable industry’s focus had shifted in recent months, and that its objective will be much more ambitious than originally supposed.
They are now talking about a fully switched, high-bandwidth network that supports channels for existing cable subscribers and services and switched delivery for most on-demand services. (See next story.) Kapor clearly applauds this shift — although he remains skeptical that they will deliver on their promise.
To end his presentation, Kapor made a plea for audience members to join the Washington, DC-based Electronic Frontier Foundation. He has frequently spoken before Congress as an executive of the nonprofit EFF, which is dedicated to developing and implementing public policies about computer and communications networks based on the principles of openness, competitiveness and civil liberties that he espoused from the Digital World dais.
David Baron, Denise Caruso
FULL-SERVICE NETWORKS FROM BOTH THE CABLE COMPANIES, TELCOS?
Richard Green, CableLabs
Dick Green, president and CEO of CableLabs and two-time keynoter at Digital World, found “a refreshing note of commercial reality” resonating at this year’s conference. We no longer are debating whether multimedia is a business so much as figuring out who is going to build the infrastructure and control the content.
In many ways Green believes this sense of certainty has something to do with a string of recent commitments to network expansion on the part of cable and telephone companies. “With billions of dollars already earmarked for cable and telephone network development, and billions more soon to be anted up, there can be no doubt that digital communications is poised for quantum growth,” he said.
The cable perspective.>> Green used his closing keynote this year to provide perspective from the cable side, “on where we are, and what we think we need to do to accomplish success for all parties to the digital communications revolution.”
He advocated that members of the converging industries make a firm commitment toward interoperability and an open telecommunications architecture model. “If we can avoid trying to use proprietary technology to lock in markets,” he said, “we’ll be able to expand and use the infrastructure for a long time to come. And, more importantly, we can all compete knowing that the network will be a fair and open platform providing a vehicle for development and delivery of new products.”
The full-service network.>> For Green, the telecommunications network model of choice — for both cable companies and telephone companies — is the full-service network (FSN) model first discussed by Time Warner as part of the Orlando project (see “Projects and Prototypes,” p. 27).
The Orlando project will “serve a 10,000-household base in suburban Orlando starting at the end of this year,” said Green. Green said that Time Warner is planning to build the FSN network throughout the major urban areas served by Time Warner, including New York City, Orlando, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Columbus, Houston, Raleigh, Durham, Memphis and Rochester. As Green said, it is “not a bad market base in which to nurture demand for digital services of every type, for services from voice to VR.”
By cable industry standards and capital spending standards, TW’s FSN is expected to be costly — the media giant has not announced the exact cost, although analysts have estimated it to be north of $500 per household, including the core home terminal equipment — even beyond the first installation cost phase. “But by the standards of what it would cost to do anything similar using any other means, whether they be existing telephone networks or unbuilt wireless transport systems, the FSN is an incredibly low-cost implementation of a digital service platform that promises to last well beyond this decade,” said Green.
TCI, Cablevision not far behind.>> In addition to Time Warner, Tele-Communications Inc., the largest MSO, with more than 10 million subscribers, recently announced its commitment to spend $2 billion on the installation of a fiber-coax network companywide within four years. Cablevision Systems has embarked on a similar project at an estimated cost of $300 million.
It isn’t just the huge cable companies that are making large commitments to fiber, however. According to Green, Scripps Howard has rebuilt its Chattanooga, TN, system, extending fiber to 500 home-serving areas, and in Syracuse, NY, Adelphia Communications is putting in a 1-GHz network — that’s 150 analog channels — which will draw fiber all the way to 200 neighborhood nodes.
As the penetration of fiber increases, said Green, it delivers far greater capability and functionality within the network. “With this deeper fiber extension we can provide dedicated virtual channels to every household within each area served by a fiber link,” he said.
The evolution of the box.>> This provides traditional cable service that everyone can watch in the usual way, employing low-cost terminals or cable-ready TVs in the home. It also means cable operators can continue to use addressable analog terminals to allow for segmentation of this block of channels into à la carte offerings at various price points or offer a package of “point-to-multi-point” digital services such as a cluster of current movie hits using digital compression.
“From here,” explained Green, “we go to a more advanced terminal in users’ households, where the premium subscriber has a digital decoder built into the analog addressable terminal. Or, if we want to devote bandwidth to the allocation of virtual channels on demand, we can provide a box in the home that can be expanded to accommodate user participation in the services offered over the virtual channel.”
Telcos to adopt FSN? According to Green, the cable companies are not the only ones enamored of the FSN design approach. Although it has not been widely adopted by the telephone companies, its appeal is strong enough that both US West and Southwestern Bell are preparing to make use of the cable approach to deploy broadband networks. In fact, he said, Bellcore is drawing up a specification to fit FSN design to the needs of the telephone companies.
US West’s initial FSN test will begin later this year in Omaha, Nebraska. The company says it plans to hook up 100,000 homes to fiber-coax broadband networks next year; it will continue at a pace of 500,000 homes per year through the end of the decade, said Green. As reported in Digital Media (see Vol. 2, No. 10/11, p. 32), Southwestern Bell has contracted to purchase two cable systems serving 265,000 homes in the Washington, DC, area. (The company is widely reported to be on a hunt for more such acquisitions.)
The pursuit of interoperability.>> While Green firmly believes that fiber to the neighborhood is a winner, he made it clear that the point of his talk was to pitch the concept of the full-service network, not cable’s deployment of it. “This is not a discussion about one industry’s advantage over another,” he said. “I’m talking about a fundamental change in the telecommunications architecture.” He encouraged all of the converging industries to keep an open line of discussion and to work toward standards that will allow “a network that will be a fair and open platform providing a vehicle for development and delivery of new products.”
Janice Maloney
A MULTIMEDIA STANDARD TO BRING ABOUT ‘UNIVERSAL COMPATIBILITY’
Nat Goldhaber, Kaleida Labs
Like so many of the executives, creators and analysts who spoke during the three-day Digital World conference, Nat Goldhaber, then president and CEO of Kaleida Labs, chose the imagery of war to describe what he believes the next couple of years of the digital convergence will feel like*. Unlike his fellow speakers, he also took the opportunity to name his enemy. (We’ll give you a clue: it is a man from a land called Redmond.)
“It strikes me that over the next few years, there are going to be some remarkably bloody wars fought between rather large companies, and when it is all over there will be some rather large bodies in the street,” he said. “It strikes me that it’s worth it to go through this tortured period because out of it will come something that is really quite wonderful, quite precious, quite important to us as a nation and quite important to the world.”
Protection against obsolescence.>> Universal compatibility among diverse hardware platforms and delivery systems was — and is — Goldhaber’s Holy Grail. He believes that as an industry we must develop a multimedia standard, preferably in software, so that hardware manufacturers, tool and title developers, and consumers are protected from making obsolete technology investments. It is Kaleida’s charter, he said, to deliver that “multimedia insurance” through the development of its ScriptX cross-platform multimedia technology. “Remember VHS vs. Beta?” Goldhaber asked. “Consumers want to know that the multimedia market isn’t going to shaft them the same way.”
ScriptX, which was demonstrated several times during the conference (see p. 41), certainly has allure as a possible multimedia standard. According to Goldhaber and the Kaleida team, ScriptX would provide tools and title developers with an opportunity to distribute their work to everything from handheld devices to settop boxes as simply as “hitting a button on a screen and selecting ‘Save as ScriptX’.” In addition, consumers could use any ScriptX-enabled device or computer platform to play interactive titles that support ScriptX — regardless of the platform they were originally developed for.
Version 1.0 of ScriptX technology is still under development and is at least a year away from delivery.
Hardware standard is a false god.>> Goldhaber argued against a hardware standard since the multimedia standard that is selected must be extensible, so that future pieces of technology can be added. “I don’t think that a hardware standard will work, because to anoint a single hardware specification as the one and only would mean an end to hardware differentiation based on quality and features, and an end to ultimate multimedia portability,” Goldhaber said.
Under this particular scenario, he said, “a lot of hardware manufacturers would go out of business and a lot of new and exciting titles would never be written. Kaleida is in the business to try to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Know thine enemy.>> After having set himself up as the King Arthur of the digital domain, Goldhaber chose to identify his Mordred. “Bill Gates is an anomaly in American corporations today,” Goldhaber said. “He’s an extremely secure CEO, founder and virtual owner of his entire company, whose shareholders are docile and who’s sitting on top of the largest cash pile in American history.
“It’s credible and even likely that his strategy in establishing what we’ve heard is called Cablesoft is just the first step along the road to Time Warnersoft. A film studio perhaps? Microsoft NT today, Microsoft ET tomorrow?
“At a multimedia conference this spring, I clearly remember Bill saying there will be one network and one network protocol. And I think Craig Mundie [general manager of consumer devices at Microsoft] this morning confirmed that Bill Gates plans to own at least one of them.”
Goldhaber painted a future in which Microsoft dominates the cable industry of tomorrow in the same way it’s controlled the computer hardware industry with its software technology. “All they have to do is duplicate their strategy where they succeeded in extracting all of the added value and reducing hardware manufacturers to an [interchangeable] commodity.”
Goldhaber said that he believes Microsoft will first set up the cable companies, then the telephone companies, then the broadcast satellite companies, so they all provide exactly the same service. “Then those companies will have to compete at the margins, and so also be reduced to fungible service providers essentially unable to differentiate,” he said. “Consumers will get their digital pipe from whoever gives it to them the cheapest [as opposed to buying the best].”
According to Goldhaber, the biggest potential problem of allowing Microsoft to set the multimedia standard is that it will only be the beginning in the company’s quest “to conquer the world of communications, technology and content.”
Pictures to the people.>> While Kaleida does have aspirations to see its ScriptX technology become the multimedia software standard, Goldhaber said the company takes a much different world view than its competitor. “Our world view is to enable, not to take over,” Goldhaber said.
“I’d like everyone to have a voice in whatever medium they need to speak in. I’d like to make the power of computer technology accessible to everyone who has been disenfranchised by their reliance on text-based information. Pictures to the people. Let’s reach the eyes and ears of a new class of users and let them take their place in a technologically enabled world.”
In closing, he encouraged attenders to take an active role in how standards are to be handled and to help select a multimedia standard. “Let’s make that choice for freedom and inclusion,” he said.
Janice Maloney
HE HELPED CREATE THE WAVE, NOW HE’S CATCHING IT
Al Sikes, Hearst Corp.>>
As chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 1989 to 1993, Alfred Sikes personally helped roil the waters that brought the cable and telephone industries to loggerheads. A deep-down believer in driving markets via open competition, he pushed hard — and succeeded — in persuading the Justice Department to allow telephone companies the regulatory freedom to offer both information services and “video dial tone.”
The latter drove telcos into direct competition with cable for the provision of video programming to America’s consumers, and, Sikes hoped, provided them with sufficient incentive to start the costly process of upgrading to fiber.
Presiding over alphabet soup.>> He was also presiding over the FCC during deliberations for, and granting of, spectrum for interactive video and data services (IVDS) and a particularly controversial decision to reallocate some of the radio spectrum already in use by industries such as the railroads for personal communication services (PCS). And it was his innovative “collaborate to compete” solution that finally got the warring factions of high-definition television (HDTV) to work together.
Sikes’s bold moves at the FCC came from a long acquaintance with the issues as both a radio executive and a state government official in the mid-1970s to mid-1980s. Then, from 1986 to 1989, he served as assistant secretary of commerce and administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
Assessing U.S. policy.>> There he was responsible for the NTIA Telecom 2000 report, which was the first comprehensive U.S. communications policy assessment in 20 years. He also led discussions on trade and market access between the U.S. communications industry and West Germany, the United Kingdom, France, South Korea, the Philippines and China.
Sikes as much as anyone in the world knows about issues surrounding the creation of a communications superhighway. His choice to enter the private sector as a publishing company executive, rather than in a cable or telephone company, should serve as a valuable object lesson for those who still don’t believe that information coupled with technology, and not technology alone, will drive the next phase of the telecommunications revolution.
A SUPERHIGHWAY WE MAY WANT IN OUR BACKYARD
Sikes opened his Digital World remarks by recalling a press interview in 1991, when a reporter asked him what he thought of a bill sponsored by then-Senator Albert Gore and Sen. Conrad Burns. The bill called for the government to take steps to ensure that an information superhighway would be in place by 2015.
“I said the bill’s authors had too little faith in the market, as it would achieve that goal much sooner,” said Sikes. “If the software and system are done well, then I believe the superhighway will arrive by the end of this century, if not before. It’s less certain, however, whether tomorrow’s superhighway will develop as quickly as it should and whether it will be as robust as it should be.”
Field of dreams.>> Sikes acknowledged the difficulty of seeing and designing products that consumers don’t know they want. “We face additionally the perils of conceiving and designing services for a network that’s not yet in existence,” he said. Only the early adopters are using the more sophisticated interactive technologies on the market today, and even they wouldn’t claim they’re representative of the population at large.
Sikes sees only a few exceptions — home shopping, video games, video on demand — but despite this dearth of broad applications, he said, metaphorically, the checkered flag is up. “The competition will be fascinating,” he said. “It will be destabilizing, and it will hold many surprises.”
Like what? “Well, all of a sudden companies headed by engineers are buying movie studios, and entertainment companies are entering into alliances with manufacturers, and software companies are buying intellectual property as if they know how to entertain,” said Sikes. Even the stodgiest print publishers are finding value in alliances with manufacturers and network providers.
The chaos is palpable and it’s “making nauseous” the full spectrum of the communications industry. “The room is spinning,” Sikes said. “The people don’t know how to make it stop. Convergence has arrived on many doorsteps an unwanted visitor.”
SOME CANDID COMMENTS ABOUT LIFE IN BUREAUCRACY
“I must admit it was easier to talk with unrestrained enthusiasm while I was at the FCC,” said Sikes. “The market was to me an abstraction. I could remember its stimulative effects from my days as a broadcaster, but I wasn’t having to make deals. I wasn’t having to invest my capital at risk or to pay debt. I was protected. I was protected from my decisions. Beyond that, I was protected from technology.”
But those days are over. Today, his job is to determine how the digital world will affect the financial picture for the extensive media holdings of Hearst, which include everything from Cosmopolitan to the San Francisco Examiner to TV stations and cable networks the company co-owns.
Extraordinary but nascent.>> “We see extraordinary, yet nascent new opportunities,” said Sikes, echoing the view of many print publishers at Digital World and beyond. “Newspapers, books and magazines are not going away.
“On the other hand, in an advanced interactive communications world, new markets will emerge inevitably, enlarging and changing revenue streams. People will want time-sensitive information now. The word ‘communications’ will be increasingly conditioned by personalization, by customization, and not by mass.”
INTERACTIVE’S ALREADY THEIR STOCK IN TRADE
The good news, said Sikes, is that people already interact with their media — they turn pages, look at tables of contents, browse. While many are looking to the technologists and the entertainment industry for answers, he believes (not surprisingly) they should look east, toward New York City, which is still the capital of the publishing industry.
Missing opportunities.>> Sikes is convinced that holding back will not only put companies at risk, but will preclude them from taking advantage of new opportunities.
A questioner asked if we might see coventures “on the magnitude of US West-Time Warner” for publishers. Sikes said, “Well, I was going to say yes until you added ‘on the magnitude of US West-Time Warner’ and I’m not sure we’re going to see $2.5 billion change hands. That’s an enormous sum of money in the publishing industry in terms of investment.”
Reticent no more.>> However, publishers are getting past their initial reticence. “Some are more aggressive than others,” he said. “But my sense is that there is a lot of movement.”
Hearst, he said, is pursuing alliances within the publishing community as well as with network providers and computer companies. “Using the networks as test beds and entering into relationships for that purpose makes sense,” he said. “When you go forward with a new medium you simply can’t say, ‘All right, we’re going to do magazines and this new interactive TV.’ Working with electronic publishers and software developers, to some extent, probably makes some sense (for us).”
THE GLOBAL MARKET NEEDS SOME WARMING
Sikes’s experience in world trade also made for an interesting exchange about how and/or why we continue to focus on “killing each other” in the U.S. market while ignoring a huge potential global market by not working with standards organizations, etc., on infrastructure issues.
“To set standards internationally is very, very slow,” Sikes said. “As a consequence, a lot of people who are on the leading edge pull back from it. Secondly, standards are frequently set internationally on a de facto basis. While it is a bit chaotic, order almost always emerges. I’m not sure at this juncture I would suggest that we anchor the innovative process in this country to (international standards bodies like) the CCITT or the CCIR.”
And, he added later, the European Community has become very protective of itself — “feeding at the EC trough,” he called it — and is making it much harder for foreigners like the U.S. to do business there. Meantime, the tough competition in the U.S. market for interactive content is pushing forward the state of the art at a much faster rate.
FREE THE MARKETS, DELIVER THE NETWORKS
Five years ago, before it was fashionable to do so, Sikes’s Telecom 2000 report forecast today’s electronic neighborhoods — outlining new ways to provide healthcare, education and other public services. The report was quite confident that the marketplace, if sufficiently free, would deliver the leading edge global networks of the future.
It is the emphasis on free markets that Sikes continues to believe will push sophisticated communications technologies further into the consumer market. He is convinced that by 2015, the date mentioned in the Gore-Burns legislative edict, we will be a generation ahead of that forecast, “and the trip will have been an adventure.”
Denise Caruso
THE PUBLIC POLICY PANEL
Trying to define the elephant
The technical vice president of a cable equipment supplier, the retired director of business development of a Regional Bell operating company, the head of business development of a company attempting to develop industry standards in user interfaces and network services, and the former head of a large software company cum telecommunications guru attempted to get their arms around the amorphous elephant known as telecommunications policy on Wednesday afternoon at Digital World.
Matthew Miller, VP of technology for General Instrument, was a good choice to start off. The cable industry has come late to the three-headed beast of competition vs. First Amendment/Constitutional rights, universal access and diversity vs. the right of the consumer to choose regardless of purported public interests. To the cable industry, the beast is less a matter of policy than one of massively conflicting concerns and a government less attuned to due process and more willing to change the “basic” rules almost daily.
To Ken Thompson, formerly of Ameritech, such concerns were the daily grist of a telephone company’s telecommunications decisions. But to Thompson, the converging technologies and industries of computers and telecommunications signaled that we have outgrown the need for a telecommunications policy and now need a much broader communications policy. This new policy needs to take into account all kinds of stakeholders — from individuals to business and governments — and their very different goals. Policy needed to be appropriate to technological changes, and based on open process.
Michael Bloom, now director of business development for Kaleida Labs, the joint multimedia venture between Apple and IBM, had spent many years working for Pacific Telesis, one of the seven RBOCs. He felt that policy had usually been a negative force, and that new definitions of needs would require a paradigm shift that official processes would not be able to control. As technology progressed, access and transport via computer networks were becoming commodities. Most computer network users can communicate with most other networks today through multiple gateways and over various transmission media. To Bloom, the globalization of telecommunications meant a restructuring of organizations and improvements in cost structures.
Jonathan Seybold interposed and asked whether the panelists could speak of their vision of telecommunications policies. He presented his own short version which included a separation of content from the transmission medium — in other words, those who own networks cannot own what travels over the networks — as well as open access to the network and clearly defined competition between the various “highways” such as cable, telco and satellite.
Mitch Kapor, chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was happy to oblige with his vision of a global, interactive, wide-bandwidth system that was structured under some kind of common carriage principles including nondiscrimination in access (i.e., how one can get hooked up) and content (no control over the user) in an open, public, switched network. This probably requires some bandwidth to be set aside so full competition by new services is possible.
Kapor continues to argue that much of this technology is fundamentally in place (see article covering his keynote, p. 14), but it will take lots of marketing and regulatory openness to make this vision a reality.
Ken Thompson felt that we could come together with a clarity of vision with words like openness, universal and the like, but said that real life is based on specific activities and emotional commitments, which seem left out of most policy discussions.
Looking more closely at the problem, Thompson urged us to consider demand as we make policy. Where is the revenue going to come from to pay for the continual improvements to infrastructure and the expensively produced multimedia products we seem to be assuming will come? What exactly is the market we are talking about serving with advanced communications policies? Where is that extra $10 a month going to come from? He thinks it will take 20 years to achieve 40 percent penetration for these high-bandwidth systems. He argued that the mass market will be a long time coming. Thousands of niches will be the reality on the product development side for a long time to come.
A question from the floor suggested that the costs to implement new capacities might be $2,000 per home, with perhaps only 35 percent of the population being able to afford to participate.
Mitch Kapor noted that it was going to be a gradual process of upgrade and that the figure will probably be more like $1,000 per home.
Matthew Miller also sounded a more pessimistic note when he commented that the new empowerments may not be pretty. Those who obtain capacity and new skills early, usually the more affluent, may go further and faster. Many may indeed be left behind.
Michael Bloom noted that not much legislation is going to help here. Laws are coming after the technology shift.
The consensus:
1. Public policy lags way behind (and generally impedes) changes in technology. When the technology is changing rapidly (as it is now), that lag becomes a very serious problem. Unfortunately, you cannot have “no policy.” Even “no policy” is itself a policy.
2. No one defends our current policy mess.
3. The day is long past when we can afford to treat telephone, cable, wireless, satellite, etc. separately. We need a single, coherent communications policy — one that encourages innovation and competition rather than discourages them.
4. All of this is going to be expensive and complicated. It will take decades to play out (a long time in technological terms, but a short time in terms of the likely impact on society and commerce). We do not have much time to figure out what the policy ground rules should be. The only thing worse than muddled policy is muddled policy that keeps changing.
5. The danger of further stratifying society into technological “haves” and “have-nots” is very real. But, other than insist that schools, public libraries and the like are served, no one knows what to do about it. (It may be either some small consolation or a very sobering thought to remember that television itself was initially an “elitist” medium.)
Tom Hargadon, Jonathan Seybold
WHAT WILL PDAS BE GOOD FOR?
Turning vision into market opportunity
In his keynote speech, John Sculley showed a nearly market-ready Newton and put it through some of its paces: handwriting recognition, automatic reformatting of documents for printing and faxing, lookup of fax numbers and so on. IBM’s Bob Carberry took up the theme, describing a PDA with built-in notepad, calendar, voice and fax telephony.
Sounds great. But what does it do for you that you can’t already do with a laptop PC and a cellular phone? In fact, the PDAs we’ve been pitched have seemed to be little more than Game Boys on steroids. What, exactly, are PDAs really going to be good for?
Anything but ASCII.>> Plenty, according to Donna Dubinsky, president of Palm Computing. As PDAs mature, they will combine the best of pocket organizers, Daytimer books, rolodexes, beepers and so on. And, yes, they will be great game machines. What they won’t be good at is entering lots of ASCII data; for that, there’s still no substitute for a full-size keyboard.
This is an opportunity, not a restriction, because it means that compatibility with today’s top application programs is not a requirement. That in turn frees developers to tune hardware and operating systems for different needs: low power consumption, handwriting recognition, “digital ink” data storage and system services that will enable novel third-party applications. It also means that there are no existing brand loyalties for upstarts to contend with.
“Information-centric” devices.>> To Dubinsky, the defining characteristic is that they will be “information-centric.” Regardless of hardware, user interface, application software or other competitive factors of the PC market, PDAs will operate on a common fund of the facts that have meaning to their owners.
Apple’s Nazila Alasti, product line manager for the Newton group, sees the PDA as a group of technologies that eases the tensions in our complex lives. Instead of adding to an endless array of dedicated black boxes — pager, cellular phone, calculator, pocket organizer, fax et al. — Apple wants the Newton to help its owner work with the snippets of information that accumulate during the day.
Dealing with data soup.>> Unlike the calculator (which anyone can use, but which can’t do much) and the PC (whose power can only be used by acquiring a forbidding list of skills), the PDA that Apple envisions will be both powerful and accessible, because it will adapt itself to you. You don’t need to type; its recognizer will gradually learn your handwriting style. You don’t need to manage a database; the Newton deals with data as “information soup.”
Apple is also conscious that it won’t get everything right the first time out. Alasti stressed that the Newton is a family of technologies, some of which may be licensed to other companies and some of which have yet to be invented. (In fact, Apple announced later in the conference that its interactive TV technology would be based on the Newton — see p. 39.) The Newton is also a family of products; the first member of the family, which will hit the stands this summer, will hardly be the definitive implementation of Apple’s vision.
EVERY PDA NEEDS A PERSONAL NETWORK ASSISTANT
Another part of the answer came from William Warner, president of Wildfire Communications. He suggested that the ideal PDA would do two things well. First, it would help you recall snippets of information; it would have enough storage and computing power to manage the information you use and acquire over the course of one business trip. Second, it would help you communicate; although tiny enough to be carried with you everywhere, it would have wireless access to cellular phone services and office computer networks.
Most important, it would live in symbiosis with a much more powerful computer in your office, which Warner calls a Personal Network Assistant. The PNA would be attached to many networks: the phone system, the office intercom, the corporate LAN, the Internet and so forth. It would serve as an E-mail and voice-mail dropbox; unlike a PDA (which might be out of range — or out of battery) the PNA would always be available.
Sounds like General Magic.>> The PNA would also know how to talk with your PDA. Anywhere in the world, if you were within a phone cell or under a satellite or at an office with infrared links, the PNA and PDA could establish a link. In fact, the PNA would know where to find you, so that if you had authorized it, the machine could forward your important phone calls at once. (This sounds very much like the concept behind General Magic’s Telescript language; see Vol. 2, No. 10/11, p. 5.)
The two machines would then swap information: you would receive your messages, and whatever snippets of data you had accumulated recently would be uploaded to the main database. The PNA would, of course, have voice recognition and would accept your oral instructions to search data banks, to file the replies to your messages for later transmission, to queue tedious computation jobs for deferred execution and so on.
EXTRA COST FOR TELECOM WON’T FLY IN THE MARKET
Rob Mechaley, of McCaw Cellular, also supports this view of seamless, wireless access to services. With roughly 16 million laptop computers sold, and about 12 million cellular phone subscribers, it is clear that people value the ability to send and receive information while on-the-go. However, most of the first-generation PDA products will have communication as an extra-cost option if they have it at all. This isn’t going to be good enough.
Gussied up Daytimers.>> In Mechaley’s view, when all of today’s announced products reach the market, the consumer will essentially see a gussied-up Daytimer (or Sharp Wizard or Casio Boss) priced between $500 and $1,000. Far more useful, he thinks, would be a gussied-up Daytimer cum cellular phone cum pager, which although costing about $1,500 would offer much more utility. As it happens, this is exactly what McCaw is preparing to offer via what’s known as CDPD.
Last year (see Vol. 2, No. 12, p. 22), a group of nine cellular carriers formulated a specification for using the ordinary cellular voice network as a way to transmit data, called Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD). The spec provides data transport at the same speed as a fast modem (19,200 bps), along with security protocols for data encryption and message authentication.
So far, three of the carriers have announced deployment plans: Ameritech, Bell Atlantic and McCaw. This fall, McCaw will conduct the pilot integration project in Las Vegas. By next summer, said Mechaley, CDPD will be functioning as a wide-area network throughout the McCaw system.
GUIDEBOOK, PATHFINDER AND KEEPER OF THE AIRLINE SCHEDULE
Barry Glick, president of Geosystems an R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co., thinks PDAs can make travel easier and more enjoyable by combining the features of an AAA Trip-Tik, an airline computer terminal and a guidebook, all in one high-tech package. To that end, Geosystems is building software for the Newton and other PDAs that will provide suggestions and directions to travelers at the touch of a button. Glick expects that PDAs will become “the platform of choice for travelers’ information assistance,” as indispensable as a toothbrush or credit card.
A few technical problems.>> For that to happen, several things must be combined: map databases, spatial search software, route selection algorithms and a global positioning capability so the system can know where you are even when you don’t. There are some technical problems to be solved: storing the sheer amount of detail a useful device would have, keeping it up to date and displaying it at sufficiently high resolution on a device that fits in a pocket. There’s also a marketing problem, because Americans (unlike the Japanese or Europeans) have proven unwilling to spend more than $15 for a travel guidebook.
(It seems to us that travelers, whether on business or vacationing, should be an especially attractive market. Not only do they comprise a high proportion of early adopters, but they expect to be overcharged for everything. They’re probably just glad they won’t have to tip the PDA.)
Fodor’s on a card.>> Geosystems’ first product, Fodor’s Guide to Business Travel, will be a PCMCIA card that plugs into the Newton. It bears a strong resemblance to the printed edition. The second-generation product, a true travel assistant with multiple information sources, will probably debut in another nine months or so.
In time, says Glick, it will be possible to download information to the device on the fly, removing the limitation imposed by the PCMCIA card’s storage capacity, and to upload such information as reservation bookings. Add the capability to read the existing Global Positioning System satellite broadcasts, along with a database of your personal preferences for restaurants, theaters and frequent-flyer programs, and you get a true personal travel assistant.
Peter Dyson
DW LAUNCHES THE INTERACTIVE MEDIA FESTIVAL
A fertile environment for new art forms
Everybody’s talking about it, investing in it, and wanting to do it. Interactive media is the hottest buzzword in Hollywood, despite the fact that no one knows what it is.
Defining the form.>> On Wednesday evening of Digital World, a giant step forward was taken to help define the new interactive art form. Seybold Seminars, Cunningham Communication, Motorola and The American Film Institute announced the official launch of the Interactive Media Festival, an international competition to encourage more development of interactive media and art.
The festival is a joint venture of Cunningham and Seybold, sponsored by Motorola and produced in association with The American Film Institute. Winners will be announced in Los Angeles in May 1994, in conjunction with Digital World ‘94. All proceeds of the festival will benefit the AFI.
MOVING AWAY FROM CATEGORIES TO JUDGE THE TOTAL EXPERIENCE
Seybold and Cunningham have been working together on the festival for more than a year. The concept behind the Interactive Media Festival is based on the Cannes Film Festival model as opposed to the Academy Awards, which splits entries into rather precise categories.
Since so little is quantified about new media, Interactive Media Festival entrants will be judged on criteria rather than categories. These criteria include level of interactivity, informational value, entertainment value, aesthetic quality and design. Intended to create an open approach to the judging process, the works will be judged not on a best-of-class basis, but by their success in meeting certain overall goals. All entries must be nominated by a jury of 60 to 75 individuals, who will be announced later this summer.
Though there will be no categories, Lisa Goldman, director of the festival, says that judges will be looking at applications of interactive media ranging from industrial training to theme park attractions.
Live at the Pantages.>> The festival itself will culminate with an evening of live, interactive performance at Pantages Theater in Los Angeles on May 5, 1994. The program will include glimpses of the winning entries, celebrity performances and presentation of awards.
A gallery of the top entries will be shown at the Los Angeles Convention Center, concurrent with next year’s Digital World, May 4–6. The gallery will be open to the public.
MOTOROLA AS SPONSOR? NO, NOT STRANGE AT ALL
Motorola is the primary sponsor of the Interactive Media Festival. Although supporting the arts in such a direct way may seem odd for a company that sells hardware and communications technologies, Motorola sees its participation as a step toward the future. (Additional sponsors are expected to be announced later this year.)
Get next event.>> “We never talk about sitting where we are now,” said Chris Galvin, senior executive VP and assistant chief operating officer of Motorola. “We’re always interested in going to the next event.”
Galvin said that Motorola believes interactive technologies are the “next event” that will drive the creation of a new industry. “Putting technology in the hands of creative people is part of the discovery process to create a new industry,” said Galvin of Motorola’s support for the festival. “It’s a part of research.”
Innovation a family tradition.>> There are not many technology companies today that have been around long enough, or are still family owned, to hear top executives talk about doing business the way Grandpa did.
But Galvin made an eloquent case that the fundamental strategy of Motorola even today comes from watching his grandfather continually identify new technology platforms, then build derivatives of them. For example, he said, the company’s digital signal processor (DSP) business, which is at the core of much of new media technology today, is a derivative of the company’s high-end microprocessor business.
The same strategy moved Motorola out of radios and into the component business several decades ago, and should yield some fascinating results in Los Angeles next year.
Amy Johns, Denise Caruso
DIRECTORS ON TECHNOLOGY
Still at the beginning of the curve
At last year’s Digital World, Allee Willis, Lily Tomlin, Jane Wagner and Shelley Duvall spent an evening batting around how entertainment might change as a result of digital interactive technologies. This year, Seybold and the Advanced Technology Council of The American Film Institute pulled together a panel of “digitally hip” film directors and writers to discuss the impact of digital technology on the art of film making.
The resulting discussion didn’t go nearly so far as to reveal storyboards for the next generation of interactive movies. Most of the panelists are already heavily involved in digital effects and production, and subsequently as much of the discussion focused on today’s problems in the film business — cable “scooping” movie theaters for first-runs, and the growing business in ancillary products — as it did on the future of digital movies.
Engaged in the struggle.>> After the panelists warmed up a bit, it was clear that they’d given the matter some thought and had some logical ideas about where they’d like to direct their efforts, so to speak. Most interesting was to see that as both artists and business people, they’re engaged in the same struggle as the rest of us: trying to figure out how to retrofit their craft for a new medium.
Panelists were screenwriter Mike Backes, directors Jim Cameron and John Badham, and producer Gale Anne Hurd. Their formidable list of credits includes the creation of the computer graphics in Jurassic Park and the screenplay to Michael Crichton’s upcoming Rising Sun (Backes); the Terminator and Alien movies, and The Abyss (Cameron); War Games, Stakeout and Point of No Return (Badham); production of Cameron’s Terminator movies, Aliens and The Abyss (Hurd).
DIGITAL PRODUCTION TOOLS BECOME INDISPENSABLE
The increasing sophistication and accessibility of digital production tools for the film industry has been one of the driving forces behind the concept of interactive media. Backes said that changes in the film business wrought by digital technology have been “encompassing.” One reason that Jurassic Park was so successful, he said, was that it was in preproduction for two years to perfect the special effects. Cameron agreed, saying that the making of Terminator 2, for example, actually had to wait for technology to make the cyborg character possible.
Special software had to be written for a specific problem in Cameron’s The Abyss — he needed to create a photorealistic character (the water critter) using computer-generated animation. The villain in T2, he said, required that the same technique work for the better part of an entire movie. “We created new things to do with it, and moved the state of the art forward.”
Not just effects.>> Backes adds that technology as fundamental and (today) uninteresting as word processing has dramatically changed the revision process for screenwriters. Storyboards are often sketched out in Virtus Walkthrough, a 3D modeling program. But while powerful general-purpose computers are taking over a wide variety of tasks in the film industry, Hurd notes that progress is not absolute.
“It’s great to have these tools,” she said. “But (today) the capitalization of new companies puts people at risk because the technology (they buy) is outdated so quickly. You can spend $10 million on computers that are outdated immediately. It used to be you’d worry about what you’d spend on a screenplay. Now you have to worry about technology spending.”
Bring back the gladiators.>> As far as Backes is concerned, the cost of technology is coming down just in time to bring back the blockbuster. Digital techniques such as George Lucas has discussed — replicating extras in post-production so that it looks as if you hired 500 extras instead of 50 — as well as using blue-screen techniques are going to make a huge difference in production budgets.
“Movies are getting smaller,” Backes said. “Sets are so expensive that there aren’t that many sets anymore. Digital sets will bring back large-scope movies, like the gladiator movie, that require very elaborate sets.”
Hurd half-joked that “(virtual reality) characters will start getting residuals,” but in fact there has been talk of how to pay actors who are replicated digitally after the initial filming.
CAN WE CREATE NEW WAYS OF TELLING STORIES?
More important than the technologies themselves, asked Badham, what kind of stories will we tell with them? Unlike some in the crowd, Badham didn’t see that digital technology necessarily “empowers” would-be filmmakers. “I think you’re looking at a sinkhole of money. There are cheaper and easier ways to make movies than this,” he said.
“Cameron built T2 on making the morphing work,” Badham added. “That’s the right use for technology. If there’s no good organic use, integrated into the story telling, it’s not worth it.”
But if directors or writers are willing to re-gear thinking that’s been around since pre-Greeks, to abandon linear story telling, then they’ll have a new art form. “Even if you decide you want to give the audience five choices, a designer has to set it up,” said Badham. “It is a new way of approaching stories, but you have to shed a lot of old habits (that work).”
CREATING ENVIRONMENTS VS. LINEAR STORYTELLING
Backes, echoing much of the feedback we got during Digital World about the interactive movie concept, wasn’t sure that the concept of providing choice via interaction to the audience was such a good one — or at least not via the present model, which, like it or not, is based on video games.
“Games are stupid,” said Backes. “They are not interactive — they give you fewer choices than anywhere outside the Marines. This is about creating interactive environments.”
Cameron believes that any writer creates enough “back story” and parallel plot lines “to have stuff left over for nonlinear.” As a science fiction writer, he said, it appeals to him because it allows him to explore “entire different worlds based on ‘what ifs’.” (This sounds to us like a Hollywood version of Maxis’ SimCity or SimEarth games. Interesting idea.)
Creating the new cinema.>> The most promising part of the discussion came when the panelists started really chewing on the problems of the interactive cinematic experience.
Badham mentioned I’m Your Man, the interactive movie that played in New York City and Los Angeles, which put the audience in the peculiar (and, it turns out, rather boring) position of “voting” for which way the plot turned via pushing buttons installed on their theater seats.
Backes ripped the concept. “Storytelling by committee is network TV and it doesn’t work,” he said. Badham was less vehement: “Interactive movies aren’t that big of a deal. They’re interesting and fun, but when you go to the movies, you want to be overwhelmed. You want to be had, not play around with a joystick.” Cameron said, “Part of the fun of a movie is surprise.”
So what’s the interactive experience going to be, then? Badham mentioned a play in Los Angeles called Tomorrow that’s been running for nine years. The audience starts in one room and follows whichever actors they choose through a house; obviously there are dramatic situations running in parallel, quite unlike anything we’re “presented with” in theater or cinema today. The production gets a high percentage of repeat business from people who want to follow what’s going on in the rooms they missed. “People really like the interactive experience,” said Badham. “They feel not so passive.”
Couple that with Backes’s and Cameron’s ideas for synthetic character creation and open-ended situations, and Badham’s and Hurd’s belief that film writers want to be freed from the two-hour limitation of film, and the future of interactive cinema is sounding an awful lot like virtual reality. As digital production tools become even more sophisticated at producing photorealistic simulations, we expect this is exactly the direction in which the technology-savvy artists in Hollywood will head.
Denise Caruso
PROJECTS AND PROTOYPES
The future, folks, will slowly unfold
Anyone who’s picked up a newspaper in the past six months can’t help being aware that big moves are afoot to upgrade the communications infrastructure of the United States. Because some 40-plus years ago the cable industry chose to wrap a housing around TV spectrum and pipe video signals directly into people’s homes, it is now undeniably in an excellent position to provide a relatively inexpensive ramp from consumer homes onto the so-called “information highway” that will enable interactive television and a host of other consumer information services.
The Projects and Prototypes panel at Digital World brought to the same table two of the most discussed companies implementing interactive TV projects and/or prototypes — Viacom and Time Warner — with database leader Oracle and the First Cities alliance to discuss the virtues and drawbacks of such networks as they’re under consideration today.
HOROWITZ: ‘IT WILL TAKE LONGER THAN YOU THINK’
Ed Horowitz is a senior VP of Viacom International responsible for Viacom’s new business as it relates to technology. Known as “the techie at the top” of the New York-based company, Horowitz first conceived of Viacom’s first interactive TV project, a fiber-based network that’s being installed in the San Francisco Bay Area community of Castro Valley.
He started his presentation on a cautionary note à propos of the vast amount of wind being generated by companies promoting interactive television, and we assume this includes his own. People in his line of business as an engineer often get trapped into believing that “if only this next chip could be installed, the world would be a better place.”
Channels are expensive.>> He said he wanted to provide a “dose of reality,” and level-set some expectations as to what we can expect, and when. “This is a balancing act,” he said. “Today it costs $100 million to start one single channel.” When building a system with a capacity of 500 or more channels, he said, we must ask ourselves, “If we build it, will the consumers come?”
(We’d like to see some research done along these lines, comparing the cost of getting a digital interactive channel up on a headend-based system vs. that of the phone companies for getting a video/information server up and running. Maybe digital production tools have pushed these costs down as well.)
The next question we need to ask ourselves, said Horowitz, is how long this will actually take to deploy. Engineers, he said, build on a heritage of knowns. The technologies being used in these fiber systems today, such as compression and fiber-optic transmission, are actually 20-year-old (or more) research projects coming to fruition. Technology, he said, always arrives earlier than you thought it would, but takes longer to implement.
It’s about money.>> And why is that? Because, Horowitz said, “It’s not about the technology, but it is about the money.” The settop boxes being built for Castro Valley, he said, will cost $800–$1,000 each, a far cry from the incredibly hopeful (and probably disingenuous) “$300″ that some companies are claiming. The national infrastructure upgrade will require installing thousands of miles of fiber-optic cabling, costing from $12–$18 billion to rebuild the entire industry.
Obviously it’s not cheap to implement intelligent networks on a broad scale. How to finance the infrastructure upgrade has been a key component. That’s one reason, he said, that cable is re-architecting its system into neighborhood segments. Laying fiber to the neighborhood essentially allows a cable company like Viacom or Time Warner to deliver potential access to very high-bandwidth programming (such as video on demand and home shopping) without having to make what both he and Geoff Holmes of Time Warner consider to be an overkill investment in fiber to the settop before the market is ready.
The benefit for cable, he said, is that they’ve already got one high-bandwidth pipe into or near the home. Direct broadcast satellite, on the other hand, has virtually no infrastructure in place; the settop devices they’re developing cost $700 per device, which Horowitz totes up to be a $7 billion investment with an additional $1 billion just for the satellite. (He didn’t cite the source of his statistics on this.)
And the national cost estimate to replace copper telephone wiring with fiber is staggering. Telcos don’t have the “to the neighborhood” option in the same way that cable does. They could indeed install fiber farther down the chain toward the home, which would allow them to get high-bandwidth programming closer to the consumer. But the copper wire that must carry this programming the final mile to the home has nowhere near the capacity of coaxial cable.
Key words: Potential and “2000.” These are non-trivial numbers for everyone involved, said Horowitz, but for cable more so than the others, there is great potential for returns. What fiber provides is “more channels,” which means more distribution options for programming. Horowitz said he believes that only 17–20 million homes will be hooked up to an interactive network by the year 2000. Though cable’s present market for basic rate services is about three times that size today, Horowitz believes a 17-million-home market will be sufficient to force changes in the economics of TV to support interactive programming.
Viacom’s Castro Valley project, said Horowitz, is his company’s foot in the door toward helping this happen. The project will serve 17,000 homes with 2,000 nodes. Different types of services will be targeted toward different demographic groups of 500 households each. It will be an interactive, two-way system, Horowitz said, with “several thousand” settop units deployed by 1994 (though he didn’t say when in 1994). Viacom will provide on-channel security and smart cards that work in tandem with security to prevent taping.
As Time Warner has said many times as well, Horowitz stressed that Viacom’s edge is in no small part the powerful franchise it has with users via its brand-name products such as MTV and Nickelodeon.
TIME WARNER IS CHANGING THE BALANCE OF ITS BUSINESS
Geoff Holmes is senior VP of technology for Time Warner, and, like Horowitz, is the senior executive for new technology business development. He’s also chairman of the Time Warner Interactive Group, formerly Warner New Media, and he spoke primarily about TW’s Orlando project, which is building the full-service, two-way interactive electronic network that we’ve all been reading so much about.
It’s more than a showcase for new programming today, said Holmes. He believes that “as long as we provide services of today, only better, there’s lots of evidence” that people will buy. They already spend $16 billion a year renting and buying movies, and about the same amount on video games. So at the outset, he said, instead of making them channel-surf, Orlando will eliminate their VCRs and provide them with “a dedicated channel with personalized services.” (We’d like to know who had this “personal channel” idea first — it certainly caught on with all the speakers at Digital World.)
Supercharged system.>> To do so, Holmes said, TW will “supercharge” the system, spending 30 months laying fiber, installing ATM switches for two-way video, audio and data transmission, and working with Silicon Graphics and Scientific Atlanta to provide video servers that hold 1,000 hours of full-motion video and a settop box to deliver them.
The Orlando system is installing “fiber deep into the neighborhood,” as described by Viacom, above, to serve 300–400 households each. Holmes said TW’s Quantum architecture for channel compression will be deployed there, and in almost all its systems during the next five years.
No twitch games.>> He sees the Orlando project as the beginning of a network of networks that can connect to any other source of data, including online systems such as Prodigy, the electronic version of the L.L. Bean catalog, etc. The only programming type he thought might be a challenge for the network was “twitch games,” those Nintendo-type games where a kid beats on the controller as fast as he can to shoot (stab, maim, whatever) the opponent.
Though Holmes for some reason downplayed the telephony side of what TW is attempting with the Orlando project — it plans to provide local phone service via cellular and interactive TV programming — he did say a bit about how this kind of massive network deployment will change the balance of TW’s business.
Changing the balance.>> Right now, he said, 60 percent of TW’s revenues are from content. (It is the largest intellectual property/copyright holder in the world.) The other 40 percent is conduit, via its cable businesses, etc. “As this number improves,” he said, “we’ll become more involved in telephone kinds of businesses, such as 30-frame-per-second video telephony.” He also said that TW intends to grow its customer base out of the “homes passed” phase to include schools and businesses.
Time Warner is planning a software developers conference for those who want to provide programming on the Orlando system, but Holmes didn’t provide details.
THIS IS A LOT MORE WORK THAN WE THINK
The presentations of Bruce Sidran, executive director of the First Cities alliance, and Larry Ellison, chairman of the Oracle Corp., differed greatly from those of the two cable executives, but they certainly joined Ed Horowitz in spirit by saying, “Whoa! Hold on a minute” to some of the assumptions about how such networks will be deployed.
Sidran, at the helm of an alliance with a dozen members including Kaleida Labs, Comsat Video Enterprises, Apple Computer, Southwestern Bell and Tandem Computers, started his presentation by saying that “fear and greed are powerful motivators.” (For more on the First Cities alliance, see Vol. 2, No. 7, p. 3.)
Throwing technology.>> Although Sidran didn’t say it quite this way, it seems that First Cities doesn’t believe that selecting a test site and throwing technology at it is necessarily the most logical progression of events to pursue.
The idea behind First Cities was to get companies together and work out some of the problems that TW and Viacom are going to face on site when constructing a network to deliver multimedia services. The key goal for First Cities is not how or when to get the fiber in place, he said, but to come up with the interface specifications that will be necessary to create, deliver and display interactive programming on the network.
Accommodating hybrids.>> In addition, First Cities believes that such services will be delivered over a variety of different network types, not just via the cable system, and that work must be done to solve the technical — and social — problems of delivering information over hybrid networks as well.
Sidran just moved his office to Washington, DC, and is spending a fair amount of time discussing issues such as the proper role of the government in a global communications infrastructure and ensuring that critical issues such as multiculturalism aren’t overlooked in the rush to market.
YOU CAN’T JUST POINT A CAMERA AT SOFTWARE
Ellison echoed Sidran’s theme, at least on the technology side. Though Ellison was a bit disingenuous in saying that the work Oracle is doing with US West (to provide a database server for video) would be able to interoperate with every computer system in existence, he did make a very good point about the difficulty of building good, robust software.
Even the big guys say so.>> The kind of software that will be required in a full-service network — especially if Sidran gets his wish and Holmes’ “network of networks” includes telcos, satellite, PCS and cellular — is unbelievably complex, difficult to create and even more difficult to test and make foolproof in the uncontrolled and uncontrollable environment of the consumer living room. You can’t just point a camera at it and get a product out the other end, as Sun’s John Gage said. All of this digital wonderfulness will be much harder, and take much longer, than any of us can imagine.
Denise Caruso
EDUCATION NEEDS THE NEW MEDIA
Technology tackles the test scores
This year’s education panel at Digital World reminded us, if we needed reminding, that this country’s educational system could stand improvement. Panelists included Dana Beth Ardi, of Dana Ardi Productions; Skip Crew, a teacher in the Wawona Middle School at Fresno, CA; Robert Tierney, a professor of education at Ohio State University; Ronald Rescigno, superintendent of the Port Hueneme School District; and Steve Carr, a teacher and model technology site coordinator for Hueneme School District. Despite their varied backgrounds, all agreed that the new media offer hope for remedial and advanced instruction.
Ardi, a long-time consultant in both education and technology, noted that test scores are lower each year, yet teachers continue to cling to the familiar textbook-oriented methods of fact-based instruction. One reason, she says, may be that teachers themselves are usually not trained in the visual and auditory media.
THE THREE PS: PERSONAL, PATIENT AND POWERFUL
There are some bright spots in the picture, however. Many a demonstration project has shown that the high-tech tools of new media can be personal, patient and powerful. Texas and California, whose centralized textbook purchasing systems make them the two largest customers in the education market, have begun to require some high-tech media as part of their curriculums. Wherever these two states lead, others often follow.
“At-risk kids.” Skip Crew, a math teacher in a Fresno, CA, middle school, described his own experiences in the trenches. Four years ago, he said, there was not a computer in the place. He worked to change that, and now the math lab has ten computers, with more on the way.
He has had to adapt his curriculum to some harsh facts: many of his students have no home life to speak of. “These are at-risk kids,” says Crew. They come to school only to be with their friends, and success in mastering the curriculum is rather low in their scale of priorities. Thus, his first goal must be to get them interested in something. Fortunately, computer software is very flexible. Unlike a textbook, a program can be tuned for each kid’s particular needs.
The right ruler.>> Robert Tierney, an Ohio State University professor who teaches graduate courses in literacy and language education, looks at the system with a more academic, research-oriented viewpoint. His focus is literacy — not just of words, but also of imagery. What power, he wonders, might accrue to students who from preschool have had access to tools such as QuickTime? What happens when there is not a “level of investment” problem, where kids have access to state-of-the-art technology and truly productive software? To find out, he has been providing computer and video technology to two cohorts of students for seven years so far, and plans to continue the experiment as they progress through high school and beyond.
Such a study obviously requires some form of testing. However, Tierney thinks educators are measuring technology projects with the wrong ruler: paper-based tests. (Most of the standardized tests in use were designed around the turn of the last century, and even then, their designers expected they would be out of date within ten years. It’s now 90 years later.) A better measure, he says, is observing the way students approach the tasks and materials of the curriculum.
The belief is that interactive media changes the way people represent ideas, how they explore ideas—a shift away from linear, text-oriented thinking. Some believe it also affects how the kids react to authority. Linear text acquires a remote and canonical (hence unchallengeable) aspect, while interactive media invite participation and dialog (an end result that may be uncomfortable to teachers accustomed to “ruling” the classroom). Educators need to be open to the possibilities that technology affords, and not be blinded by standardized tests or by fear of trying a new kind of relationship with students.
Success is political.>> Ronald Rescigno is a successful school superintendent; he’s survived 14 years in the post. Nine years ago, the Port Hueneme (CA) school district began allocating one percent of its budget each year to an experimental technology program. Now, in the demonstration classroom taught by Steve Carr, he can showcase a complex network of servers and computers, with audio and video moving across the network to 32 students at a time.
Carr, in cooperation with the Thousand Oaks, CA-based company Total Multimedia, has developed a series of multimedia history lessons that TMM will publish on CD-ROM. The results have been outstanding. As teachers and administrators from other programs have reported at previous Digital World conferences, the students are more engaged and more motivated when they use computer technology to learn. Equally important in a real world where — like it or not — students and schools are measured by standardized tests, test scores have risen dramatically. The only problem (and when you think about it, it’s not a trivial one) has been that students really miss the technology when they move on to high school.
Carr noted that, even so, replicating his demonstration room is not going to be easy; the cost to do so will approach $200,000 per room for hardware and staff development. He suggests that one source of funding might be to get nearby businesses involved; his own project had extensive participation by TMM.
The teaching strategies (and for the kids, the learning strategies) are beginning to be understood. As with any technology demonstration program, the challenge now is to replicate the results achieved in his model classroom at other schools. But first, it is necessary for Rescigno to convince the wider community that he’s got a good idea, by showing results as measured by standardized tests. (Despite the success at the middle school level, the local high school has not yet seen fit to follow suit.)
ELECT A NEW BOARD, FIRE THE SUPE AND MAKE A VIDEO
Getting the money for classroom technology is always the first obstacle. Funding in his district is nearly $5,000 per student — considerably less than the average spent per student in U.S. public schools. But Rescigno contends there are few school districts that really don’t have the money; often the textbook budget can be tapped if new money can’t be raised. (The state of Texas has already decided that computer programs can be regarded as textbooks and purchased with textbook monies. California, Florida and Texas — the three American states with centralized, state-wide textbook adoption programs — are working together on common standards for computer-based course materials.)
If all else fails, suggested Rescigno, elect a new school board and fire the superintendent.
Another obstacle is teacher cooperation and support. That’s why Carr emphasizes that technology “is simply another resource in my room. It is not in any way guiding my curriculum.” It’s important that great content be part of any technology product; teachers like the idea of open systems, but they don’t want to have to learn complex authoring packages as the first step — even in systems designed to teach authoring techniques.
All of the panel members agreed that computers should be regarded as tools, with heavy emphasis given to hardware and software that lets teachers — and students — create their own materials. Where “courseware” is used, it should always be “open” so that teachers and students can use it as a base for creating more personalized instruction.
Little things count.>> Even the little things, such as keyboard skills, count. One faculty committee discovered that its members who could type were usually in favor of using technology in the classroom. Those who had never learned the skill expected that the computer would be inaccessible to them and thus were markedly less enthusiastic about technology.
More money is not always the answer, said Rescigno, no matter what militant teachers’ unions say. At bottom, the issue is the political will of the wider community. Which makes us wonder: should technology advocates begin making videos to educate the parents and taxpayers as well as the students?
Peter Dyson
MEDIA COMPANY STRATEGIES
How traditional media giants produce interactive content
The very newness of interactive publishing as a medium levels the playing field — at least for a while — for publishing startups that are conceived from the ground up as interactive companies.
Both interactive publishers and mainstream media companies interested in making the transition to new media products are scrambling to uncover what consumers want from an interactive entertainment or educational experience, and how much they are willing to pay for it.
And while traditional media giants enter the interactive media arena with the advantages of deep pockets and access to existing content, the price of admission is still steep. It requires a willingness to fundamentally change established business models and to invest in the re-education of their existing talent pool as well as invest in new staff and consumer research.
During the Media Company Strategies panel at Digital World, some of the heaviest hitters of the entertainment industry — Michele DiLorenzo, senior VP of Viacom New Media; Keith Schaefer, president of Paramount Technology Group; and John Papanek, editor-in-chief of Time Life Inc. — discussed in detail how their companies are making the transition toward interactive production.
KNOW WHAT INTERACTIVE ISN’T TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS
Interactive media production appears to be a natural for large, diversified media companies such as Viacom, which is a cable operator with more than one million subscribers. What makes Viacom powerful in the new media world, however, is not its cable system but its programming, which is among the most recognizable in American culture — Nickelodeon, MTV, Showtime, VH-1 and The Movie Channel. The company also owns and operates several radio and TV stations.
According to Viacom’s DiLorenzo, the sheer size and stratification of large media companies can also be a weakness when entering the new media marketplace.
“The downfall of getting started in new media for a lot of companies is that they are good at setting up vertical hierarchies — ‘I have a movie business; I have a record business; OK, now I am going to have an interactive business’,” she explained. “(But) what inspired you to get into interactive is that it’s really not a peripheral thing. It’s really the creative extension of what you can do in your existing businesses. Therefore, you have to find an organizational structure that enables you to not live off on the side, but allows you to tap into the talent and thinking that exists across your company.”
Companies that don’t approach new media in this holistic way, she said, tend to treat interactive production as an assembly line procedure that primarily involves one division “repurposing content” created in another division — a strategy each of the panelists agreed is doomed to failure.
A process of education.>> DiLorenzo said Viacom New Media is a “facilitator,” bringing together traditional creators with savvy tools. The group has invested heavily in the education process of its in-house creative team, which DiLorenzo identifies as Viacom’s “most critical asset” for success in the interactive media marketplace.
These individuals, she said, always create with the audience in mind. “TV looks different today because of the MTV production approach,” she said. “They broke a lot of rules back then, and they are totally psyched now about the possibilities [for interactive production]. These people are banging down our doors; they have more ideas than we can possibly use.”
To help turn those ideas into reality, Viacom has built a technology center, where interested creative staff can experiment with the latest cross-platform technology. The cable giant has also built an in-house design lab, where creative technologists and creative producers can collaborate on the design of an interactive product. In addition, Viacom offers classes on interactive production environments in order to demystify the technological process. “Until we empower the creative people,” she said, “we can’t have an industry.”
Educate the consumer.>> Beyond educating the creators, DiLorenzo emphasized the need to educate the consumers. She said that Viacom is conducting extensive, disciplined consumer research.
“It is important that we understand that just because we can create something, doesn’t mean we should,” she said. “We must always find a way to communicate with our audience.” As an example of how Viacom is introducing its customers to digital media, the MTV news team covered, for the first time, the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago in an attempt to educate its audience about the difference between an audio CD and a CD-ROM disc.
The long view to ITV.>> Viacom is in no hurry to get interactive product onto the shelves. At this point, DiLorenzo said, a lot of research and experimenting remains to be done. “We are primarily a TV company, which means that at some point interactive television will be our core business, not some ancillary market,” she said. “Therefore we take this very seriously.”
She did say that a number of Viacom New Media products and titles, including a CD-ROM based on the legend of Dracula from Icom Simulations, and several video games and CD-ROMs based on Nickelodeon and MTV characters, are to appear next year. (Viacom New Media acquired Icom Simulation this past May.)
PARAMOUNT MAKES PLANS TO FILL THE DIGITAL HIGHWAY
Paramount’s approach to interactive media production (outlined in detail in Vol. 2, Nos. 8 and 12) is similar to the Viacom business model, where the technology group collaborates with and has access to each of the business units within the entire media corporation.
As the largest provider of education content in the United States, however, the Paramount Technology Group is focusing primarily on interactive learning products first, leveraging off its established contacts and distribution channels within that marketplace. Schaefer says entertainment titles will follow.
“Next year we will take Paramount movie properties and make them interactive,” he said. “We are also working with Madison Square Garden [which is owned by Paramount Communications, Inc.] and making sports games.” The group also plans to deliver an interactive CD companion to a new television series Paramount is developing called Viper.
Schaefer reiterated the need to keep the consumer in mind when creating new media. “What is often missed in the technology rush is the consumer’s voice,” he said. “That voice dominates what we are doing at Paramount and should be what all of you listen to if you are working in this emerging marketplace.”
IS MULTIMEDIA AN ANSWER IN SEARCH OF A QUESTION?
For John Papanek, editor-in-chief of Time Life Inc., and the former director of new media at Time, there are many questions left to be answered before interactive CD production makes the transition from “practice platform” to the “$3 trillion entertainment business” that it has the potential to be.
“As a passionate publisher, I am excited about [interactive media] — all of us are excited about it,” he said. “It’s because of that excitement that so many of us are so frustrated. The reason is that no matter what we want desperately to believe, as a popular publishing medium, most of what we’ve been able to make of new media so far is simply lame. Not every title, of course, but for general leisure-time information entertainment fulfillment, CD-ROM can’t touch a book or magazine or newspaper.”
In order to become really viable, interactive titles are going to have to invoke passion among the people who use them. “Publishing thrives on passion — passion for repeat readings, renewals, building collections,” he explained. “We have not yet seen a CD-ROM that captures hearts and minds the way that Time Magazine, the New Yorker or Harlequin Romances do.”
THE SEVEN STEPS TO A TRILLION DOLLAR BUSINESS
Papanek offered seven steps that he believes will bring us closer to that $3 trillion industry.
1. Get smarter.>> The greatest assets we have as publishers, he said, are our storytellers: writers, photographers and graphic artists — what our computer-industry friends might call “interface engineers.” They’ve been refining their art of connecting editors to “users” for more than a century. Storytellers can learn to be technologists far more readily than technologists can learn to tell stories.
2. The story, stupid.>> As if this really needs to be said: Clicking on something does not make it better. People don’t want to work to be entertained and informed. Paper is a display and access medium that is very hard to beat. Interactivity is difficult to justify when you’re not playing games, Papanek said. Don’t settle for being “user-friendly.” No book or magazine is “user-friendly.” It must be as comfortable as a person’s clothes. People don’t think about what they’re doing when they read a book. They get inside it.
3. Get a verb.>> Papanek was serious about this one. He asks, can anyone dispute the statement that if there’s no good verb to describe the doing of something, it can’t be worth doing? You read a book, watch a movie, play a record, eat lobster, drink champagne. But what do you do with a CD-ROM? Catch it? Glom it? ROM it? Use it?
“Use,” he said, is the worst verb of all. At best it is colorless, at worst, pathetic. “Oh, her? She’s a user. Or worse, she’s an end user. Please, he said, let’s find a verb.
4. Get a noun.>> In books there are novels and novellas, romances and roman-a-clefs, thrillers, biographies and bibles. Magazines are weeklies, monthlies, women’s books, men’s books.
But CD-ROMs? This, said Papanek, “is an embarrassment to speakers of English or any other language. We have got to think about and promote new media as stories, not as gadgets!”
5. Break the plane.>> Nobody reads anything sitting in a straight-backed chair staring at a vertical surface atop a desk. You’ve got to be able to sit back, lay it in your lap, curl up, take it on the bus, said Papanek.
6. Portability, stupid.>> TV has beaten up on magazines and newspapers because it brings information immediately, with moving images. Now, electronic magazines and newspapers, fed by digital and cellular links, capable of mixing penetrating text with sound and moving images, can beat the hell out of TV by virtue of its being portable, said Papanek, while TV becomes ever-more tethered to that big, fat cable in the “home theater.” Remember portable TV? Don’t hear much about that anymore. Ergo: Golden opportunity for electronic books and magazines.
7. Know what we don’t know.>> Books on a shelf and magazines in a rack have great value to their owner even when they are not being read, said Papanek. Even if they have never been read. They look good. People feel good for having them, knowing that all that knowledge is theirs, even when they’re not using it.
Do CD-ROMs hold similar value? Will people buy them to own them, or choose to get their information by the piece, as at a sushi bar? In the electronic media world will there be anything like Time or Newsweek or the World Almanac or the Time Life Library of Home Repair? Or will those be the names of databanks? Will too much access turn all information into a commodity, or will quality be rewarded? Most important, how will intellectual property be valued, and its owners protected and compensated?
QUESTIONS HAVE BEEN RAISED, LET’S FIND SOME ANSWERS
This session certainly left the audience with questions without answers. Papanek’s talk provoked, while DiLorenzo and Schaefer raised important issues about shifting business models and the cost of entering an emerging marketplace. It will take massive amounts of consumer research, experimentation and collaboration among technologists and traditional creators to uncover future guidelines for this emerging medium. As DiLorenzo said, “it’s a lot of hard work, but once you understand that you can move forward.”
Janice Maloney
DATA SECURITY AND PRIVACY
Conflicting rights in a world full of thieves
Although data security and personal privacy do not have the topical sex appeal of, say, “interactive television,” what many people refuse to acknowledge is that the success of most of today’s up-and-coming digital media technologies — including the hottest buzzword, interactive TV — are completely dependent upon it.
The communications battleground.>> Joseph Swyt, president of Macrovision, set the stage for this session by discussing data security in the context of a larger and growing tension among contending interest groups in our society.
Each group, he said, is legitimately trying to fulfill its role and will properly assert itself in the defense of its rights. In this case, the main players are:
• National government, which is charged with protecting us from enemies, both external and internal. It argues that wiretaps can lead to the capture of terrorists, spies and criminals. To preserve everyone’s collective right to national security, it may have to encroach on the other players’ rights to privacy.
• Businesses, which have discovered that the trans-border flow of information has changed the concepts of labor and capital. Corporations need to protect trade secrets, get paid for their services and invest in new business opportunities regardless of national boundaries. In protecting their financial interests, they may come in conflict with both the governments they deal with and their own employees.
• The public — folks who obey the law, pay their taxes and consume digital services — which wants the benefits of national security, artistic creativity and reliable access to information services. U.S. citizens also want privacy for personal data and protection against electronic fraud.
• Creative individuals who have rights in their creations through copyright laws. But digital copies cannot be distinguished from originals, and in fact the act of copying is an essential step in using digital information. New laws may be needed, supplemented by digital security techniques, to protect intellectual property rights.
THE CLIPPER CHIP INTENSIFIED THE DEBATE
The recent debate over the U.S. government-proposed Clipper encryption chip pitted national security against commercial and individual privacy. Often, though, the struggle is between businesses and individuals; for example, the phone companies say toll fraud is a $4–5 billion annual loss of revenue, which must be made up by law-abiding customers. Software publishers, cable operators and credit card issuers have similar complaints.
Theft is a fact of life, so data security schemes must be employed and must stay ahead of anyone’s ability to crack them. (The government may not like this, but as we shall discuss below, the cat is already out of the bag.) We may see data security services become a viable industry, charging higher prices for greater degrees of security. One can envision a world in which all information is encrypted and keys are sold, moving the legal debate from the realm of copyright law to contract law.
Public keys, private secrets.>> Jim Bidzos, president of RSA Data Security, described exactly how the cat got out of the bag. As he pointed out, every cryptographic technique relies on keeping a secret: the decryption key. With symmetric approaches, such as DES and Clipper, the encryption and decryption keys are the same. This means that at least two parties must share the secret, and either party can compromise the other.
The only alternative to date is public-key cryptography. The mathematics for public key encryption was invented in the late 1970s and is based on the difficulty of factoring huge numbers. In a public-key system, there are two keys. One, which is published, is used to encrypt a message; the other, which is secret, is used to decrypt the message. (See Vol. 3, No. 1, p. 6–7, for more on public-key cryptography.)
In a widely deployed public-key system, public keys could actually be published and anyone could look up your public key and use it to encrypt a message to you. But only you would have the matching secret key, so only you could read the message. No secrets are shared, and thus no outside party can compromise your security.
“Digital signatures.” The same technique could be used as a “digital signature” to authenticate the identity of the sender of a message. The sender merely applies a second level of encryption with his secret key; upon receipt, you decrypt with his public key to remove the outer level of encryption — which will only work if he is who he says he is — and then decrypt with your secret key to see the message.
The best-known product for public-key cryptography uses the RSA algorithm (named for the initials of the inventors). A wide range of computer companies, including Apple and Microsoft, have licensed the RSA system. However, there are many other algorithms, such as the ANSI standards X930 and X931, which have been adopted by the financial community for secure electronic fund transfers. The Internet has a standard for privacy-enhanced E-mail, including a way of publishing a “white pages” directory of public keys. ISO and CCITT have begun deliberating on international standards for encryption.
THE KEY TO ENFORCING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
Encryption has obvious applications for enforcing intellectual property rights. For example, a company like 3DO could embed decryption keys in its game players, and only those software houses that had licensed the encryption could sell games. Getting a virus from downloaded software could become a thing of the past, because you could pinpoint responsibility for malicious code; the digital signature would serve as a tamper-seal for software.
The technology is already being used by cable companies that need to activate or deactivate access to premium channels based on whether a customer’s bill is paid up, and is likely to be deployed by the new digital direct broadcast satellite (DBS) delivery systems — particularly prone to clever thievery and tampering — as well.
Bidzos acknowledged that the government and the military would prefer that you not have this technology. But it’s too late; the techniques and the benefits are both widely understood within the U.S. and overseas. The potential for harm is present, as with any technology, but the good clearly outweighs the bad.
SUN’S GAGE ASKS: WHO DO WE WANT TO HAVE ACCESS?
That’s all very well as a theory, said John Gage, the director of the science office at Sun Microsystems. But if you look around at today’s world, you see computers and networks being implemented with scant thought for security. “When Geoffrey Holmes said earlier this morning, ‘We want you to be able to tap into our servers,’ my heart took a flipflop,” said Gage.
Open access may be wonderful for responsible citizens and businesses, he said, but what about those 13-year-olds whose sole mission in life is to break things, let alone the crooks and terrorists? Lots of them have powerful computers and time on their hands. Do we really want to give them open access to the servers?
Russian satellites in Congress.>> Consider the FBI’s demand for tappable networks. A drug kingpin need not use the phone company’s lines. Instead, he can put up a phased-array satellite antenna (less obtrusive and more steerable than a dish) and use a satellite. There are plenty of low-orbit satellites; the Russians loft them because they are cheap.
In fact, Gage told a rapt audience, he had installed the necessary equipment on the roof of the building in which the Commerce Committee was holding its hearings on communication security in less than a day, and had established a link to a Russian satellite while the Committee watched.
Tracking you via cellphone.>> Cellular phones have no security at all. Despite a federal law making it illegal to sell scanners for cellular frequencies, a cellular phone is by its very nature a scanner. When you move to a different cell, the device automatically hunts for an open channel.
However, by entering the key sequence that puts the phone into “debug” mode, you can take control of the scanning process and listen to any of the conversations floating through the ether — and you can even track the location of the cell they’re talking from. The proof that people are already doing this is that recordings of famous people’s cellular calls are readily available.
CABLE AND ENTERTAINMENT ONLY A FRACTION OF THE PROBLEM
When it comes to security needs, the entertainment and cable industries are small potatoes, said Gage. The financial industries, which move trillions of dollars each day, have real security concerns. Before bankers will trust wireless PDAs for financial transactions, they need to be very sure that it’s not easy to steal money by eavesdropping. Bankers have no reason to trust anyone — not even federal bureaucrats — with the keys to their digital coffers.
“Hoover Inside.” The computer industry, which sells a substantial fraction of its goods to foreign nations, is particularly offended by the proposal to make the Clipper chip a mandatory standard. Gage said, “It’s like putting a sticker on every computer that says, ‘J. Edgar Hoover Inside’.” (We suspect he was taking a poke at the “Intel Inside” ad campaign.)
Gage pointed out that by using good public-key encryption, we might once again trust the communication system for personal conversations and for financial transactions. However, as a member of the audience noted, we would still have to trust someone to supply reliable public and private keys.
Peter Dyson
NEAT NEW STUFF
VActors, ScriptX, ICTV and Smart 3D
Digital World’s Neat New Stuff session provided an opportunity for demonstrations and explanations of new technologies. This session introduced four new technologies, and threw in a little fun besides.
SIMGRAPHICS VACTOR: FUN AND PROFIT WITH VR
The evening began with a little comedy. Waldo, a virtual actor created with the VActor (Virtual Actor) technology from SimGraphics, opened with a stand-up comedy routine. The animated character, generated in real time, was able to have conversations with and play off of the audience.
Waldo, and later another character called Hot Dog, were both played by Charles Fleischer, the actor known best as the voice of Roger Rabbit. Steve Glenn, vice president and director of the Entertainment Group at SimGraphics, gave the audience a peek at how VActors are created.
Fleischer, sitting in an off-stage room, donned a complex, and uncomfortable, headpiece that tracked the movements of his face as he talked. This information was translated by a Silicon Graphics Crimson workstation. Meanwhile, he watched and listened to the audience through monitors.
The VActor technology is being used extensively in trade show attractions and theme park environments. Now it is also being used to generate and record animations for use in virtual reality and three-dimensional environments.
So now, instead of creating synthetic animations and laying a voice over it, the VActor will create a role just as a live actor would in a movie. The first products using the VActor technology on a CD-ROM will be coming out by the end of 1993. A VActor-generated character will premiere on TV this year in a pilot show for The Disney Channel. In addition, Glenn said, SimGraphics will have a full-body armature for the VActor available in 1994.
KALEIDA LABS’ SCRIPTX: CROSS-PLATFORM TOOLS ARRIVE
The evening’s biggest event was undoubtedly the first public demonstration of Kaleida Labs’ ScriptX technology. ScriptX (described in Vol. 2, No. 10, p. 12) is a scripting language/software layer that sits between a multimedia player and its operating system and enables different hardware and operating software systems to read and play back the same media-rich files.
There was a lot of discussion about Kaleida’s software development slipping schedules, but as promised, Nat Goldhaber, then president and CEO, and David Kaiser, vice president of engineering, were able to provide an exciting demonstration for the audience.
There are two significant aspects of the ScriptX environment. The first is, obviously, its ability to play back the same multimedia files on diverse platforms, something that is mostly impossible today. The second is its robust, “object-oriented” programming environment. That’s a computer term meaning that any single piece of data, or programming tool, can be modeled as a single “chunk” of software with its own characteristics, and can be reused across different applications.
(For some more thoughts on object-oriented programming, please see Glen Hoptman’s remarks from the Saturday conference track on p. 55.)
For the rather dramatic presentation, Kaiser took a CD-ROM and loaded it into a Macintosh. He opened up a prototype application of an undersea exploration called Monterey Canyon. The application showed a number of different aquatic plant and animal species, and enabled the user to “capture” any of these and add them to one’s own personal journal.
Since each fish is an individual object, and therefore imbued with its own characteristics, traits, etc., the user can learn about the object by accessing the attached data. That information can exist simply by having a text database associated with the object or, more profoundly, by actually making that object appear and act as it should. For example, if you had two different fish on the screen, they would each appear to be the proper and proportional size to each other.
An application like this should have working scientific tools and the folks at Kaleida did not disappoint. They demonstrated an X-ray tool that enabled the user to see different layers of the physiology of a fish, such as its skeleton or musculature, simply by passing the X-ray “lens” over any area of the fish. Since the information about how to display the fish’s innards is built into the fish, the access to that information was a real-time response to the application of the tool, and not a canned animation.
Another tool, which was imported from a floppy disk (not built into the original application) was a tape measure, which allowed the user to measure parts of the fish in the most appropriate scale: centimeters. (This tool returned later in the demo.)
Kaiser then showed another demo, a template for multimedia classified ads for buying a used car. Each car listed was its own object, and therefore all of the relevant information was intact. Kaiser was then able to display graphically the different relationships between a selection of cars that met certain criteria: resale value, mileage charted against price, etc., which would enable a buyer to make a better selection.
The finale of the demonstration was moving the CD-ROM to a PC running Windows and having the same applications, and the same tools and floppy, working on both machines.
(When questioned later about whether this demo was in reality a single ScriptX file that ran on both platforms, Kaiser promised that indeed it was. This was not, he assured us, a “fake” demo.)
In a different application, running on the PC, the tape measure was again imported (from the same floppy disk), only this time it came up with an entirely different scale. The software understood that different environments, such as measuring a fish or measuring distances on a road map, require different units, and was able to adapt on the fly.
ScriptX was a real crowd pleaser. It is scheduled for release to third-party manufacturers in spring 1994.
ICTV HAS AN INTERACTIVE TV SYSTEM READY TO GO
Leo Hoarty and John North (president and vice president of strategic relations, respectively) explained the new interactive television technology developed by ICTV.
ICTV’s plan was to create an infrastructure for interactive television that could be installed with a minimum of effort and cost to existing cable television or any other electronic network, including a phone company’s central office.
The system does not require that the entire structure be rewired for high-speed digital transactions immediately, but can be upgraded when the market requires, and can pay for, enhanced services.
The system works this way: ICTV’s proprietary hardware and software is installed in the neighborhood “nodes” of an existing cable television system. (The node is a local delivery point for a limited number of homes in a cable television system, downstream from the headend.)
At this node is installed a computer-based switching system, and the facilities to install a number of hardware interface cards, which enable access to digital servers, satellite downlinks, communications networks, etc. This node then becomes a switching station, between you, the TV viewer and the different facilities offered by the system. Your home cable tuner would require a small additional piece of hardware (which the cable operator would install), and would not require a settop box, as is required in other systems under development or discussion.
Let’s say the cable television system in your neighborhood is limited to 37 channels. That is, the cable network is physically able to send 37 channels of analog video simultaneously to your cable tuner, which enables you to select the particular channel of your choice for viewing.
INGENIOUS WAY TO PROVIDE CHANNELS AND SWITCHING
The cable system is a channelized architecture. But once the ICTV system is put in place, tuning to channel 37 would transfer you (though you wouldn’t notice it) into a switched architecture — using only the bandwidth of a single channel, as the channel switching is happening at the node. The number of “channels,” or choices, is limited by the number of interface cards, or services, offered by the cable operator. (See Mitch Kapor’s keynote, p. 14, for more on channelized vs. switched architectures.)
The system could be upgraded as the networks improve; as fiber-optic cabling in the network moves closer to the home, and the more advanced the cable tuner becomes, more sophisticated services could easily be offered. The system could begin by offering near video on demand, as well as catalog advertising, online classifieds, etc., over this single virtual channel.
Ultimately it could offer full digital interactive services, including true video on demand, interactive multimedia, electronic messaging, transaction and online services and all of the other applications that have been talked about during the past year. (See Interactive TV series, Vol. 2, No. 12, and Vol. 3, No. 1, for discussion of ITV services, and how they might be deployed.)
The system’s focus on a “cage” of hardware cards makes it, in the words of ICTV’s Hoarty, “future-proof.” Each card acts as the interface to a particular kind of server or switch. Thus, people who want to offer a service can use their own technology, and keep control of their content (providing, of course, that the cable operator feels there is enough of a market to invest in that particular service). The ICTV system is merely acting as a switch and billing system.
Since the system is added to existing infrastructure, and does not necessarily require that all operators use the same exact tuner architecture or software (it just needs to match a card in the node), the system is relatively inexpensive to deploy.
Hoarty demonstrated a number of applications, including a classified buyers’ guide; a movie theater interface for pay-per-view (complete with concession stand); local restaurant menus; and catalog advertising. These were all prototype applications (in this case running in Macromedia’s Director). The final applications and interfaces would be created by the people who offer those services for the system.
Digital World attendees saw a number of concept demonstrations of home shopping systems (from Apple, IBM, Viacom, Time Warner, etc.). The developer of a shopping channel would be able to use the best technology and plug that system into the ICTV switcher.
ICTV has built and installed this system in its offices in Santa Clara. Although a number of discussions have been taking place with many of the major cable operators, the system has yet to be deployed in a consumer environment.
MACROMEDIA SMART 3D: ALL OBJECTS, ALL THE TIME
Macromedia demonstrated a new software technology that will enable people who create 3D models to add properties to those objects. While the Kaleida architecture supports objects in its system, this technology will enable the creation of those objects.
Macromedia fellow Young Harvill, who created the software, demonstrated two different environments, each with different kinds of objects. The first was a very simple desert landscape, with three standing rectangular towers. You can navigate around the desert at will. If you bump into one of these rectangles, however, you will knock it down. You can even push it along the ground. Since it has the properties of balance and gravity built in, the towers respond to the environment around it.
By holding down the option key, a big pink pig appears. Releasing the key throws the pig in the air. (All right, it’s a little strange. But after all, this is still in the realm of software engineers, not product marketing managers.) If the pig lands on the ground, it will bounce a few times before settling (following the laws of gravity, as well as the pig’s own properties of bouncy-ness). If, however, you throw the pig at the rectangular structures, it will explode. Inherent in the pig is the knowledge that the ground will absorb the shock of the throw, but the towers will not. By the way, while the pig explodes, the tower falls to the ground.
The second environment was more advanced and detailed. It was a prototype of a racing game, in which you are driving a car through a town. There are obstacles in your way, including other cars, signs, buildings, etc., and your effect on those obstacles, and theirs on you, will depend on the particular properties of those objects. Of course, those attributes you assign to a particular object do not have to follow any known laws of nature. Harvill, having gotten fed up with traffic, decided that he would let his car fly.
This was purely a technology demonstration; Smart 3D is not yet integrated into any available products, and won’t be until 1994. However, Macromedia was able to print a number of CD-ROM demonstration discs of the technology, complete with the environments demonstrated, for some conference attendees.
David Baron
THE INTERACTIVE TV DEBATE
A world of standards to choose from
At Digital World’s much anticipated Great Interactive Television Platform Debate, a panel of executives from the computer industry presented their varying agendas for developing equipment and software to enable two-way TV, and Apple Computer publicly unveiled its ITV strategy for the first time.
That all the participants were from large, established companies in the computer industry shows the complexity of the digital network being built, and the cross-industry cooperation that will be required to build it.
The distinguished panel included Craig Mundie, general manager of Microsoft’s advanced consumer products division; Bob Frankenberg, VP and general manager of Hewlett-Packard’s Personal Information Products Group; Nat Goldhaber, then president and CEO of Kaleida Labs; and Gaston Bastiaens, general manager of Apple’s Personal Interactive Electronics (PIE) division.
Though each would like to be the company that “owns” the platform for interactive TV, however they define such a thing, it was clear by the end of the session that multiple platforms and standards will prevail at least until we move through some fairly significant market research and field testing of these systems. Such foment signals the start of a potentially healthy industry.
THE BEGINNING OF AN ‘INTERACTIVE FOOD CHAIN’
Microsoft’s Mundie, head of the group that’s developing software and tools for ITV, began the debate with a presentation on his company’s strategy for ITV. (Microsoft, you may recall, has a working alliance with Intel and settop provider General Instrument to provide a program guide/navigation interface.)
Chain, chain, chain.>> Microsoft sees an ITV platform as only the beginning of “an interactive food chain” that includes content and service developers and providers. Content and services provided by ITV are the most critical element to interactive television’s success.
In this light, Mundie said, it’s interesting to people at Microsoft to watch the furor created over the rumored affiliation (called Cablesoft) between Time Warner, Tele-Communications Inc. and Microsoft. “While an operating system strategy is important, “it is only one very small part of this.” (Mitch Kapor’s keynote presentation, chronicled on p. 14, discusses why this “very small part” is so critical.)
Interfaces, OS and tools.>> ITV requires four components, according to Mundie: a fully switched, two-way, broadband digital network; program display and selection mechanisms; a variety of distributed computing capabilities; and shared sources of interactive content and services.
Microsoft plans to participate in the creation of viewer display and selection mechanisms, operating systems and authoring tools. “We realize we can’t do it all,” he said.
In designing interfaces to be displayed in the living room, Microsoft is trying to keep the consumer, not computer users, in mind. “We’re not going to bring Windows as we know it on the PC to your TV,” said Mundie, to enthusiastic applause from the audience. He believes that many different interfaces, targeted at different users, will be employed. “There’s not going to be any one-size-fits-all human interface.”
Beyond Windows.>> Microsoft is also developing a new operating system architecture for ITV. As did the cable industry, Microsoft seems to have changed its earlier attitude toward the developing network and is now working to provide system software to support a complex of distributed computing capabilities for a fully switched, broadband digital network.
Because Microsoft is not traditionally known for its strengths in networking systems, Mundie said the creation of such a system will be a challenge. Its requirements are substantially different from any in existence, he said, and the company is well aware that it must also address the critical consumer-acceptance problems of privacy, security and network control.
Making an open framework.>> Lastly, said Mundie, Microsoft is developing authoring and creation tools for ITV programming. Microsoft doesn’t plan to develop all the tools itself. An “open framework” will allow other companies to produce tools as well, much as has evolved in the PC market.
In the Q&A following his presentation, Mundie was under fire from a decidedly hostile crowd that wanted to know Microsoft’s definition of “open,” as well as assurances that Microsoft would not use its tremendous clout in the computer industry to impose its vision of ITV on the world.
No slam-dunk answers.>> “In this [ITV] world in particular, I don’t think we start with any huge advantage over some of the other companies,” he said. “We want to use the name, reputation and technology we have. I think we should be proud to do that. I don’t think we have a slam-dunk answer for every technical and relationship problem that exists in this business.”
Mundie said Microsoft favors market-driven standards over those imposed by standards organizations. Microsoft would participate with standards bodies when it is appropriate in order to achieve compatibility, he said, but standards can’t be set for the huge array of interfaces required by ITV.
HEWLETT-PACKARD TAKES THE RESEARCHED APPROACH
Bob Frankenberg of Hewlett-Packard believes that at the outset, ITV will follow the evolutionary path of the computer industry that spawned multiple platforms. But unlike the computer industry, which waited many decades before taking the steps to make systems work together over networks, these companies will be forced to work together on some level to ensure that content and services — such as interactive advertising, movies on demand or shopping — are available on a nationwide basis.
In other words, the problems that the “multimedia” industry faces today — i.e., lack of widespread developer interest because there’s no single standard to develop to — will plague ITV in spades unless there’s a core set of data formats, operability (i.e., fault tolerance) and interoperability standards.
Coming out of the closet.>> Frankenberg said that HP, which came out of the closet about its ITV plans by exhibiting at the National Cable Show last month, only plans to compete on the hardware side in the new ITV industry. It hopes to create standards at this system interface level via its development of a universal settop box. “This allows for growth and innovation underneath (in the system software) as well as on top (in the applications and programming area),” said Frankenberg.
He claims HP will work with standards as they evolve, but initially it will support a range of operating environments.
Working with TV Answer.>> As part of its charter to provide hardware solutions, HP’s first ITV customer is TV Answer. The TV Answer system relies on technology significantly less sophisticated than that of a fully switched digital network (see Part I of our ITV series, Vol. 2, No. 12, p. 3). However, as Frankenberg pointed out, it is a good place to start. TV Answer can reach the 40 percent of U.S. homes that are not connected to cable —and can reach businesses as well, which are not traditionally cabled.
In addition, the TV Answer system is complementary to cable and has capabilities that he believes will bridge into a fully switched interactive environment.
The modular approach.>> HP’s modular approach to settop boxes has yielded a prototype, which Frankenberg showed during his presentation. Looking like a combination between a CD audio player and an old-fashioned 8-track tape deck, the box has removable cartridges that Frankenberg said will allow cable companies to upgrade services without replacing the entire box. For example, an online video game customer might find it useful to slip in a module that contained a sophisticated graphics processor.
You can take it with you.>> To that same end, an enticing additional benefit, which Frankenberg would not detail, was that his little HP personal assistant was almost exactly the same size as a cartridge module. This has fascinating ramifications for the consumer’s ability to download information into a portable device from the TV system, and shows the kind of imaginative problem-solving that’s likely to make HP a force to contend with in the ITV arena.
Frankenberg said that HP will produce basic settop units for “under $300″ (though today’s settop box providers say that’s still way too high for cable operators), but for that price consumers should not expect the kind of “3D morph shopping” that everyone seems to be promising will be standard on every ITV system.
Doing its homework.>> Hewlett-Packard’s strategy for ITV is the result of two years of extensive consumer research. (For a summary of this research, see Vol. 3, No. 1, p. 10.) Security and privacy ranked foremost among consumer concerns. The study also found that people are overloaded with data, but underloaded with the information they want and need. Lastly, consumers wanted to be wowed by exciting new capabilities at a cost of less than $300.
KALEIDA LABS AS SAMURAI ITV PLAYER
Much in contrast with Hewlett-Packard’s approach, Kaleida’s Nat Goldhaber said ITV is not an area where elaborate studies are needed. The industry should simply go with its gut.
Kaleida recently signed a deal to provide its cross-platform scripting language called ScriptX to Scientific Atlanta (a leading provider of cable settop boxes), which Goldhaber believes offers a solution to problems of platform incompatibility.
A single development platform.>> A distributed version of ScriptX, which is under development, would have much the same goal as ScriptX has for today’s CD-ROM-based multimedia world. It would allow developers of ITV programming to create a program or service only once to work on a variety of hardware and software systems.
Distributed ScriptX will support the sharing of objects over the network and across ITV platforms, Goldhaber said: objects would reside partially on a server (i.e., the headend or a server on a telephone network) and partially on the settop, enabling multiple shared objects to be synchronized in real time. It will also feature some kind of lock-and-key technology to protect against theft of intellectual property or network services.
Kaleida’s existing ITV alliance is with Motorola and Scientific Atlanta to develop terminals, servers and networks using ScriptX. Several hardware manufacturers, such as Hitachi, Creative Labs, Toshiba and Mitsubishi, are developing settop boxes incorporating the ScriptX technology as well.
APPLE UNVEILS EZTV, ITS PLAY FOR DOMINATION
The surprise of the ITV platform debate was that it unveiled a rivalry we weren’t exactly expecting to see: between Apple Computer and its progeny, Kaleida Labs.
Gaston Bastiaens, general manager of the PIE division at Apple (which provides 50 percent of Kaleida’s budget) that’s developing the company’s EZTV system, claims PIE is waiting to support distributed ScriptX as the scripting language for EZTV.
But the two are obviously creating ITV systems that compete on many levels, despite Apple’s efforts to make it seem as though the developments were cooperative. Though no one at either company is mentioning it, we are certain that this rivalry played a major role in Goldhaber’s ouster from Kaleida.
A copyrighted charter.>> Bastiaens provided some much needed comic relief during his presentation. “PIE’s… charter is to develop products and services that are so compelling that just by nature, on its own, it will become a standard for the way we work, learn, communicate and play. This sentence is copyrighted,” he said to a roar of audience laughter.
But he also provided some important news: Apple’s EZTV system, which he demonstrated with its designer, Fabrice Florin, is based upon the company’s Newton technology.
A platform for communication.>> This is excellent news. First, despite all the bad press that Apple’s gotten because its Newton PDA (personal digital assistant) is running behind schedule, this set of technologies is a perfect front-end to the kind of full-service TV network that Geoff Holmes of Time Warner and Ed Horowitz of Viacom discussed in the Projects and Prototypes session (see p. 27).
Second, Apple is in the process of making some significant Newton alliances, including some with Bell operating companies that will make the Newton a base for “smart phones.” Bastiaens said Apple has been focusing on making these types of alliances, rather than the “smoke and mirrors” type that are more typically being made in this area, because Apple believes that the promise of ITV lies equally in its ability to deliver information services over a fully switched, rather than a channelized, network architecture (i.e., telco rather than cable).
Apple is also allied with America Online, working with the online information service provider on underlying architectures and user interfaces to develop multimedia mail, home shopping, interactive libraries and games, etc.
EZTV, the demo.>> In a nutshell, here’s what Bastiaens and Florin demonstrated: EZTV uses a remote control device that is the single unifying object to the system (i.e., the focus is off the settop box). The remote has a built-in microphone and speaker that allows you to speak on both the telephone and to the TV (using Casper, Apple’s voice-recognition technology).
Using a large cursor and a joystick-like mechanism on the remote, you can mark programs, access online services and slip into telephone mode. An “info” button allows you to “pop up” information, such as sports scores. “One-touch videotaping” and virtual VCR are supported. Using multimedia mail, you can record a program and send it to someone else’s video mailbox.
Jumping with Casper.>> A program guide can be directed by Casper technology — you can jump directly to Saturday, or to a particular program, by using a combination of a voice button and speaking into the remote’s microphone.
The interface supports multiple viewer profiles and categories, and 12 active screens can be in preview at one time.
“When the smoke clears, we will find (ITV) is not about hundreds of channels, but personal channels” enabled by a fully switched system, said Bastiaens, echoing Apple chairman John Sculley’s keynote remarks. It must support everything from broadcast TV to personal services. “Video on demand alone will not justify large investments. EZTV is the basis for two-way interactive communications, way beyond video on demand.”
Only a year away.>> Designed specifically to be a communications platform that can handle virtually all data types, the Newton EZTV demo (we use the term loosely — both Florin and Bastiaens admitted it was largely hardwired) showed that leading technologies such as voice input (via Apple’s Casper system) would provide great benefit to navigating and interacting with an ITV system.
Bastiaens said that some major alliance announcements are in the works and that “somewhere around one year” from now, EZTV “will be available as a product. We’d like to see it in every home.” This statement no doubt made blood drain from the faces of engineers in the PIE division, but we suppose EZTV can be the first test of Newton’s object-based, “snap-in-tools” system architecture.
Bastiaens assured developers of interactive programming, concerned with the multiplicity of platforms, that it would support ScriptX as a cross-platform development system. “We are developing EZTV with ScriptX in mind,” he said. “We think ScriptX can be an answer to your worries. We absolutely will forcefully support ScriptX.”
THEY’RE ALL IN THE SAME BOAT, LIKE IT OR NOT
Despite the impressive demo, Apple is in the same position as virtually everyone vying for attention in ITV today: no deliverables, very few specifics and a lot of hope for the future. But its goals are identical to everyone who’s angling for play in ITV: provide a solution (hopefully its own) to real-time navigation on a fully switched network and make the technology available to major industry players, including cable, telco and anyone else it can get involved. Considering the multiplicity of companies involved, the real task that lies ahead is not to select the winner, but to create a network where their visions can coexist.
Denise Caruso, Amy Johns
LET’S MAKE A DEAL
How to get the most from a CD-ROM publishing contract
Almost everyone agrees that the digital media convergence is a positive movement toward new forms of communication and entertainment, but it is not a process free of growing pains.
Some of that pain came through loud and clear during the session called “Leveraging the Deal: Content, Rights and the Law,” where interactive media producers questioned a group of experts on how to stay alive in a marketplace that to date has no established business model but promises to be extremely lucrative for those who can survive.
As CD-ROM distribution specialist Joanna Tamer, president of SOS Inc. and comoderator of the discussion, said in her opening remarks, “In the film, record, book and software industries everyone knows how the deal goes down. It is established and settled. What is not understood is how to handle the hybrid product that comes from [combining the media of] these industries. There is no model, and in fact, the confluence of these four industries — and all the different cultures of those industries and all the different deal-making structures and laws from those industries — are (actually) in collision.”
The panel, which agreed with Tamer, included Jessee Allread, vice president of sales and marketing for EBook, Inc.; Michael Kapp, president of Warner Special Products; Richard Thompson, managing partner of Silverberg, Katz, Thompson & Braun; and comoderator David Baron, program director of Digital World.
NEW MEDIA PUBLISHERS IN THE EYE OF THE STORM
According to Tamer, it will take two years to establish the business model for how interactive media titles are created, published and distributed. Until then, publishers in the new media market “must walk a rocky road.” To alleviate some of the burden, Tamer and her fellow panelists offered advice on how to navigate the deal-making process based on their past experiences and understanding of this emerging marketplace. (Tamer covered the art of negotiating a distribution deal in Vol. 3, No. 1, p. 19.)
I’ve got the power.>> According to Tamer, success in this industry is really about controlling the copyright to your content and having successful leverage in your distribution deal. “If you can do this,” she said, “you will survive whatever is coming and you will come out in the end as one of the key players.”
The panelists encouraged new media publishers to keep their production costs low — about $100,000 for a CD-ROM title and $200,000 for a game — until the market is better established.
Make your own content.>> To reduce costs, said Allread of EBook — a content developer, acquisitions and licensing company for CD-ROM titles (with distribution in 25 countries) — new media publishers should create their own content as much as possible. He pointed out that the cost of licensing intellectual property, especially excerpts from a hit movie or best-selling song or book, could potentially create so much overhead for the publisher that he or she cannot afford to produce the disc or sell it at a price that the market can sustain.
When EBook cannot create something on its own, he said, the company uses material that’s in the public domain — reworking it so that in its new form it becomes EBook’s intellectual property and EBook can then sell the rights to the newly created piece in different ways.
YOU MUST KNOW WHAT YOU CAN’T KNOW
You must also know what you can’t know — what’s coming down the road in the next two to ten years in terms of new computer and consumer devices or new kinds of delivery systems such as interactive TV. “The code [the content in digital form] is your key asset,” said Tamer, “and you need to leverage it as much as you can.”
According to Allread, EBook always tries to acquire rights to as many facets of the content as possible. In other words, if the company is negotiating for digital rights to a piece of intellectual property, the EBook team would try to negotiate the rights to include all of the existing computer and consumer devices (and those that don’t exist yet), even though initially the company plans only to make an interactive CD for the Macintosh or MPC platform. If the disc is successful, then EBook can repackage that content for another delivery system and increase its profits without having to go back and renegotiate the licensing agreement.
Turn an idea into a series.>> Thompson, an intellectual property lawyer, suggested that new media publishers develop story ideas that can generate a series of products. It makes the distributors and/or affiliated label that might be marketing a title feel more confident about carrying the product if they understand that the author is invested in the market long term. “Also, you should consider negotiation for one property, as well as future spin-offs from the property whether it is merchandise or another product, early on, because negotiating these things after a smash hit is difficult,” he said.
HAVE PASSION FOR WHAT YOU CREATE
There is no question that the new media publishing market is tough. It will be survival of the fittest, and it is unlikely that all of the interactive publishing houses creating titles for the market today will still be around when the dust settles in two to five years.
The hurdles are too many and too high. In reality, publishers must invest heavily in a development process — make a prototype — before they can even pitch an idea, as opposed to writing a treatment for a film, TV show or record project. In addition, publishers generally cannot gain distribution leverage until at least their second title and that’s only if the first one they produced was a smash hit. Access to content is difficult at best and creating your own requires a stable of talented designers, musicians, videographers and writers. As Warner’s Kapp pointed out, there are no guarantees in any creative profession that someone is going to make it. But, he said, passion for what you do is a good foundation to build on.
“This all sounds so complicated,” said Kapp, who has been in the record industry for more than 30 years. “But the people who have passion to create stuff don’t typically know all of this other stuff about distribution and business plans.
“Have an idea, acquire the rights, and you’ll get the distribution if you make the best product coming out on the market. That’s where the energy has to be. The filmmaker doesn’t start out by solving all the problems of how many sequels there are going to be to a film or how he is going to merchandise it before he makes his film — that’s the movie studio’s job. The filmmaker’s (job) is to make a great movie.”
Janice Maloney
LOCATION-BASED ENTERTAINMENT
Is it the movie house of the next century?
After years of hype, virtual reality is finally becoming an industry. The tools exist to build photorealistic digital environments that either mirror reality or create whole new worlds. The economics for large, medium and even small virtual reality installations are good, providing developers with the promise of a high rate of return on their investment.
Even the prospective audience, which includes all ages and sexes, is in place to push VR technology and location-based theme park attractions into a multibillion dollar entertainment business that could be larger than the movie industry. The only thing missing is the content.
To date, the most widely known installations, from Battletech in Chicago to Star Tours in Anaheim, CA, are action-packed and content free, as they say, obviously modeling themselves as large-scale video games. At this year’s Digital World, the creators and technologists sitting on the “Virtual Reality and Location-Based Entertainment” panel were unified in their belief that if VR installations are really to become “the movie houses of the 21st century” — motivating people to leave the comfort of their homes and interactive television sets — developers must produce experiences that include real stories with characters as well as visually stimulating environments.
Panelists included David Smith, chairman and CEO of Virtus Corp., maker of 3D modeling and visualization software; Diana Gagnon Hawkins, a consultant and applications expert in the areas of interactive television and virtual reality; Thomas Dolby, musician, composer, producer and artist, who is working on three separate VR installations; and Bran Ferren, senior vice president of creative technology at Walt Disney Imagineering, the division of Disney developing virtual reality-based theme parks.
MAKE THE TOOLS EASY TO USE; THE ARTISTS WILL COME
Smith opened the session with a sneak preview of a new visualization application that supports QuickTime movies on the Macintosh. It appeared — even in its beta version — to make it incredibly simple to build 3D “worlds.” The new program renders the images in real time, so creators can immediately see the results of their handiwork. “Just as a painter would not be terribly productive if he had to wait five seconds or five minutes to see the result of a brushstroke on the canvas, neither is it productive if you have to wait to see the results of what you are doing [when building a virtual world], as you are doing it,” explained Smith.
As he talked, he created a 3D building — complete with windows, doors and a TV set, of course, showing a digital movie — surrounded by trees.
Building worlds.>> “Think of [the emerging VR market] like the movie industry when it first started,” said Smith. “They not only had to make the movie but the camera. That’s where we are today. Many people today say, ‘Hey, we have the camera.’ Now we need to make the transition to make the content. But in order for people to make a good story they have got to have access to this kind of technology.”
In many ways Smith is banking on the artists and creators being drawn into the VR medium by easy-to-use tools. Already some of the Hollywood community has adopted Virtus Walkthrough, a 3D modeling and visualization tool for the Mac and PC. Most recently Sidney Pollack used it while directing The Firm to block out scenes before they were shot, and set designers, he says, like Virtus because it is interactive and the sets are “recyclable,” so that they can be used again.
MOVING VR INDUSTRY FORWARD THROUGH EDUCATION, RESEARCH
For those uninitiated in the world of virtual reality entertainment (about 40 percent of the audience), Diana Hawkins outlined the highlights (and the “lowlights”) of passive simulator rides and helmet-based immersion experiences.
“You are there.” Passive simulator rides, which include a film with a fast action point of view such as going on a roller coaster ride or going down an alpine trail attached to a motion base platform, are the number-one attractions at amusement parks worldwide, according to Hawkins. They appeal to the entire family, not just the video game generation.
The larger installations, such as Disney’s Star Tours, seat about 50 people at a time, are highly “themed” and very expensive to produce. In fact, because the films, which are about three to five minutes long, have such demanding production values — the visuals are very high resolution — they might even cost more to produce than a full-length feature film, Hawkins said. Many of these rides are actually based on movie properties such as Back to the Future and RoboCop III.
The medium-size, location-based theme rides, such as the Iwerks Turbo Tours unit, can contain as few as two seats or a row of seats on a motion base and are installed in shopping malls and hotels such as the Excalibur in Las Vegas. Unlike the larger installations, the films change on a regular basis in these installations and there is a higher number of repeat visitations. The smaller units are movable and travel around to trade shows or county and state fairs.
LBE and VR complexes.>> One of the major drawbacks of these rides is that they are brief, and, generally speaking, people are not willing to get into their cars and drive somewhere for three minutes of fun. “If you are trying to create an out-of-home experience for large audiences, you must create an environment around the rides, similar to going to a movie,” explained Hawkins, who added that some developers are building large location-based entertainment complexes that house a number of installations as well as food and beverage stands.
One of the other negatives of passive simulator rides is that they are passive. “The next generation audience is the Nintendo generation and interactivity is something we are really going to need to hold them,” she explained.
FLYING, DRIVING, SHOOTING: IS THAT ALL THERE IS?
To date there are only a few interactive virtual reality sites open to the public in the United States. They are flying, driving, shooting experiences that replicate the video game “story” model — if you can call it that.
Who put this sneaker on my face? And while the novelty factor of putting on a VR helmet and data glove draws large crowds initially, there is a low repeat visitation rate for these experiences. In part, Hawkins believes, that is because putting one of those helmets on after several people have used it “feels like putting someone else’s sneaker on your face.”
In addition to sanitary problems (and the unwillingness of some people to muss their hairdos), these installations present numerous drawbacks. Unlike passive simulator rides, VR experiences require an attendant to get you in and out of the helmet, which is time consuming. Also, these VR experiences are based on stereoscopic 3D images, which 10 percent of the population can’t see. In addition, the graphics are not yet even to the quality level of video arcade graphics, which is completely unacceptable to audiences weaned on television and motion pictures.
Last but certainly not least, some of these experiences make people, well, want to throw up. “If you have ever seen when the pterodactyl in Virtuality picks someone up in the audience, it makes (some) people physically sick,” Hawkins said. “It presents a bit of a clean-up problem.”
Cooperative vs. combative software.>> Software is going to make or break this market, according to Hawkins. And she believes (as did the audience, based on the applause) that it’s time “to get away from doing simply boy games.”
“We know everyone will go in and drive flight simulators, shoot people,” she said. “My argument is that we don’t know for sure that is what people want to do since that is all we have ever given them. We need to be more creative. We need to create a story within an environment.”
Baby, you can drive my car.>> Hawkins believes virtual reality experiences that use networked vehicles within a site are a positive step in that direction. Although she did not name any specific installations doing this today, she said these experiences are comfortable, easy to load and unload, and the cars can be networked, so people playing the game within a site can collaborate. In addition, individuals can play different roles within the vehicle, so there is interactivity. Finally, these experiences are based on “highly pristine, quality images.”
THE POTENTIAL OF VR TURNS ARTIST INTO ENTHUSIAST
Thomas Dolby is aware of what is wrong with VR today — “dumb content and cheesy graphics” — but he remains a true enthusiast because he believes that if the artists become involved in the creation of VR, it has the potential to be an extremely powerful entertainment medium.
Dolby has just finished scoring the music for three simulation ride-films. He is also working on a CD-ROM game and a VR installation for Intel Corp., which will appear in a major New York City museum later this year.
Experiencing Mozart anew.>> Dolby did not want to end up “apologizing for the graphics from the beginning” of the Intel project, so he decided to emphasize the audio aspects of the experience, since the technology to create high-quality digital audio is here today and is inexpensive, while the graphics processors necessary to create gorgeous imagery at low cost are still a couple of years off.
His installation is based on a favorite piece of music from Mozart. He recorded it digitally using “world class” musicians, then let the experience itself dictate the kinds of images he would create. “They didn’t need to be photorealistic,” he said. “In the same way in which our museums are full of great paintings — sometimes a few brush strokes on canvas by the right artist can actually communicate more to you than a photograph — I think you can do something really useful in VR with the amount of pixels and polygons we have already.”
Tickle me for bluegrass.>> Dolby chose to create a concert hall that the audience could “wander around and hear the music from anywhere they went.” Individuals can get on the conductor’s podium, stick their heads next to a violin or even go inside a ‘cello and listen to the music from that point of view. (You can, using your data glove, even tickle the first violinist who then starts to play Appalachian bluegrass instead of Mozart.)
“It’s very simple,” Dolby said. “It’s not something a backroom technician would have come up with because they probably would have wanted to get too clever, and I didn’t want to take away from the charm of a classical music experience.”
Making music interactive.>> Most recently Dolby has been tackling the problem of how to compose music for interactive experiences. “The whole thing about interactive entertainment is now the audience is in the driver’s seat, so if they are making up the movie as they go along, how do you write a musical score for the movie?” he asked.
Dolby has adopted an object-oriented approach to scoring for interactive. “I was always a big fan of Peter and the Wolf,” he said. “Each character has his own melody, and that idea works well for interactive.” He gave the audience a sample of his work in this area, which will appear in a CD-ROM game later this year. The score is generated in real time as each of the characters (or objects) come together, so it is always the same elements in a different context. “For instance, if I play you a musical box playing Brahms’s Lullaby, you’re going to think what a sweet little baby, but if I put a drone underneath it in a different key you’re going to think the kid grew up to be an ax murderer.”
Dolby believes it is critical to get other artists involved in the VR creation process, and has set himself up as a lightning rod to attract other creatives. He started a company in Los Angeles called HeadSpace, which has already signed on several composers and sound designers (and is looking for more), who are interested in developing the audio aspects of virtual reality installations.
“As an artist, I think it’s really important that creative minds apply themselves to doing something useful with virtual reality and with these other new platforms becoming available,” he said. “I don’t think that is happening very much at the moment.”
A TIME WHEN VR CAN EVOKE A HUMAN EMOTION
As both a technologist and a creator who has been working with VR technology for the past 20 years, Bran Ferren provided a reality check on the state of virtual reality. It was not pretty, but it certainly had its humorous moments.
Ferren, who believes that the “stuff we are dealing with now is just awful, even embarrassing,” said that evangelizing about VR today is “a little bit like sitting down with Orville and Wilbur Wright and trying to convince them of the advantages of the AAdvantage program of mileage credit.”
It’s tough, he said, “because experimental evidence suggests that all this stuff we are showing people now is exciting on an intellectual level but it’s not yet exciting on an experiential level,” he explained. “That’s something that deeply interests me.”
Like his fellow panelists, Ferren firmly believes VR will not become something we can care about until it combines good stories with good environments. “The fact is, until we get to the stage that the quality of the idea and the quality of the presentation give us the ability to touch your heart as well as just your curiosity, we are not going to see this live up to its potential.”
The ultimate communication tool.>> That said, Ferren summed up what seemed to be at the core of most of the panelists’ experiences: that VR has the potential to be the most valuable new communications tool in human history.
“Every time throughout human history we have increased the communications bandwidth to a human being either going in or going in and out in any significant way, it has changed the course of civilization. What is so exciting to me about VR is it is the ultimate bandwidth communicator. When it is done properly, which will not be in 15 minutes and hopefully in less than 100 years, it will be unobtrusive, whether it be the sunglasses or the RJ-11 jack installed in the side of your head, it will let you get pictures into you at the same resolution that you have the ability to see; it will let you get sound into you at the same frequency temporal and spatial resolution that you hear.”
Ferren said that humans are “sensing junkies. We like to fuse our sensors. VR gives us the ability to make that fusion take place in a synthetic environment. And it is potentially an incredibly significant tool to communicate interpersonally and as a society — both on the level of fantasy and serious stuff like education.”
Janice Maloney
THE CREATIVE CAFE
Hanging out with the artists
The Creative Cafe, cosponsored by Seybold Seminars and the Writers Guild of America, west (WGAw), and located in the open-air Palm Courtyard of the Beverly Hilton Hotel, was held in parallel with Digital World for those who believe that creative content, not technology, will determine the ultimate success of the new digital media industry.
An immediate hit.>> The Cafe was an informal gathering place where creative professionals met and discussed issues of interest in new and interactive media. After making formal presentations, panelists moved down from the podium into the audience to continue the discussion.
Panelists included screen writers, producers, actors, musicians and multimedia designers, representing creative genres ranging from children’s television to video games to electronic music, multimedia and interactive movies.
The idea was so successful that more than 800 people attended during the three days of Digital World, including actor Alan Alda and musician Frank Zappa.
FINDING THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGY FOR THE JOB
Several themes emerged from the discussions:
• Probably the highlight of all the sessions came when an audience member took the panel to task about focusing too much on interactivity by saying: “Let me tell you what I want in interactivity. I want two choices. When I come home from a hard day at work, I want to turn this thing on and watch it. I don’t want to play with it. I don’t want to ‘interact’ with it. I just want to let it wash over me. On the other hand, I want the ability, when I am not tired, to ask this thing questions, to participate in the entertainment or information it is providing. If you are going to force me to always be pushing buttons or asking questions, I’m not going to be interested.”
• The idea of interactive fiction seems like an oxymoron. While hotly debated, the idea of creating successful, intriguing, interactive narratives with multiple storylines and multiple endings may be unobtainable — technologically achievable yet creatively flat.
• While the creative community and the technology community use the same words to describe projects, the definitions of the words are different. This has derailed many a happy relationship. To avoid this, creatives and technologists need to be sure that assumptions are explained clearly and not left “assumed.”
• The computer industry has been slow to invite professional writers and other individuals from the entertainment industry into the creative process of building interactive titles (with notable exceptions such as Brøderbund and Philips): first, because they don’t know how to find each other and second because they don’t understand the value of working together as a team.
• There is no effective business model for rights licensing, royalties, distribution, pricing, music, video and film clip rights, and other reuse issues. Consequently, rights holders take a very conservative approach by not setting a precedent on licensing until they “see how it all shakes out.” No one wants to leave money on the table.
• Games, especially “shoot-em-ups,” are the hot sellers in interactive media and the principal buyers are teen-age boys. Titles for teenage girls, women, minorities or “thirty-somethings and beyond” won’t develop until there is a market, and a market for them won’t develop until there are titles. This conundrum had most participants denouncing the state of the industry, but the upshot is that while solutions are eminently desirable, no one has any clear ideas on how to achieve them.
• There is a lot more to interactivity than simply CD-ROM. Other venues are interactive: online games, theme parks, audio, informational kiosks, robots, magazines, television/cable and research.
Finally, the Creative Cafe was about networking. Meeting people who are wrestling with the same issues in creating this new form of communication. As one of the participants said: “The difficult I do right away. The impossible takes a phone call to a friend.”
(For information on the Writers Guild of America, west, contact Richard Kulberg at [310] 550-1000.)
Larry Jordan
INNOVATION, CONTENT, CREATION
Just what is it we are creating?
This session kicked off Digital World’s first-ever day devoted entirely to content — the consumable fruit of the digital convergence. An opening panel of some of the best-known names in the world of new media demonstrated products and discussed the delicate balancing act between creativity and technology.
Though many of us like to think that “content’s the thing” that will fully engage us in the digital revolution, putting the discussion in those terms is slightly disingenuous. If it weren’t for digital technology, none of the great ideas and products under development would even be conceivable.
A collaborative middle ground.>> The point is well taken that digital production tools are still in their early stages — both in terms of being affordable and easy to use. And the way that artists think about technology is also in its formative stages. As session moderator David Baron said, “Like the early film industry, content was first created by technologists — the people who invented the machines — and it shows.” As the price of technology continues to drop and tools become easier to use, he said, we’re coming closer to a “collaborative middle ground” between artists and technologists.
What was most exciting about Saturday’s “content day” was not necessarily the demonstrations themselves, most of which were representative of a new media in its infancy. Instead, the variety and imagination of what these artists are striving to create energized the entire audience, and made us all aware that after all the talk and hype of the past few years, a new creative outlet has indeed arrived.
NO ONE DREAMS HERE
Greg Roach, Hyperbole
Bucking popular thought, Greg Roach of Hyperbole (recently purchased by Media Vision) launched his discussion by rejecting out of hand the idea that interactive fiction is not worth pursuing as a genre for new media. “They said the same thing about film (being derived) from theater,” he said.
At first, film used the existing theatrical metaphors and processes — that is, a still camera pointed at a proscenium stage — until it evolved its own. Now we easily absorb the meaning of filmic punctuation such as cuts and wipes and camera angle as a language unto itself. The new media will evolve its own language, too, he said. What’s more important is how you affect people’s emotions.
Today, the concept of interactive fiction is a synthesis between video games, films and books, said Roach, launching a demo of his latest interactive fiction, called No One Dreams Here, Hyperbole’s first venture into what Roach calls “virtual cinema.”
Using a variety of media, from text (“as enhancement,” Roach said) to video, to new media concepts such as hypertext to deliver pertinent information about getting from one place to another in the story line, No One Dreams Here allows the viewer not only to navigate the environs of the fictionalized realm, but also to learn what is in each character’s mind from various points of view.
Despite Roach’s protestations to the contrary, the general attitude toward the title seemed to be “it’s neither fish nor fowl.” Although visually stunning with a clever interface, No One Dreams Here seemed to suffer from the synthesis that Roach described. Those who come to No One Dreams Here looking for a game are likely to be daunted by its density and unhappy with its lack of traditional video game “play.” Those who approach it as a film or book may be equally daunted by the clue-seeking required to maneuver around the fiction, and a little discombobulated by the variety of points of view that they can assume.
That said, it is clear that Hyperbole intends to keep gnawing away at the concept of interactive fiction until it finds something that clicks. The imagination shown in all of the company’s work to date, not just No One Dreams Here, is a good indicator of the company’s likelihood of success.
CREATING THE ‘NEW HOLLYWOOD’
Allee Willis, Willisville
Allee Willis, Grammy Award-winning songwriter and one of interactive media’s most avid supporters, expressed some disappointment that not much had changed since her well-received keynote speech at last year’s Digital World conference. At that time, she’d seen nothing even remotely resembling a mass media product.
Market before art.>> “The stuff that’s out there now is (still) boring compared to mass entertainment,” she said. “The public, mass, pop mind is moving quicker than this stuff.” Part of the problem, she said, is that the entertainment business is trying hard to figure out how to make interactive media a “market” before it has had a chance to be art. “I do not think that Old Hollywood is going to create New Hollywood,” she said. “It absolutely won’t happen.”
More concerned with how to make money on “the next lunchbox or the next movie of the week,” said Willis, these people don’t see the potential. Interactive products with pop culture appeal have to come from artists who have vision about how to make something that’s completely new. Whereas the formulas are already set for how to make a “hit” movie or a “hit” record, and you can be punished if you’re unwilling to follow the rules, today’s new media market is wide open. “That’s the turn-on today — no one can say that you’re doing it wrong.”
What’s particularly exciting to Willis about interactive media, and why she thinks it’s so incredible even though “I haven’t made a dime yet,” is its potential to allow people to experience their own creativity by participating in an interactive experience.
Imbued with confidence.>> The highest compliment to her as an artist is “pulling up to a stoplight and seeing the person in the car next to you singing your song at the top of their lungs, completely out of tune,” she said. “It’s an unbelievably fabulous experience to know you’ve imbued someone with so much self-confidence. It’s (allowing the expression of) creativity that draws the public in.”
So, said Willis, she increasingly finds herself collaborating with the technologists that can make her particular vision of interactivity happen. The fact that she is largely unfamiliar with the technology involved, she said, has proven to be more an asset than a liability. “It’s valuable to be (technically) illiterate,” she said. “They want to know what you need. And Silicon Valley is not so tainted with Hollywood to ignore the independents.”
DESIGN AND BUILD YOUR DECK
Stu Gannes, Books That Work
By far the most impressive demonstration, by audience standards, was done by Stu Gannes of Books That Work. More than half the audience members said they would buy a personal computer for their homes solely on the basis of what they could do with Gannes’s title, Design and Build Your Deck.
Distributed by Sunset Books, Gannes said Your Deck is a digital extension of the home improvement books that Sunset made its reputation upon. Designed as the first in a series, it does exactly what its title implies: it provides you with an elegant, visually delightful means of designing a custom patio or deck by taking advantage of the power of computer-aided design tools.
By using the simple point, click and drag features of a graphical user interface (the Windows version was released first, with a Macintosh version soon to follow), Your Deck allows you — with virtually no keyboard input — to create a 3D deck design, futz around with different styles, see it in blueprint mode if you’d like, then when you’re ready, compile and print out a stunningly complete materials list. In addition, it contains simple animations showing how to use certain tools and perform specific kinds of carpentry functions, and teaches a neophyte some valuable “tricks of the trade,” such as how to avoid wet rot or termites, or the best way to set a wood screw in a tight corner.
Gannes’s demo generated spontaneous applause on a few occasions. The flawless logic behind its design and the elegance of its execution seemed to reacquaint the audience with why they were interested in new media in the first place.
Gannes, formerly an editor with Time Life Books, said the genesis of the product was twofold. First, he discovered that the computers in people’s homes were often more advanced than those they had in the office; second, the company wanted to make consumer products that use the computer only for what it does well. “We think of it as ‘publishing on a digital platform’ versus ‘multimedia’,” he said. “There’s a line drawn between what is compelling versus what is entertaining.” The audience was delighted to hear that the next title in the series will help users design and plant a graden.
NEWSWEEK INTERACTIVE
Michael Rogers, Newsweek
A few months ago, when the country’s largest weekly news magazine announced it was going into the CD-ROM business, many people thought that Newsweek might be too far ahead of the curve to be successful. But Michael Rogers, managing editor of the Newsweek Interactive division, took time before his demonstration to disagree.
Rogers, for many years Newsweek’s technology correspondent, said that questions like “How can you afford to do this?” and “How much money can you make?” became less important than the lessons to be learned. “You learn to swim by swimming,” he said. With the resources of the Washington Post Company (which owns Newsweek) behind the project, he said, those working on the project realized they would have to forget what they “used to be” — i.e., a venerable print publication — and act like a startup.
One of the most daunting problems they faced, he said, was selecting the delivery platform for Newsweek Interactive. They’ve gotten a lot of flak for the decision: the Sony MMCD, a portable CD-ROM XA player with a small, monochrome screen that has not yet caught on in the consumer market. Rogers discussed the logic by which they made their selection.
The fact that the MMCD adheres to the CD-ROM XA standard (see Vol. 1, No. 5) was at first more important than the player itself. Despite the common belief that CD-ROM is less than optimal for delivering fast, high-quality multimedia products, Rogers said that XA’s status as a cross-platform delivery vehicle was the best they could do today.
“Content providers have to be platform independent in a very profound way,” he said. “They can’t count on brand names.” After the decision to go with XA, he said, they had three more basic criteria for their player:
• By 1996 or 1997, he said, they believed the “personal portable” information device would be very important to their customer base;
• To be in the living room, they’d have to learn to live with NTSC (the North American television broadcast standard); and
• It would also have to work with a high-resolution color computer monitor.
The Sony MMCD player is portable, and it has an easy hookup to NTSC and computer monitors. Voilà.
To date, Newsweek Interactive has shipped its first two titles (one on the environment and one on the baseball industry), with others expected to come out on a quarterly basis for the near term. They include video, audio and searchable text. A text archive of the past year’s issues of Newsweek is included on every disc (one of the benefits of CD-ROM’s huge storage capacity).
One of the most important editorial issues that Newsweek Interactive editors are dealing with, Rogers said, is “how to mediate between exploration and narrative.” (Though dealing with factual subjects, they seem to have the same core conflict that Greg Roach encounters with interactive fiction/cinema.)
Subscription offers are included with every MMCD player sold, and the presence of a subscriber base — however small today — will be a boon to the project. “The great thing about publishing on a regular basis is that we can incorporate feedback immediately,” Rogers said.
Newsweek Interactive is an ambitious project on many fronts, not the least of which is its foray into the uncharted waters of advertising. Right now, the advertising has its own discrete section on the CD; despite its different “look and feel” from traditional print publication ads, Rogers said that ad contracts are signed for the next few issues. Though he didn’t believe it at first, Rogers said, their studies show that people do actually look at the ads.
But even more than its print counterpart, interactive advertising is an unproved medium and its presence on the Newsweek Interactive disc is likely to cause a desire on advertisers’ parts to capitalize on its “fad” value. How long they’ll continue is a big question. One of the most valuable lessons that Rogers and his team may learn for us all is what happens when advertising no longer works as a way to subsidize the creation and distribution of sophisticated information products such as Newsweek Interactive.
Denise Caruso
THIS OLD HOUSE KITCHENS
Wendy Richmond, WGBH
WGBH, which produces one-third of all public broadcast programming, has been producing interactive titles for eight years. While most of those have been for the education market (including Interactive Nova) the company is now expanding into the consumer market with titles based on its existing library of television programs.
The first of these projects is This Old House Kitchens, based on the home improvement program “This Old House.” The title, which was shown in prototype form, was designed not as a how-to guide (à la Books That Work), but more to inspire the user to create the best kitchen possible before going to a decorator or contractor with a plan.
By using this title, WGBH believes homeowners will have a better sense of how their kitchens should look and why, and at what cost. The program is guided by Steve Thomas, who is the host of the television program.
The program begins with a questionnaire intended to establish the parameters of the redecoration project. The answers to such questions as “How long do you plan to stay in your house? How much are you able to spend? Do you have kids? Do you entertain a lot? What major activities take place in your kitchen?” are saved in a database, which becomes very useful as you navigate through the program.
For example, you may decide that a particular kitchen layout is what you are looking for, but the program, knowing your stated budget, warns you that those changes may be too expensive.
Once all of the questions have been answered, the viewer moves out of the planning section and into the design section. By simply moving images of stoves, refrigerators, sinks and windows on a floor plan (based on six basic kitchen designs), a replica of one’s own kitchen is created, which becomes the basis for any changes that are being contemplated.
This replica is more a blueprint than a real facsimile of a kitchen, but it does enable the user to view the plans from different perspectives or orientations. That is, if your image of your kitchen comes from the view from the outside door, or the entrance to the kitchen, you can set that perspective. Of course, there are measuring tools and everything is to scale. In addition, design guidelines and tips will pop up as you contemplate changes.
For example, kitchen design is based around a work triangle between the stove, the sink and the refrigerator. If your design has too much distance between these points, Steve will pop up on screen and explain what you have done wrong.
The entire program is designed to allow the user to associate freely with different design elements and ideas, while keeping in mind the constraints of budget and intended usage, before committing to the expense of hiring professionals.
It is with this in mind that the program also includes galleries of photographs of designer kitchens. These can be viewed in different contexts, such as counters, or lighting or appliances or kitchen shapes.
The user is also able to tag these photographs for future reference, with annotation for future searches such as, “I like this tile pattern” or “This is a great looking oven.” You can then search for all photographs that have ovens that you like. In addition, video clips from the television show are available at relevant points in the application.
After you have determined the physical layout of your kitchen, you can open up a photorealistic image of a kitchen counter, with appliances, cabinets and floors. Then, from an extensive collection of digital material swatches, you can see how your kitchen might look given your chosen mix of textures, colors and surfaces.
The prototype for This Old House Kitchens was developed for the CD-I platform. WGBH plans to develop the title for Mac and Windows as well as other appropriate platforms. It will sell for approximately $50, and will be released later this year.
EXPLORA
Steve Nelson, Brilliant Media
Steve Nelson is president of Brilliant Media, the San Francisco-based interactive media designer hired to put together rock star Peter Gabriel’s first interactive CD-ROM.
Debuting the disc at Digital World, Nelson described Gabriel’s Explora as “Grandma and Me for adults.” The design concept behind this program is as follows: as you explore the world of music and Peter Gabriel’s world, you find different objects, each of which allows you to do new things. Finding a backstage pass, for example, allows you backstage at a music festival. (If you find all of the objects, you get an unidentified surprise.)
In addition to things that you would expect to find on an interactive record, such as lyrics scrolling with the music and enabling random access to particular words, or music videos accompanying some of the songs, the CD-ROM is an exploration of both Gabriel’s music (from his recent album Us) and the genre known as “world music,” which Gabriel frequently incorporates into his own work.
In different parts of Explora, the user is able to witness behind-the-scenes footage of the recording of an album: listen to interpretations of the music by Gabriel; learn about some of the instruments used, including custom-made instruments (you can “play” them yourself), and join an international music festival. There are other things to do and areas to explore as well.
The Explora experience revolves around a tour of Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in England. You can navigate the grounds of this stunning facility and enter any room you wish. For example, if you enter the engineering booth, you can make your own mix of one of Gabriel’s songs, “Digging in the Dirt.” If you decide to enter the recording studio, you find that you have a chance to participate in a jam session of 25 musicians from around that world, and work with Brian Eno as your producer. You choose who plays with whom, and you can hear the results of those pairings.
Gabriel commissioned different artists to create works based on the music from “Us.” On this disc, each of those pieces is included, along with interactive elements added to the work, including animation, interviews with the artists, etc. All of this is included to give more understanding of the music to the listener, as well as allowing the listener to make deeper connections and individual interpretations of the music and lyrics.
Explora also includes a map of the world, with examples of music from different regions, and an inside look at the World of Music, Art and Dance Festival (also known as WOMAD), of which Gabriel is a producer.
Gabriel was very involved in the production of this disc. He also plays host and guide on your tour. In addition, since Gabriel owns all of his music and videos (which is unusual in the record business) the cost of producing such a disc was greatly reduced. He has recently started a new division of his music company called Real World Multimedia, which can be expected to produce more of these kinds of products.
One interesting note about this CD: In order to include all of the different elements on this disc, Nelson chose not to include the music in Red Book audio format (the standard CD-Audio spec). Instead, the music was compressed to leave more room on the disc for high-quality images and video. This flies in the face of common wisdom that good-quality music is more important than the quality of images and video; we’ll be anxious to hear from Nelson how the market responds. The disc will be released later this summer for about $50.
VOYEUR
David Riordan, POV
We wrote about Voyeur while it was still being filmed (see Vol. 2, No. 7, p. 12). At Digital World, David Riordan, creative director of POV (a Philips production studio) was able to demonstrate a nearly complete title.
The goal of POV is to “combine the best of what we know about movies and television with what we know about games,” according to Riordan. POV has three titles in production for the CD-I platform, all of which he calls “interactive movies.”
Voyeur is an adult title, approximately equivalent to an R-rated movie in theme, language and sexual situations. According to Riordan, the interactive notion of this title is to explore how much will you, the viewer, get involved in the story.
Here is the scenario: you are a voyeur. You have an apartment that overlooks the mansion of a very wealthy businessman who is contemplating entering the race for the presidency of the United States. But that is not all he is contemplating. There is infidelity, intrigue and murder. From your vantage point, you watch the story unfold.
The fiction plays out in real time; that is, there are a number of activities all going on at the same time. You may focus on one scene, and miss a critical piece of action in a different room. Or, you may switch between rooms on the fly, and enter in the middle of a conversation.
The goal is to gather enough evidence about the goings-on in the millionaire’s residence. If you feel you have enough evidence to bust the presidential candidate to be, you can call the police and turn him in. Or, you can get more involved in the story and actually try to save the person who is to be murdered.
There are 65 minutes of video and 39 audio scenes that play out behind closed venetian blinds (which helps POV maneuver around the censorship problem). There are four different murder scenarios, which launch at random. You choose how to navigate through the mansion and when and if to make a phone call to the police or the house.
A single “run through” of the movie is intended to take about 30–40 minutes (if you don’t get yourself killed or arrested first). Riordan hopes that the title will generate 30–40 hours of play by people who buy it, which appears to be a standard for a successful video game.
According to Riordan, the challenge in interactive fiction is the balance between emotion and strategy. “You need an interface that doesn’t pull you back and forth between suspended belief… and making a choice.” This indeed is the crux of the issue.
THE L.A. JOURNAL, VOL. 1
Bob Stein, The Voyager Co.>>
Bob Stein, a partner in The Voyager Company (which just moved to New York from Santa Monica), can always be expected to blow away your expectations of interactive media and create products that expand your perception of interactivity as well as your mind and emotions. He’s done so every year at Digital World, and this year’s demonstration was no exception.
Stein showed The L.A. Journal, Vol. 1, a laserdisc collection of literally hundreds of thousands of still photographs taken by Mark Brems. The question that Stein wants to answer with this disc concerns how we are going to present information that enables people to browse quickly and absorb slowly. The L.A. Journal allows the user to watch images whiz by on the screen at a full 30 images per second, and also slow it down, or freeze on particular images, for more in-depth viewing.
This title is better experienced than explained. To some, viewing still photos at 30 frames per second was beautiful; it gave others a headache. Yet Stein contends, and most in the audience agreed, that people are more able to absorb information quickly today, as witnessed by MTV and its ilk, than they used to be. This title was able to gather not just the moving images of television, but still images — each of which may itself be a work of art.
Voyager had Nikon create a camera that took half-frame images on motion picture film in the correct ratio for true motion picture viewing. That film is then processed through a scanner, a much more economical procedure than scanning individual slides. Therefore, in a single second of video, there is a “very complete sense of the space that (Brems) was in.”
As Stein put it, this is “both a coffee table book and a serious sociological study” of Los Angeles. Because he was able to include such a huge number of images, Brems was able to capture things that never make the final cut in a documentary or ordinary illustrated book. “It’s the kind of stuff that doesn’t normally make it into coffee table books because of the problems of color separations and printing (costs), but which we could do here with abandon.”
For example, in photographing a series of images of artist Keith Haring painting a mural, Brems followed him into a local hardware store and captured him buying his paints. In another series of images around Dodger Stadium, there are photographs of the press room and of the organ player.
The title includes 1,400 historical postcards and a lot of archival video. There are also three different soundtracks. (Only certain laserdisc players are able to read multiple soundtracks.) In addition to a score that was written to each image, there is a track of early Indian and Latino music, as well as poems by 14 local poets. To examine the entire collection carefully would take hundreds of hours.
For Stein, the challenge was integrating the capture device with the display medium. He wanted to discover how to create the images (or other media) for increasingly complex display technology. In this case, he wanted to know how we can experience a full-motion video, while at the same time have the capability to view individual images, each of which has its own value as distinct from the whole.
“I’m not sure we’ve solved the problem,” said Stein. “Perhaps all that’s been done is to point out that there is a problem.”
Problem or not, the Digital World audience was excited enough by this title that the majority of hands went up when asked if they would buy a laserdisc player simply to own The L.A. Journal. It is now available for $30 through Voyager or a local laserdisc retailer.
THE VIRTUAL BIOPARK
Glen Hoptman, Paramount Technology
Glen Hoptman, consulting producer to Paramount Technology Group, was unable to show the demo that he had planned. (He was unable to get permission from the publisher to show the work in public.) However, he was able to give a short presentation on The Virtual BioPark, and why object-oriented development is so significant for education and publishing as well as other applications.
The Virtual BioPark’s goal is to examine animal biology from a cross-discipline approach, involving not only science but art, history, anthropology, philosophy, etc. The developers built objects based on a series of animals, and allowed those objects to move across and interact with other objects.
Since each object has its inherent properties built in, the user is able to see the effects that the different objects have on each other. It would therefore be possible for the user to learn about the effects of different environments, including those that may be totally inappropriate and impossible to recreate naturally, on a particular animal/object.
Let’s say, for example, that we have a “polar bear” object. That object has certain properties, or characteristics, that cannot be changed. One of them may be that it needs to live in a certain climate. If you put that polar bear in the desert, you would be able to see how the polar bear reacts. More subtly, you might be able to see the effects of a warming environment on the polar bear population.
It is Hoptman’s belief that traditional academic disciplines have “hampered” our ability to understand dynamic relationships between different sciences and arts. “Information is a contextually rich set of data that we tend to take out of context,” according to Hoptman. Because of academic specialties and economic models that structure the publishing industry, there is very little room for learning in a “contextually rich” manner. “Information people are tyrants,” he said. “They are not interested in other people rearranging their work.”
This is where objects could revitalize how learning is handled. If these intelligent objects could be created and available across different applications and lessons, it would be possible to teach in a new way, without a hierarchical environment that is typical of most educational applications.
We were sorry to have missed the demo.
CRASH AND BURN AND TOTAL ECLIPSE
Judy Lange, Crystal Dynamics
Judy Lange is one of the cofounders of Crystal Dynamics, a start-up software development company that is focusing its efforts on developing games for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer. The company’s first two titles, Crash and Burn, and Total Eclipse, are both post-apocalyptic action/adventure titles that make significant use of 3DO’s fast three-dimension graphics rendering, as well as limited use of video.
Lange spoke about the future of Crystal Dynamics, which has very big goals indeed: It intends to be “the developer and publisher of CD-ROMs for 32-bit home entertainment.” Its start is the game business.
The company’s belief that the game industry is still in its nascent stages, “where Hollywood was during the Keystone Kops era,” without significant story development and with poor sound and pictures, and simplistic characters. It is placing bets that the game business is going to grow and change like Hollywood has during the past 50 years. It is to this end that the company recently hired the president of Twentieth Century Fox, Strauss Zelnick, to lead the company.
Critical to reaching this goal is character development and environment creation, which will bring increased realism to the world of games. This, however, was the single biggest issue in the discussion that followed her presentation: How can we continue to justify the violence and amoral attitudes that pervade most games today, especially as they become more realistic and life-like?
Lange promised that “we are being very cautious in what we do.” But Lange’s demonstration videos themselves did not make a very good case for character and story development, and aroused some very strong emotions as people discussed the idea that the new technologies should enable developers to strive for higher goals than simply violent action/adventure games. When asked if they would buy a 3DO player for either of Crystal Dynamics’ titles, virtually no hands went up in the audience.
We wonder if it’s possible that both Crystal Dynamics and 3DO itself have incorrectly assumed that the adolescent male teenager market may have peaked. It’s clear that Crystal Dynamics and 3DO will have to move beyond the arcade market if their medium is to expand beyond the teenage male market.
THE MATRIX
Peter Black, Xiphias
Peter Black, president of Xiphias, showed a prototype interface for movies in digital form, called The Matrix. The idea is to break out the different elements of a movie into a grid, with time moving from left to right, while top to bottom can represent individual characters, movie elements (i.e., musical numbers) or tandem points (commonly referred to by Black as “the good parts”).
Each square of the grid can be accessed with a simple click on the remote control. The determination of how the vertical axis is constructed would be up to the producers or publishers of the disc.
Black created The Matrix in order to increase his ability to get leverage in the retail sales channel. He figures that the big movie studios are going to start demanding shelf space currently held by small CD-ROM developers. If he could create a movie interface that the movie studios bought into, then he could give himself some exposure and space alongside.
The development of The Matrix began with Black’s fascination with how stories are told. The oral history of story telling, he explained to the audience, allowed listeners to interrupt the story teller with questions and reactions. Therefore, allowing the audience of a story or movie the ability to interrupt, find out what happens to that character next (or what already happened) brings the audience “closer to the core of story-telling.”
Black feels that The Matrix is an interface that would not get in the way of the movie. The grid itself would be hidden from view most of the time, popping up only over the image of the movie when called for. It also enables the audience to follow the director’s or author’s path, as well as a path of the audience’s choosing, i.e., a particular character or all of the musical numbers.
To attempt to prove his concept, Xiphias will soon publish four titles that use this interface. Two of them are home reference. There is a Kathy Smith exercise title, which can obviously work either linearly or interactively (“I’ll follow the workout” vs. “I just want to focus on legs today”).
The final new product is a “Tom Clancy-like” thriller called Soft Kill. This story has multiple characters following the same linear time line. Thus, as you watch the movie the second or third time, you may find character motivations or rationales for certain actions.
Soft Kill will be the first story created for this interface, although Black believes that any movie made can work with The Matrix. The Matrix was designed to enable interactivity by exploiting differences in perspective and character, not multiple endings. There was more than a little confusion and some skepticism about how such an interface could be retrofitted to movies already in creation, but the audience did at least seem to understand the rationale behind the interface. We’ll wait and see whether it works for Soft Kill.
‘JUMP THEY SAY’
Ty Roberts, Ion Productions
Ty Roberts is the chairman of Ion Productions, a new software publishing company. Like Brilliant Media, his company is focusing on interactive rock-’n'-roll products. Ion’s goal is to form strategic partnerships with artists from different disciplines to create new media titles, both as individual vehicles and group projects. (For a profile on Ion, see Vol. 2, No. 12, p. 8.)
Roberts demonstrated the first product from Ion, an interactive disc based on David Bowie’s single, “Jump They Say”. The title is in three parts: an interactive video studio, where you make your own music video; a musical slide show; and a virtual environment, where you can witness behind-the-scenes clips of the making of the “Jump They Say” video (MTV’s version), interviews with Bowie, and other activities. The virtual video set is the interface to all of the other facets of this title.
Making your own videos is the high point of the disc. Although Roberts could not show a fully working version (it includes technology currently being patented) he was able to show the interface and explain how it would work. In essence, the user sees five concurrent video streams running simultaneously. Using the mouse on a Macintosh computer, the “video producer” can choose which segment to run when. The technology still under wraps ensures that each clip “works” in synch with the music track.
This CD was created to be bundled with a new computer, not sold as a standalone product. Roberts views this as a “single, not an album,” although he feels that this will be a proof-of-concept title for further interactive rock-’n'-roll titles.
David Bowie collaborated on this disc, but not very directly. He was certainly apprised of the progress, and had a number of meetings and demonstrations with the producers from Ion. (According to Roberts, he was particularly interested in, and pleased by, the quality of the graphics and audio on the disc.) Bowie’s management company was also involved, allowing access to the recordings and video clips necessary to produce this title.
Roberts spoke about the need for artists, especially in music, to become more involved with the new media industry, in order both to learn from and to inspire others to create new kinds of products. He was particularly adamant about the need to create ground-breaking experiences, and to do that, the artist must be directly involved in the total creative process. “(Rick Smolan’s) Alice to Ocean proved to many photographers that there are great possibilities in the new media,” he said. “We still need that for music.”
In order to be a truly ground-breaking product, it must be radically different from anything that came before and it must be available on the new medium. If it can be done on videotape or audio CDs, it’s not worth it. As an example, Roberts cited the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, which he believes is the perfect balance of technology and art concept. The album caused people to break out of the 45-RPM mindset and accept a new platform, the LP record. It could not have been done any other way.
In a way, we are all waiting for the Sgt. Pepper of interactive media.
MYST
John Baker, Brøderbund Software
The final demonstration of the day came from John Baker, vice president of sales and marketing for Brøderbund Software, publishers of computer software for the home and school. Brøderbund is best known for Carmen Sandiego and the Living Books series.
Baker demonstrated the latest title from the people who created Cosmic Osmo and Manhole. Myst, like the previous titles, is an exploration title — an environment is created and the user navigates through it at his or her own pace, finding hidden items, etc. In Myst, however, a mystery is established in the beginning, and it is the job of the reader to solve it.
While reading a book in a library, the reader is transported to a mysterious island, where clues begin to turn up about a somewhat troubled family. It would seem that the husband and wife are trying to determine which of their sons destroyed the ancient library. All that is left are remnants of these ancient texts (although they do contain not only words, but QuickTime videos as well).
The reader must navigate the island, solving puzzles and deciphering clues, until the mystery is solved and the reader can leave the island.
The entire island, which includes five different regions, is rendered in three-dimensional graphics. There are no set paths and the user can navigate the island freely in search of clues and answers. There are sound effects and music throughout, which correspond to particular locations. (See Thomas Dolby’s presentation on p. 45 for ways that audio can be improved.)
Like Cosmic Osmo and The Manhole, one navigates through this environment by simply clicking on the mouse in the direction one wishes to go. However, also like those earlier titles, there is a lag between the click of the mouse and the change in scenery. Unfortunately, this appears to be endemic of random access on CD-ROM (the disc must find the data for the direction you wish to travel, and it could be one of many different possibilities).
While this may give the feeling of stuttering travel, the mystery and the well rendered, deeply intricate environments provide enough to keep a reader/traveler/sleuth engaged for hours. According to Baker, he had been navigating through Myst for an entire weekend, and still hadn’t seen all there was to see on the island.
David Baron
>I/O
THOUGHTS FROM DIGITAL WORLD
‘Highways’ may be the wrong metaphor
Jonathan Seybold is publisher of Digital Media and CEO of Seybold Seminars, which produces the annual Digital World conference.>>
The metaphor that everyone has been using for the communication structure of the future is “information highways.” This may have been appropriate at last year’s Digital World, when we were talking about relatively “dumb” digital cable TV systems with lots of channels that really did move programming down a wire much the same way that a car moves along the highway.
But it hit me somewhere between Bob Carberry from IBM demonstrating the applications of a gigabit network, Geoff Holmes of Time Warner explaining the incredibly ambitious prototype system his company is installing in Orlando, Larry Ellison talking about server architecture (in between his sales pitches for Oracle), and Dick Green of CableLabs describing the full-service network the cable industry is now planning to put in place. What we’re all really talking about is creating a single, giant, networked computer system that’s 100 to 1,000 times more powerful than any installed in the most advanced businesses — and (eventually) connecting the entire population to that network!
The magnitude of this task is worth pondering for a moment. There we were at Digital World, blithely discussing a world where TV settop boxes have the raw computing power of today’s top engineering workstations, and which are transparently connected (via fully switched networks capable of data transfer speeds 100 or more times greater than those of the best office systems) to massive digital file servers the likes of which we have never seen.
And we are talking about delivering this technology to every consumer that wants it and can pay for it.
When you start thinking about this network as a mass of interconnected, interactive computer systems instead of only thinking about it as a data highway, several observations spring immediately to mind.
1. It’s a daunting job.>> In the first place, thinking of these “highways” as computer systems brings home the magnitude and the difficulty of the undertaking. These systems will have a completely different character from any computer systems we have built before. They must combine unprecedented scale (in terms of numbers of users and the amount of data being handled), extraordinary robustness, exceptional security, and unprecedented ease of use. This is a pretty daunting task!
It is ridiculous to assume that the new generation of interactive services will be any different. It takes a while to get to “critical mass” (both you and the person you want to communicate with have to have access to the service), but once this happens, it is logical to expect that we will see widespread use of real-time video telephony, video “voice mail,” electronic “package delivery” of multimedia information, interactive forums and “gathering places,” and all types of virtual games in which people interact in cyberspace.
People who have been exposed to the existing, often primitive computer interactive services talk (and worry) about this kind of application all the time. But the people who are actually building the new systems seem largely oblivious to it.
2. It looks a lot like the phone system.>> With the crucial exception of the amount of data we will be moving around, the sort of super high-speed switched system everyone is now talking about bears a much stronger resemblance to the existing phone system than to the existing cable TV system.
This, of course, is why almost everyone assumed initially that it had to be built up from the phone system. It was only a couple of years ago that people began to notice that the really expensive part of the system is the physical wire — and cable already has high-bandwidth wiring in place.
What really complicates things is that cable and the phone companies currently operate under such vastly different regulatory and economic conditions. The cable people do not have to worry about things such as universal service and prohibitions on deriving revenue from the content they carry. The phone companies do.
3. The computer industry is an essential player.>> If you are going to build massive interactive computer systems, you are almost certainly going to need to involve the people who build computers and computer systems, especially those who understand the special needs of networked systems.
If you turn this around and look at it from the standpoint of the computer industry, it is instantly clear that this is the big opportunity of the coming decades. The market is likely to dwarf anything the industry has seen to date. No wonder Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Silicon Graphics, et al. are suddenly paying so much attention to it. But the rest of the computer industry has been remarkably slow to catch on.
4. The fundamental importance of open systems.>> If the computer industry has one lesson to teach the cable, telco and consumer electronics industries, it is the importance of open systems — the importance of an open, competitive market where a wide variety of companies, large and small, can compete to provide the best solution for some component of the overall system.
The experience of the computer industry should also teach us that however much one may profess to believe in open systems, no supplier will willingly give up competitive advantage. Open systems have come about because users insisted on them, not because the vendors altruistically decided they were a Good Thing.
If we think about the new systems as giant interactive computer systems it is pretty clear what we need to ensure competition:
• Standard network protocols and data formats that make it easy to connect one network to another and/or to connect all manner of devices to the network. As long as protocols and data formats are described and published, any network should be able to link to (or compete with) any other. In the end, users should not have to care whose wires (or radio waves) are carrying their data.
• A standard network interface for settop boxes. There is no need to standardize the hardware or software within the box. There can be plenty of room for competition — and innovation — here. But it is important that the interface be completely open so that anyone can compete. It is also important that there be a small number of network interfaces (preferably no more than two), so that we can create a huge nationwide (or even worldwide) market for the consumer devices that connect to the network.
• A standard network interface and command protocols for information servers. We want a system that will allow anyone to connect into the network with any size or type of server. As long as you build a server that has the proper data interfaces and understands the command protocols it must deal with, it should work on the network.
• Standard transaction protocols. In order for the system to be truly open, anyone who wishes to must be able to conduct business over it.
What is not yet clear is how we get these standards. My hope is that the network carriers (the cable, telco and wireless people) will understand that it is in their interest (as well as ours) to create open standards. They are in a position to insist on this in their dealings with the computer industry people and with each other. However, human nature (and the profit motive) being what it is, the network carrier people are going to be looking for ways to ensure that their position in all of this is as lucrative (and protected) as possible.
5. Likely products and services.>> Movies on demand, interactive catalog shopping and interactive classified ads are easy targets because they all represent very large markets that could (presumably) be better served by online interactive services than by current approaches and technology.
But if we think of what we are building as giant interactive computer systems, other obvious applications jump immediately to mind: Probably the most pervasive use of the existing interactive computer systems is person-to-person communication. The examples are all around us: electronic mail, electronic bulletin boards and information services, Minitel services in France, and, of course, the use of the current phone system.
It is ridiculous to assume that the new generation of interactive services will be any different. It takes a while to get to “critical mass” (both you and the person you want to communicate with have to have access to the service), but once this happens, it is logical to expect that we will see widespread use of real-time video telephony, video “voice mail,” electronic “package delivery” of multimedia information, interactive forums and “gathering places,” and all types of virtual games in which people interact in cyberspace.
People who have been exposed to the existing, often primitive computer interactive services talk (and worry) about this kind of application all the time. But the people who are actually building the new systems seem largely oblivious to it.
INFORMATION HIGHWAYS VS. COMPUTER SYSTEMS
The “information highway” is probably still a useful metaphor. It reminds us that we are setting out to build an infrastructure that will be used to “transport” all manner of goods and services — one which is almost certain to transform the way we are informed and entertained, and the way we do business.
However, it is vitally important to remind ourselves that what we are really going to be building are really not so much “highways” as interactive computer systems of a truly awesome magnitude. We are embarking on a massive effort to put an ever-increasing proportion of our population “online.” This is going to take decades. It is going to involve wrestling with profound social, commercial, technical and human issues. But it looks as if it really is going to happen. As far as I am concerned, the best news out of this year’s Digital World conference was the clear overriding concern that we pay attention to what we are doing and do our best to do it right.
Jonathan Seybold
>EVENTS
MILIA
Jan. 15–18, Cannes, France
Midem Organization
(212) 689-4220, fax (212) 689-4348
The publishing community is no longer an island unto itself. As digital technologies change the way printed materials are published and used, publishers are finding they must forge alliances with the computer, communications and entertainment industries in order to create new business models.
The first MILIA, or the International Illustrated Book & New Media Publishing Market, hopes to provide a marketplace where publishers involved in all aspects of new media, from rights acquisition to interactive multimedia production, can mingle and shop for new partners, new ideas and new business strategies.
This event takes shape in general sessions, specialized workshops and an exhibition center. Conference sessions are intended to present a diverse range of new media case studies. These cases will present different approaches and experiences, and offer possible new media solutions.
The event will also break down into “smaller conferences,” or workshops of 50–300 people. A sampling of the potential topics to be explored in these workshops include U.S., Japanese and European electronic publishing market characteristics and comparisons, adapting titles for foreign markets, licensing for multimedia, issues surrounding the digitization of images, and “the myth of content.”
The exhibition hall will feature more than 100 companies, such as Tate Gallery Publications, Turner Broadcasting Group, Chronicle Books, Time Warner Interactive Group, Virgin Games, Apple Computer, IBM and Philips Interactive Media International.
Show sponsors have high hopes and great ambitions for the event: they say they are hoping to attract an international audience of 3,000 to 3,500 attendees. Organizers are targeting media professionals including illustrated book publishers, distributors, interactive multimedia producers, film, television and video producers, photographic agencies, and visual and electronic rights holders.
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