• SILICON GRAPHICS TASTES THE FUTURE
As digital media develops into technologies to be reckoned with, virtually every hardware and software company is making some degree of effort to learn the intricacies of computing with pictures and sound. Those most dedicated to the task are trying very hard to cover quickly the ground that Silicon Graphics Inc., a computer company based in Mountain View, CA, broke a decade ago. Will the next generation of digital tv make SGI the company that can do it all?
• FCC CHAIRMAN SIKES SPEAKS OF CHANGE
During the past year, the Federal Communications Commission has presided over many controversial decisions, including ones to allow the regional Bell Operating Companies into information services and the provision of “video dial tone.” The FCC’s most radical moves, spearheaded by Chairman Alfred Sikes, have shocked many industry observers. But after an interview with Sikes, one recalls a wry sense of humor, a deep respect for technology, and an unwavering belief that deregulation and competition are the critical elements in making the digital world a reality.
• NEWTON, APPLE’S FIRST PDA, ARRIVES
“Newton technology” for Personal Digital Assistants, or pdas, is certainly the most significant piece of system software out of Apple Computer since the Macintosh was shipped in 1984.
Newtonian-type devices are obviously the “next wave” of computing. On the very same day as Apple’s unveiling of Newton at a nightclub near the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Tandy Corp. announced that it was working with Casio Computer, the Japanese consumer electronics firm, to create a family of “personal information processors.”
• I/O
John Coate of 101 Online discusses the intricacies of “Innkeeping in Cyberspace.”
• CES
Opening the show to consumers maybe wasn’t a great idea, but Sony, Philips and AT&T made a good showing.
• RADIUS LAUNCHES VIDEOVISION
Radius debuts its first products based on the Touchstone technology it licensed from Apple Computer.
• TW TAPS ‘NEW MEDIA’ DIRECTOR
Joe Papanek, former ME of Sports Illustrated, gets “best job in the company” at Time Warner.
• BRIEFS
Digital Telephony; Avid Sponsors Multi-Vendor Architecture; Northern Telecom’s Videoconferencing Products Debut; Fly the Friendly Skies; Truevision-RasterOps; AT&T and Zenith Transmit HD; Multimedia to Go; Viacom Recruits Info, Proposals; TV Guide Moves onto Cable; Motorola-UPS Sign For First Nationwide Mobile Data Network
• EVENTS
SIGGRAPH ‘92 will focus on global, interactive visual communication.
SILICON GRAPHICS TASTES THE FUTURE
Will the next generation of digital TV make SGI the company that can do it all?/
As the movement toward digital technology becomes more pronounced in all industries, those groups who understand it best — computer hardware and software companies — are actively involved in everything from developing consumer electronics devices to providing “big iron” computing muscle for digital broadcast of movies.
But, generally speaking, the expertise in most personal computer companies of the day, such as Microsoft and Apple Computer, still lies in deep knowledge of the computational requirements for productivity applications such as databases, spreadsheets and word processors. Behemoths like IBM and Digital Equipment are experienced in corporate, or enterprise, computing and understand industrial-strength systems with power and intelligence enough to run manufacturing plants and move vast stores of digital information around a network.
VETERANS IN ‘VISUAL COMPUTING’
As digital media and multimedia develop into technologies to be reckoned with, virtually every hardware and software company is making some effort to learn the intricacies of computing with pictures and sound. Those most dedicated to the task are trying very hard to cover quickly the ground that Silicon Graphics Inc., a computer company based in Mountain View, CA, broke a decade ago. Manipulating and maneuvering 3d graphics, video, audio and other unwieldy data types is imbedded in SGI’s corporate DNA.
SGI was founded (and is still chaired) by former Stanford University computer science professor Jim Clark, who came to Stanford from the University of Utah, a hotbed of computer graphics, in 1974. (Other alums include Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull, Apple Fellow Alan Kay and Jim Blinn, now of Cal Tech and formerly of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.)
Financed by a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project to create design tools that would keep the U.S. ahead of the Japanese in semiconductor design, Clark took his expertise in 3d and built what are still the cornerstone of SGI’s products, the Geometry Engine and the Image Engine, for performing the special calculations required to generate 3d graphics in real time.
[Historical note: That very same DARPA project also spawned Sun Microsystems and MIPS Computer Systems. MIPS is in the process of merging with SGI, and both companies are cutthroat competitors with Sun.]
Clark cherry-picked an enormously talented start-up team from watching for the brightest students in various graduate and Ph.D. programs at Stanford University. Then, in 1982, they left to found SGI and together shot the fledgling company to the top of the computer graphics market selling what it calls “visual computing,” and have already leveraged its powerful 3d graphics machines out of the bowels of science and engineering labs into the glamorous world of Hollywood’s special-effects studios.
YEN FOR THE LOW END
For some years now, Clark’s yen for the low end of the market has successfully shoved SGI’s formidable graphics capabilities into smaller and cheaper computers. As the price of high-powered workstations plummets industry-wide, SGI believes its facility with visual computing can finally deliver a useful rendition of digital media into the workplace and beyond.
It’s even official: In April, the company issued a press release announcing that the field of digital media was a “core technology” for the company.
Had SGI made this strategy decision two years ago, it might have a great deal more leverage than it has today. Now even everyone is on the digital media bandwagon; even the traditionally stodgy Digital Equipment is heavily hyping a “multimedia” strategy. Nonetheless, Clark believes that SGI still has the opportunity to be a significant player in everything from delivery of digital television and video programming, via its high-end systems, to providing the quintessential digital media authoring system (via its mid- to low-range workstations), to building the guts of a TV-set-top cable decoder box.
The mirage of ubiquity. Anything is possible, and certainly SGI is in a very good position technically to accomplish these heady goals. But no matter how unique its technical abilities, SGI — like all hardware and software companies, at this point — is in danger of being duped by the mirage of digital ubiquity.
Digital ubiquity presupposes that any company knowing its way around the computer industry automatically has it made in the emerging digital world. But any company that hopes to play in that world — even a company filled with brilliant technologists — has to meditate long and hard upon the fact that it is a dangerous undertaking to move outside of one’s area of expertise.
They’re scratching at the door. In SGI’s case, the risk is two-fold: It has plenty of formidable foes already scratching at the door, hungry both for SGI’s present business and for these new digital media markets it hopes to conquer.
In the future, for example, it may soon become a thorn in SGI’s paw that Bruce Tognazzini, a noted Apple user interface designer, recently defected to workstation competitor Sun Microsystems, followed closely by Bud Tribble, former chief software designer at Next. The folks at Sun are obviously planning a concerted move toward the low end, possibly even the consumer market.
Can SGI do it? Can a company that started as a provider of mega-powerful equipment to the high priests of computer graphics move its wares into the larger world? Given sufficient humility and innate intelligence to search out good partners who know the things SGI doesn’t, it is indeed possible. But as Ringo says, “It don’t come easy” — and that advice goes for all computing companies trying to segue their talents into a world verging on digital.
A FORMIDABLE ARRAY
SGI’s customer base is the envy of the computer business, which is well aware that everyone from Walt Disney Studios to Industrial Light & Magic to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to Boeing Corp. is willing to pony up significant dollars for SGI’s 3d graphics computers. The company’s formidable product line ranges in price from $250,000 for a SkyWriter “virtual reality generator” to the new Iris Indigo, selling like hotcakes in its entry configuration for $7,995.
The Personal Iris, announced nearly four years ago, was the best-selling SGI workstation in the company’s history until the Iris Indigo. “It was our first mainstream product, and it doubled the size of SGI as a company,” says Jim White of SGI’s Entry Systems Division. Starting at $12,000, the Personal Iris was the first machine to bring SGI’s graphics capabilities to individual users for a price that didn’t cause apoplexy.
Surprised by success. Despite the smashing success of Personal Iris, it is the new Iris Indigo that embodies the changing soul of SGI. Even SGI’s ultra-practical president, Ed McCracken, who by most accounts was at first a little dubious about the concept of a “digital media” machine for SGI’s customers, was surprised by the success of the little purple box, which he claims is already making a profit.
“It’s weird looking, very strange and different,” says McCracken. “But we’ve sold three times more units than we expected to. I was a believer, but still I’m surprised.”
INDIGO BREAKS TRADITION
Indigo broke a lot of tradition for SGI. For one thing, the company is doing a land-office business selling Indigos by direct mail order — something that not even Apple Computer or Sun Microsystems, two of SGI’s competitors for low-end systems, do today.
Second, the company is working hard to snare software developers for the machine. And third, Indigo is the first truly general-purpose system from a company best known for its work in a highly specialized niche of computing, which certainly doesn’t hurt when you’re trying to attract a wider variety of software developers to your platform.
‘Virtual 24.’ Indigo can also boast a rather significant technical breakthrough. Most high-end graphics systems, especially 3d systems, require high-quality 24-bit imaging. Though Indigo appears to provide 24-bit graphics, it does not. SGI’s engineers came up with a system called “Virtual 24″ that simulates 24-bit, 3d graphics using a far less expensive 8-bit graphics board.
This is a not a trivial accomplishment. Typically 8-bit systems can’t do 3d graphics, because they require what’s called double-buffering, which cuts the number of color choices in half. Computer-graphics math says your eight bits would then become four bits, which translates to a mere 16 colors. It is impossible to shade even a single 3d object using only 16 colors.
“Virtual 24 really made a big difference” for Indigo, says White. For example, SGI customer and developer Alias Research, maker of high-end graphics software for the pre-press industry, was really skeptical originally and didn’t believe Indigo would be worth it for the company or its customers. Since then, however, it has released “a bunch” of software on Indigo and is “shocked at the image quality.”
Falling short of perfection. Despite its technical wizardry and come-hither pricing, Indigo isn’t perfect. Though the company has reasons for doing so, it’s slightly ludicrous to read SGI’s promotional materials — “a true digital media-capable system is designed from the ground up for the express purpose of allowing the user easily and simultaneously to work with 3d graphics, video, still images, animation, audio and text … it takes a total integration approach” — then look at the Indigo spec sheet and realize that it isn’t shipped with either a video board or a cd-rom drive.
The IndigoVideo board is a $2,500 option. The cd-rom XA drive is another $1,200. In fact, no storage device is standard. Because of its built-in networking, which means that many of SGI’s existing customers will already have all the necessary software, even a system disk containing the system’s bundled software costs extra.
For now, says SGI, that’s okay. Most of its customers are still from its primary market, engineers and scientists, who want the flexibility of configuring a workstation the way they want it. They say they’ll change the packaging as customers request it.
But as Indigo moves out of familiar markets into terrain covered by the personal computers of the world, Silicon Graphics had better heed the “plug-and-play” call. Such ease of use was Apple’s strong suit right from the start, and if SGI wants some of Apple’s market, it will have to provide at least a modicum of that kind of functionality.
NOW ENTERING THE MAINSTREAM
Despite its noticeable slant toward its existing customer base of software engineers, great efforts are being made to “mainstream” Indigo.
Dave Larson, SGI’s director of software, says a Digital Media Developer Kit will be shipped in July for $495. Carol Peters, former project manager for the Indigo, has shifted jobs so that she is devoted full-time to attracting developers to the platform. So far, more than 20 developers — including WaveFront, Diaquest, Alias Research, Avid Technology and Time Arts — have announced or are shipping software that takes advantage of Indigo’s digital media functionality.
Also on the boards are deals to port AutoCAD to the Indigo, as well as Adobe Illustrator.
A recent developer conference in Boulder, CO, was “incredibly exciting,” says Jeff Barco, who works for Peters. A 14-year veteran of the PC industry, Barco says it’s been very many years since he’s seen developers so fired up to bring a technology to the mainstream.
Indigo QuickTime. A recent deal with Apple Computer will allow suitably equipped, media-capable SGI computers to read and write QuickTime movies. SGI is doing the development on the QT project, which when finished will be shipped free with SGI’s Movie Player and Movie Maker software. To date, Indigo is the only platform that will be licensed to create as well as play QT movies. Many of SGI’s existing customers are thrilled — for them, it will be the first time to allow people without access to high-end SGI machines to see what’s being produced on them.
One way SGI hopes to draw developers is by the sheer influence of the SGI product line. SGI claims the largest binary-compatible line in the industry now, which means Indigo software can run without modification on all of SGI’s computers. Vice versa is a little trickier since audio isn’t standard on SGI’s high-end hardware — a funny table-twist, since features from high-end computers usually migrate to the low end. This time, says Larson, “the features are migrating up.”
Free tools and a new development environment. In July, SGI says it will begin bundling with Indigo (and soon, for all SGI’s platforms) a set of “end user enablers” called the Iris Media Mosaic. These enablers allow users to take advantage of the machine’s digital media capabilities as soon as they buy it.
It’s an impressive bundle, including a sophisticated audio control panel, sound editor and filer, cd and digital audio tape (dat) managers, a video control panel for Indigo Video hardware, a movie maker and player, and Showcase, a powerful presentation package.
“No one ships a presentation package with their systems,” says Larson. “That’s worth a few hundred dollars right there. And there’s hundreds to thousands of dollars more of value that gets thrown in free.”
Also shipped with the system is Workspace, a graphical user interface to SGI’s Irix operating system; Iris Explorer, which uses object technology to snap together a mini-3d application; and a disc called 4D Gifts — “a bunch of unsupported, great little applications that the engineers put together,” says Entry Systems’ White.
A recent deal with Avid may make Indigo an even better deal for digital media developers (for details, see Briefs, p. 21). In short, Avid and SGI are working together on a standard platform called the Open Media Framework (OMF), which allows users in the post-production environment to move digital media data easily back and forth between different tools and computers — a task that is a nightmare in today’s world of wildly incompatible computers and professional editing equipment.
OMF will be ported to Indigo first, via joint effort between the two companies, and it will be SGI’s multimedia development environment for digital media applications, according to Avid’s marketing director, Joe Ricotta. If OMF catches on, SGI hopes that digital media developers will abandon their present development machine of choice — today, the Macintosh — for Indigo, without fear of rendering useless all their previous work.
“People think of SGI as an exotic brand of computer, but it’s less exotic than people realize,” says Larson. “Because of our history, things like the cable business will be an opportunity for us as well, but there is plenty of in-between stuff too.”
JIM CLARK’S ‘TELECOMPUTER’ OF TOMORROW
Indeed, many visionaries in both the consumer electronics and computer worlds have waxed poetic about the coming convergence between televisions and computers. They visualize digital, interactive textbooks delivered to the TV, information retrieval from online databases and libraries, games that link many players in different locations, and the capability to perform telephony functions through this same box — i.e., message retrieval, video telephones and “multimedia mail.”
SGI’s Clark has been beating this drum for a while himself, though with somewhat limited success inside his own company. He’s not alone in his plight. Despite highly publicized moves by such pacesetters as Viacom (see Briefs, p. 23), digital television is not yet here. Those in charge of the bottom line at companies like SGI, with scary competition like Sun Microsystems breathing down its neck, aren’t exactly jumping at the chance to invest millions of dollars in technology that’s not arrived.
A $200 core unit. But Clark absolutely, deeply believes that if SGI acts now, within three years, it can ship a high-powered central processing unit for $200 that acts as the core of a set-top device enabled with SGI’s 3d capabilities. The equivalent of today’s cable box decoder, it would sit at the end of the cable or phone network and deliver output to a cathode ray tube (CRT) screen or digital TV.
“Today’s TVs have tuners in them that are totally unnecessary,” says Clark. “There’s potential for a new industry here that would build such a CRT.” In an attempt to rally his industry around such an effort, Clark wrote a paper called “A TeleComputer” for next month’s Siggraph conference (see Events, p. 28), in which he outlined the essential qualities of such a module.
FOUR BASIC TECHNOLOGIES
What such a device would require, he says, is four basic technologies: digital video, digital audio, and the decoupling of both transmission/reception and resolution. This means a digital TV’s set-top decoder box must be smart enough to figure out how to display a digital TV frame or datastream, no matter what kind of screen was attached to it. (This quality is also known as device and/or resolution independence.) Such decoupling is good for many reasons, including easy adoption and display of high-definition TV signals when they arrive.
At the core of the “teleprocessor,” as Clark calls it, would be a very high-speed (500 million instructions per second) RISC, or reduced instruction set, central processing unit, a real-time operating system (which he doesn’t feel yet exists), high-density memory, very high bandwidth (6.4 gigabits) networking for input and output, and advanced 3d graphics capabilities. Encryption and decryption capabilities, he says, are also essential components to allow consumers to pay for services.
To keep costs as low as possible, Clark believes it may be necessary to circumvent intermediate parts suppliers. In fact, he says, “success might even require that a single company be able to integrate almost everything, from semiconductor fabrication to the telecomputer itself.” This is no surprise, considering the company’s recent merger with its microprocessor supplier, MIPS Computer Systems (more on MIPS, below).
‘THERE’S MONEY TO BE MADE’
Though its main role will be delivery of entertainment — most likely candidates are digital movies and
television programs — Clark believes that such a device would start a rush of interest in the next wave of interactive games. “People always ask whether the next generation TV really needs 3D,” he says. “Some say no. But digital video alone may not be enough. You may need games. You may want to get virtual reality into the home without the head-mounted displays.”
Clark contends there is a “huge market” for a realistic, multiparticipatory, interactive flight simulator. “Flight simulators are a compelling thing. You can call a buddy and play the game, have a little contest, gang up on other people. I’d like to supply the game software,” he says with a smile. “There’s money to be made there.”
Sluggish activity level. Clark is very hot on building this device, but he admits that at SGI, the scale of activity for the project on a scale of one to 10 is “about three.” President McCracken says that’s partially because SGI never plans things more than 18 months in advance. “It’s one way we stay close to what’s happening in the industry,” he says. So Clark is out on the rialto, pushing hard to get partners lined up behind the concept. One surprising snag he’s hit in the consumer electronics world is some heel-dragging on the part of some large companies that, as he says, “don’t particularly want to see analog video go away.”
A $10 BILLION SERVER BUSINESS
Though Clark’s focus today is mostly on the consumers of the near future, he’s also interested in where SGI’s high-end computers can fit into the loop for delivering information to those set-top decoder boxes.
He believes that SGI’s slant toward visual computing makes it a natural solution for delivery of picture information, no matter whether the delivery vehicle is phone lines, cable or direct-broadcast satellite. Though he declined to give specifics publicly about what companies he’s talking to about such potential solutions, let’s just say he is pushing ahead.
‘Client-server’ works for TV, too. Clark says it’s an easy map from the “client-server” model of today’s computer networks to what the cable and phone companies will need from a hardware provider. “The client in the consumer environment is simply the digital television in the home,” he says. “The server is a bunch of stuff at the headend or the local exchange. Properly mutated, this is simply a multimedia computing system.”
He believes such servers represent “a $10 billion business opportunity” for SGI. “Look at the local loops,” he says of the phone companies. “They’ll each need $4 million worth of gear to do this. And how many local loops are there?”
Though Clark doesn’t see SGI doing the installations itself, he sees a land office business for a system integrator in putting such digital television systems together for media delivery companies. And speaking of integration, Clark also believes that such a scenario, carried to its logical extreme, might show that compatibility between the client — i.e., the digital television — and the server at the headend/local loop might just be important.
WHERE MIPS FITS IN
Voilˆ! Enter the MIPS Computer Systems merger with SGI. MIPS, long plagued by bad management and good technology, is the designer and seller of the RISC processors upon which SGI’s entire product line is based. SGI decided in early spring to “merge” with MIPS — resulting in a $200 million stock swap.
As a result, SGI has more than a few months of rough going as it figures out how to merge MIPS Computer Systems into its operation. So, despite its success story with Indigo, the company is cash-poor at a time when it most needs to whip up support around its newfound religion of digital media.
Tactical value. Both companies’ stock dropped as a result of the announcement, so the jury is still out on whether the merger will be a success. But both Clark and McCracken agree that in the long run MIPS will be a great asset to SGI.
“There is great strategic and tactical value of owning state-of-the-art technology,” says the pragmatic
McCracken. “Half the value for us is simply in the microprocessor itself and access to the technology.” And Clark obviously sees MIPS chips at the heart of every one of his future set-top digital decoders, a massive potential market if he can pull it off.
WHAT A SANDBOX!
As in the case of Bill Gates and Microsoft, never underestimate the potential of a company that has bright, curious and ambitious engineers at the helm. Though Clark is often painted as a kind of wild dreamer, his ideas for SGI’s future are certainly not far-fetched in a world where cable TV researchers are actively and publicly searching for ways to deliver digital television.
All but one of Clark’s hand-picked professors and graduate students from the early days are still at SGI. They’ve obviously found a sandbox that’s more fun to play in than anywhere else. If Clark and McCracken can provide them with the proper direction in terms of technical problems that need to be solved, and sufficient resources to do the job, their track record to date makes a pretty good case for success.
After all, not many companies could realistically consider supplying equipment and expertise for everyone from the cable headend to the film, video and TV post-production houses to the interactive multimedia producer and finally, to the consumer’s own TV set.
BUT FIRST, A REALITY CHECK
But they do have some prejudices to overcome, and some realities to face.
First, and absolutely mission-critical, SGI has to figure out a way to move past its deep identification with the science and technical communities. To abandon its core customers in the most lucrative market going — companies that need complex problems solved, and damn the price tag — would indeed be foolish. But the economics and customer needs of the cable business on one end, and the consumer business on the other are radically different, and SGI cannot expect them to adapt to the way SGI does business.
Second, the company must pay more than lip-service to making digital media easy to use and incorporate into products. It is vital that the company adopt a single, standard user interface for application developers. “Developers are begging for it, but it’s hard to get the company to do it,” says one SGI employee. This is foolish and counterproductive.
As producers are finding out with no small degree of pain, it is far from easy to develop a multimedia title. It is also insanely expensive. Potentially, SGI could do much to win developers if it wasted no time in standardizing a user interface (ˆ la Macintosh) and development environment, and put together a standard plug-and-play Indigo for those solo artist-types who will really be the ones to put digital media on the map as a new entertainment and/or communications medium.
Leverage what you’ve got. Next, SGI cannot bank on its stellar reputation in the film production industry to buy it anything special in the distribution world. But it should find a way to leverage its existing, enormous cachet in the entertainment business. For example, if it really wants to be a supplier of head-end equipment for digital television, SGI ought to get its foot in the door before any big deals go down. There are more than a few opportunities to get in there and muck around with the problems that need to be solved.
Clark’s instincts are that by the end of 1992, everyone will be whipped to such a pitch about digital television that there will be lots of investment money available. But there’s an awful lot going on right now, today, in the subterranean grottos of cross-industry deal making. SGI can’t afford to wait any longer if Clark really wants to move down from the rarified air of SGI’s elite market and muck around in the world at large.
Denise Caruso
THE CHAIRMAN SPEAKS
FCC Chairman Alfred Sikes explains a year of massive change
In a brief lull before yet another rubber-chicken conference lunch in Chicago, Federal Communications Commission chairman Alfred Sikes spent an hour with Digital Media editor Denise Caruso, discussing the massive changes taking place in the telecommunications industry that is his purview.
Sikes has arguably the most exciting job in the country today — laying the foundation for a global, interconnected network of digital technologies. He’s certainly not wasting any time. In the past year, the FCC has presided over moving the regional Bell Operating Companies into information services, provided for a “video dial tone,” pushed hard on a standard for high-definition television (hdtv), and allocated spectrum to interactive television services, and much more.
Though over the past year the Commission’s most radical moves — spearheaded by Sikes — shocked many industry observers, one walks away from an interview with Al Sikes recalling a wry sense of humor, a deep respect for the power of technology, and an unwavering belief that deregulation and competition are the critical elements to making the digital world a reality.
Digital Media: Based on everything that’s happened in the past year — deregulation of the Bell Operating Companies, allowing their entry into information services, so-called video dial tone, progress toward digital hdtv — it appears that you believe demand for video entertainment in the home will finance the installation of a broadband fiber network in the United States. Is that a fair statement?
Alfred Sikes: Well, entertainment generally has been a supply-demand leader. For better or for worse, the American public seems to have an insatiable appetite for entertainment. If you say to telephone companies, for example, “You can’t get into the video carriage of entertainment,” then you obviously deny a large revenue stream which might help in the modernization of the network.
We just don’t think that it makes a lot of sense to say, especially as we go into a digital world, that you can carry this, but you can’t carry that. So, we believe that saying to the telephone companies, “You can’t get into video carriage” would be a mistake.
DM: It looks as if what you’re trying to do is find a way for the U.S. to be able to modernize the infrastructure and find a way to pay for it at the same time. Is that why it was important to you to let the regional Bell Operating Companies get into information services?
Sikes: Yes, essentially we now have technologies of enormous promise, which are either not deployed at all or deployed in a limited way, or are deployed in private networks but not in public networks. The question then becomes, how do you optimize the potential for the deployment of those technologies, whether it is fiber, whether it is the use of digital compression techniques to enlarge existing media, whether it is additional computer functionalities or whatever? How do you, without government funding, stimulate the universal deployment of those technologies?
Now, our experience in the U.S. has been that with competitive markets comes a race to meet demand and also to stimulate, create, find demand. And we find also that sometimes with that competitive need companies are willing to take a loss in the short term for the potential in the long term.
DM: Do you believe that that can happen with the phone company?
Sikes: AT&T, for example, wrote off a huge amount of copper plant because it felt it must meet the competition, by say, Sprint, which was going to an all-fiber and all-digital network. So our view isn’t that the phone company should or shouldn’t do well in any given market. Our view is that the phone company should be allowed to compete, but that the obligation that goes with that latitude will be the obligation of having an open platform, which is available to those who want to use those communications links for whatever services they want to perform.
DM: Are you talking about Open Network Architecture? [ONA, or Open Network Architecture, is a network design that requires phone companies to unbundle and provide equal access to all the network's basic functions, such as call-waiting or caller party ID. ONA lets enhanced service providers package these features together and resell them at the same tariff that the phone company must charge itself to sell them.]
Sikes: Yes.
DM: Do you think that ONA and opening up the network like that also opens up competition in the local loop?
Sikes: Sure, I mean that’s what we’re at right now. We’re looking at various ways that alternative providers, sometimes called competitive providers, can interconnect with a local network — that is, with the subscribers, with the telephone users — so they can get into the local and inter-city telephone business.
DM: How do we make sure that these alternative networks are as reliable as we’ve been accustomed to over the years? We’ve seen more phone network failures in the past two years than I can remember in my entire life. Is that a function of opening up long distance to competition, or is it a function of technology that’s in the process of changing?
Sikes: We’ve been working on the issue of reliability globally — and so I have been able to look into the Belgium market, Swiss market, the Swedes’ market, the Japanese and other markets — and you find that in a number of different parts of the world where these modern technologies are being introduced or widely deployed that there have been some transitional difficulties. So what we have done, both through the International Telecommunication Union and then domestically at the FCC (although we brought Mexico and Canada in as well), is we have set up a reliability forum. A number of committees are developing within that forum that are going to address a whole series of questions. Now, some of the questions are decidedly low-tech, that is, how can we to the greatest possible degree keep people from severing cables, you know, when they’re using backhoes.
DM: A nontrivial matter actually.
Sikes: Well, it’s not trivial. It is a very serious matter, whether it may be sharks in the underseas
cable environment .• . .
DM: … It seems so silly, but it’s obvious.
Sikes: But then you’re looking at questions like, the introduction of out-of-band signaling systems, and what new challenges Open Network Architecture poses. Now, from my standpoint there is no question that we have to move forward, that the promises are too great to stand still.
But as we move forward, as we introduce a higher level of competition, as we go to a more pluralistic vendor environment, as we go to a point where it is at least possible to concentrate more traffic — it may not be intelligent to do it, but it is possible to do it — and a whole range of these kind of developments, how do we make sure that they not undermine the reliability of the network so we’re acting on that front? I’m optimistic that we can do the job.
DM: If you really wanted to be paranoid, just sit and think about what people could actually do — can actually do today — to an all-digital network that’s not properly protected. Security issues become very interesting when you’re moving software around on a network, which is essentially what we’re going to be doing pretty much full time from here on.
Sikes: I don’t think there’s much doubt that we have greater challenges. You know, in retrospect one might liken the situation to the Wright brothers in the kind of simple questions they were dealing with, versus the complicated questions on the launch of Endeavor and the effort to recapture the Intelset satellite as the Endeavor and the satellite are spinning around the earth at 17,000 miles an hour. The challenges are orders of magnitude greater, but we going to have to address them. There are going to be some difficulties, but I think we can address them successfully.
DM: Let’s talk about the RBOCs and information services. The Association of Newspaper Publishers of America is furious and the cable industry is maybe not as furious, but also worried. How do we make sure that the RBOCs don’t exercise undue power in that situation? Is the FCC working on what kind of regulatory safeguards have to be there?
Sikes: We’re not working on it, the regulatory safeguards are in place. And it is quite feasible to keep them from discriminating, and it is quite feasible to keep them from cross-subsidizing, and we will do both. Will they be done perfectly? Is human endeavor perfect? But, what you have is you’ve got a battle between industries and you’ve got industries wanting to stop potential competition that develops through new technologies. I think to stand still because particular industries are no longer as secure as they once were would be a mistake.
On the other hand, to not understand that the telephone companies have significant market power, and that therefore, there is a need to have a regulatory system that safeguards people from that market power, would be similarly naive. Phone companies have been involved in information services certainly for as long as either of us can remember.
Take the Yellow Pages, for example. If you tell them that they’ve got to continue to print, in a city like Chicago, a book that’s about the size of a large Webster’s dictionary, and then cut down trees to do that and then, throw those books in landfills — as it has become increasingly possible to provide that kind of data service electronically — I don’t think it makes sense to do that. And yet from ANPA’s standpoint, that’s precisely the service they are most concerned about. Because they see that service as potentially coming head-to-head with their classified advertising service. Now, ANPA does appropriately look to the FCC to provide safeguards, and we will do that.
DM: Let’s take ANPA out of it. I’m more concerned about smaller companies that want to provide information services, people that might not be visible to the FCC. It doesn’t seem like it would be very helpful to have their recourse be to file a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the phone company in order to get access to communication lines for information services. What is the grievance procedure now?
Sikes: Well, it depends a little bit on what the question is, but with regard to most questions, they can come to the FCC. Obviously the courts are available as well. You know, filing complaints and pursuing them is often somewhat costly. I wish that weren’t so, but it is.
But for the most part, the little companies will be, in my view, the ones to profit most tremendously if you have a video dial tone with essentially an infinite network potential.
Because then you could turn Digital Media into a national provider of services by simply providing the information to those who want to use whatever networks you might develop. Today, however, if you want to use a broadband network, if you want to, say, take what you do and turn it into a video network, you may not have a common carrier platform to which you are assured access.
DM: That leads into a question about common carriage. At the recent Computers, Freedom & Privacy conference in Washington, there was a conversation about open access to the networks. One panelist said what he was worried about regarding the phone company and information services was not services that could be provided by common carriage, but enhanced services. It is the enhanced services that the phone company can decide that they won’t bill for. What’s the difference between an enhanced service and something that should be provided via common carriage?
Sikes: “Common carriage” is typically a legal phrase that goes across a very broad spectrum of potential services, including everything from voice mail, which for the most part is not a content service, all the way to, say, 976, and as I recall my numerology, that’s the combination of digits used for Dial-a-Porn.
DM: Was it just for Dial-a-Porn?
Sikes: I don’t know. I don’t have a problem with my memory, I just haven’t used it. Now GTE got indicted a couple of years ago for its distribution of a couple of what were generally called “blue” cable channels. They had X-rated material, and they got indicted for distributing pornography. The phone companies have been picketed by organizations who objected to their phone lines being used for the distribution of the sex chat lines.
That sets up a difficult question. Phone companies don’t like to be indicted, that’s for damn sure, and they don’t like to be picketed either. So, it strikes me that what we’re going to find, is we’re going to find a legal testing of how restrictive phone companies can be. That’s going to raise this probably to both the judicial and Congressional levels, where in the final analysis there will be decisions made.
In the Dial-a-Porn area, for example, the Congress said, and the court upheld, that Dial-a-Porn services don’t have to be billed by the telephone company, that what is billed to customers doesn’t have to be collected by the telephone company. And additionally the telephone company can choose to not provide those services except to those who ask for them. As I said, that was the law passed by the Congress and upheld by the courts.
As we get into these new technologies and all of the hundreds and thousands of applications that will result, we’re going to have some difficult questions to work through.
DM: I’m not fond of dial-up pornography either. However, there is a thing called the First Amendment here that I get concerned about in many areas other than pornography.
Sikes: But what’s happening more and more is these information service providers are using credit cards — MasterCard, Visa and others — for purposes of payment and billing and collection.
DM: Well, I’ll just go ahead and argue the other side of my own argument and say that the phone company may find that it has to accept some services that it might not otherwise want to accept, if it wants to stay competitive. Cable doesn’t seem to have a problem with finding a way to deal with controversial subject matter such as pornography.
That aside, let’s talk about the cellular data networks and other alternative networks such as cable and satellite, and whether they will be granted common carrier status.
Sikes: I don’t think they will seek common carrier status.
DM: Because it’s so regulated?
Sikes: That’s right. The common carrier must by law hold itself out to like customers on the same terms and conditions, at the same rates. For the most part companies want to avoid having their contractual and pricing policies be determined by governments. What we have essentially said is that where a particular business is monopolized, then it is appropriate that that business operate on a common carrier basis. But where competitive providers have emerged and the markets have become effectively competitive, then we think competition and not the regulatory agency should determine price and services and things like that.
DM: Because it’s assumed that there will be competition for local phone services, you don’t think there will come a point where government has to step in and say, “Cable, cellular data, satellites — you all are charging too much money and we need to have some equal access provided to people who can’t pay your exorbitant prices”?
Sikes: I don’t see an environment where these companies can charge too much money.
DM: You think the competition is just going to take care of it?
Sikes: I think competition is going to, that’s right. It’s going to keep price very close to cost.
DM: How long before broadband network communications become a commodity in terms of pricing? Do you think that could happen by the turn of the century?
Sikes: Well, it depends on what kind of broadband networks you’re talking about. If you’re talking about domestic satellite broadband networks, those are very competitive right now. If you’re talking about the subscriber loop and its universal availability in a broadband configuration, I would say that is going to be somewhat after the turn of the century.
DM: And what about in between, what will happen with cable?
Sikes: If municipalities won’t perform as protectors of monopoly status, then I’m convinced the cable market will become competitive. There are enough dollars in that market; it’s growing particularly as pay-for-view becomes more attractive, as advertisers seek out cable as a means of reaching a targeted audience. I think that cable can be a competitive market. It tends to be noncompetitive because municipalities are protecting the monopoly.
DM: What would you like to see the United States look like in the year 2000?
Sikes: I believe strongly that if markets are freed and if we do our work to make sure they stay free, there will be enormous strides in unforeseen ways. I believe that the American public wants certain things, even though they might not be articulating what they want in easily determined and measured ways, and that these technologies and [most importantly] the applications are going to serve those wants.
I think the American public, at least a portion of it, wants to be able to get in touch or to be reached regardless of where they are, and I think we are going to get there in not all that many years.
I think the American public would like choice in how they get their video. For the most part, over land or in wire-based manner, they don’t have choice today. They can do it only through the cable company. I think that choice spreads across the full spectrum of services. Choice will be one of the real signal characteristics of where we’re going.
The third thing the public wants is help with this blizzard of information. It wants to be able to pinpoint and get much more quickly the answer or the movie or whatever it is they’re seeking, and I think the applications people in particular will help the public get that.
And then I could talk about speed. I think there will be the capability to get things much more quickly. I see an enormous opportunity for the rural areas, just as Walmart stores used its [satellite] network to help create the fastest-growing retail empire. And rural America, as these technologies are more and more universally deployed, has enormous opportunity to get out of the disadvantages of isolation. So those are some of the things I see ahead.
APPLE’S ‘NEWTON’ IS HERE
This little Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree
Those who are bone-weary of the relentless hype that our industries subject us to on a daily basis find it difficult to accept when something, anything, actually pierces our hides and evokes a positive response.
That explains our somewhat grudging praise of Apple Computer’s new Newton technology for Personal Digital Assistants, which really is quite remarkable.
It is not the beginning of a revolution, as Apple chairman John Sculley claims. What happened in the USSR is a revolution. What’s happening in Thailand is a revolution. Newton technology is software for little hand-held computers, so let’s keep things in perspective.
THE NEXT WAVE
However, Newtonian devices are obviously the “next wave” of computing, and none of the big players are wasting any time getting involved. On the very same day as Apple’s unveiling of Newton at a nightclub near the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Tandy Corp. announced that it was working with Casio Computer, the Japanese consumer electronics firm, to create a family of “Personal Information Processors” or pips (see sidebar).
Although Tandy is adamant that its pips are significantly different in intent from Apple’s PDAs, it doesn’t look like it from where we sit. Apple’s and Tandy’s “personal product” lines are likely to have the same distinguishing characteristics that their computers do now.
Apple’s PDAs, which it is codeveloping with Sharp Electronics, are likely to be designed to the teeth, full of features and priced for the well-heeled yuppie. Tandy’s will appeal to more middle-of-the-road users, willing to swap some style for brute utility — the same kinds of users who buy IBM PC clones. And Microsoft, which has declared its intention to enter this market but has not yet made an announcement, is likely to be somewhere in-between.
THE BIGGEST DEAL SINCE MACINTOSH
Newton technology is certainly the most significant piece of system software out of Apple Computer since the Macintosh in 1984. For those who were under a rock and might have missed the media blitz, here’s a quick rundown of what Apple announced at CES.
Straddling the fence. Newton is the name of a technology set that Apple will build into an entire product line of what it calls “Personal Digital Assistants,” or PDAs. Made possible by rapid advancements in computer power and miniaturization, the PDA straddles the fence that has traditionally separated consumer electronics devices from computers.
The first Newton Apple showed in Chicago, driven by a powerful RISC processor chip, fits neatly in the palm of the hand and is operated using an unattached stylus on a flat-panel display. The best description so far goes to MacWeek, which called the Newton device “a cross between a communicator from the original ‘Star Trek’ television series and a black Porsche 928″ (see photo).
Point-and-squirt. The word “communicator” isn’t used lightly. Newton was designed to allow absolutely simple connectivity between Newton owners, as Apple says, “in meetings, on the street corner, or during lunch.” One favorite feature is the capability for two Newton users to “point-and-squirt” their business cards at each other on the street using the device’s built-in wireless communications capabilities.
A combination of what’s being called “Enhanced LocalTalk” and a collaboration architecture called “Instant Network” will facilitate simple connections and re-connections to existing networks in much the same way that a cellular phone operates. Newton devices will, depending on how they’re configured, be able to fax letters, check electronic mail, or link to satellite news services, as well as hook up to standard computer networks.
RECOGNIZING ‘DATA SOUP’
What’s equally remarkable about Newton is the Newton operating system. Four years in development, it’s designed to facilitate what Apple’s Michael Tchao, Newton manager for product marketing, calls “the inverse of print architecture — instead of concentrating on the output [which is what we've been doing with computers for years], you’re concentrating on input.”
Integral is Newton’s “data soup”-style architecture, which provides flexible views into a free-form database. The concept is to take all the little pieces of data we acquire in a day — phone numbers, maps to meetings, messages — and let Newton organize them. It then can make decisions about what to do with that information.
So if you were to jot down a message from your answering machine that said, “Call Dana re: Feather River, weekend of July 4,” Newton is designed to automatically bring up Dana’s phone number from your address book, and simultaneously display the July calendar to see if you’re free on the 4th.
Snap-in recognizers. Probably its most significant feature is what’s called a “recognizer architecture,” part of Newton’s object-based software technology that allows a device to be configured for a wide variety of applications based on what kinds of pen input it needs to recognize.
For example, a single Newton device might use one company’s cursive handwriting recognizer module, another company’s music recognizer, yet another’s graphics recognizer. “The more recognizers you put in, the more things you can recognize simultaneously,” says Tchao. Though not a function that can be configured by users, Newton supports the recognizers in a hierarchy that’s constructed by the application developer.
In other words, in an application that requires writing in text most of the time, but could also draw on the screen, a software developer would likely “turn up” the intensity of the handwriting recognizer.
That way, if when drawing what appeared to be a triangle — which could be either the letter “A” or an actual symbol — the software would be more likely to recognize it as a letter. If a composer were using Newton to write music, the application would “turn up” the music recognizer so something looking like the letter “d” would be more likely recognized as a musical note.
Motorola, Pacific Bell, Random House, SkyTel Corporation and Traveling Software made announcements in conjunction with Apple to support Newton technology. Apple expects that outside vendor products will focus on communications, content and compatibility with existing systems and will not try to cram desktop applications into the Newton form factors and architecture.
The first Newton product from Apple will be available in English-language versions in early 1993. Newton-based products from Sharp Corp. are also expected to be available in the same time frame.
THE APPLE DROPS
Two immediate downsides of Newton, which aren’t likely to change before launch, are its cost and its battery life — which are too much and too little, respectively. For those who get infuriated with PowerBooks because they can’t get any work done on the damned things before the battery runs out, Sculley’s statement that Apple “hopes for” eight hours of battery life for a Newton is chilling news.
If Apple is working with Sharp, why can’t it get its hands on some of the technology that keeps the Sharp Wizard’s battery running forever, relatively speaking? If the idea behind this device is to make it unobtrusive to the user, and make it completely portable, and totally reliable for all that very important personal information that we cannot do without even for a day, the idea that we have to carry a spare battery to use it outside for more than eight hours is not just daunting. It’s absurd. Consumers don’t care how hard it is to power a backlit screen, they simply don’t.
A little matter of cost. Then there’s cost. Apple is saying the first Newton will cost “less than $1,000,” and even if less-than means $700 that’s simply too much for the consumer-type people that Apple’s marketing seems aimed at. After all, these days you can buy a fairly high-powered PC clone for that kind of money. A high-end Sharp Wizard is actually pushing the envelope at more than $300.
At $700, Newton does seem, as Tandy suggests, far more targeted toward existing Macintosh or computer owners than it does at a whole new market segment. There’s nothing wrong with doing that — in fact, it’s probably a fairly savvy business move — but Apple does itself a disservice by leading the industry (especially the cutthroat consumer electronics industry) to believe that ordinary non-computer-using folks are going to pony up the cost of a nice, big color TV set for such a device.
At least at first, until consumers understand why products like Newton are worth paying for, it might be good to aim the technology at the people who are going to buy it, instead of at the people Apple hopes will buy it. Like the original Newton — that’s Sir Isaac — someone may need to get bonked on the head with this apple before they get the message.
Denise Caruso
TANDY BUILDS A PIP
Though Tandy is holding its cards closely to the chest, it has also announced an upcoming line of what it calls Personal Information Processors, or PIPs.
It’s no surprise that Tandy seems to be a bit allergic to adopting the PDA nomenclature that Apple coined for such devices, and that Microsoft has since adopted. It was also quite purposeful that Tandy’s pip announcement was made on the same day as Apple’s.
“Apple does a masterful job of stirring up the market, evangelizing and making sure the world understands their point of view and perspective,” says Howard Elias, Tandy vice president. “We thought it was very important that this emerging technology and market not be solely defined by Apple — especially since some of the things they’re talking about in terms of size, features, price, we believe are all too much, too big and too expensive for the consumer market.”
A COMPUTER PERSPECTIVE
Though Elias says it’s too early to talk about specific kinds of pip functionality — he doesn’t expect to ship devices until 1993 — the largest consumer electronics company in the U.S. immediately began differentiating itself from Newton.
“When we heard that Apple’s battery life was eight hours, we knew that we were going after a different niche,” says Ed Juge, director of marketing for Tandy. “That sounded to us like the perspective of a computer company. We’re going at it from the view of a consumer electronics company — eight hours isn’t going to cut it, and neither is an $800 or $900 price tag.”
Tandy is teaming with Japan-based Casio, which today owns more than 50 percent of the worldwide market in personal organizers, and award-winning system software makers GeoWorks of Berkeley, CA.
Pip applications are under development by Palm Computing’s Jeff Hawkins, former vice president of research at Grid Systems (now owned by Tandy), the pioneer in pen-based computing.
Denise Caruso
CES: NOT PERFECT, BUT PROGRESSING
Old or new, there’s always something digital to marvel at
Although Apple’s Newton technology stole the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago for most people interested in something new and different (see story, p. 13), there were other events and trends worth noting for digital media watchers.
One is the fact that the much-vaunted “first year open to consumers” feature of the show did not seem to make very many exhibitors happy. Many said they were planning to pack up and leave before the show was opened to civilians, as opposed to dealers, on Saturday and Sunday.
The great unwashed 80 bazillion. One of the many problems with letting customers on the show floor, said vendors, is that showing them what’s coming may only serve to keep them from buying what’s on the shelves now. “I came here to get buyers, not talk to 80 bazillion people from the street,” was the basic drift.
Here are some highlights.
SONY REAFFIRMS COMMITMENT TO CD TECHNOLOGY
Sony Electronic Publishing Company, the division of Sony Software that was set up in April of last year to exploit digital media opportunities, has spent the last few weeks pushing cd-rom publishing on many fronts. The latest efforts demonstrate Sony’s faith in CD-ROMs as a viable delivery medium for a number of different applications and, more importantly, its faith in the potential marketplace for cd-rom purchases.
During the last two weeks of May, SEPC entered into a number of agreements that it hopes will convince consumers that cd-rom is a viable product category, and simultaneously give SEPC consumer mindshare as a leading publisher of cd-rom titles.
Tie-ins to Sony artists and properties. First, it has promised to create a line of video games for the new Sega Mega cd platform, the cd extension to the Sega Genesis game system. The titles under development include tie-ins to established Sony artists and properties, including theatrical release movies such as Dracula: The Untold Story and Batman Returns. In the Sega booth at CES, the company showed prototypes of the coming Batman game, complete with video sequences. While this was just for demonstration purposes, Sony says it plans to produce live-action as well as music videos for upcoming game titles.
In addition to Sega, Sony has its own cd-based game machine due out next year, called the Play Station. The Play Station was developed with Nintendo, which has its own cd-rom extension to the 16-bit Nintendo Entertainment System in the works. Sony Electronic Publishing will be developing titles for all of these game systems.
The ‘Affiliated Label’ program. Although as usual Sony did not have a presence on the CES show floor, it used its Sony Gallery store in downtown Chicago to launch its “Affiliated Label” program. Under this program, Sony will act as manufacturer, marketer and distributor of various third-party titles. The Affiliated Label program will encompass all three major personal computer formats: dos, Macintosh and mpc.
Titles from companies such as Voyager, Maxwell Electronic Publishing and EBook will be distributed to 4,700 retail outlets, including record and book stores, consumer electronics and computer outlets as well as the more traditional software houses.
“The key part is getting titles into the hands of consumers,” says SEPC president Olaf Olafsson. “So far it hasn’t been a consumer product. It’s been a technology, a niche business. There are more parts manuals on cd-rom than consumer titles.”
Everybody’s happy. It’s also a great deal for producers, at least the ones who were part of the announcement. Independents have spent far too much time and money trying to get the market interested in their wares to keep fighting the battle alone. “We get a flat percentage of the retail price — Sony presses the disc, packages it, and ships it,” said one publisher. “We’re very pleased. It’s a good opportunity for us to partner with a well-known name in the industry.”
Some have said that Sony had no choice but to sponsor such a program — it has too much invested in cd-rom technology to not push it forward. A SEPC division, the Digital Audio Disc Corp. of Terre Haute, IN, is the world’s largest manufacturer of CDs, with 45 percent of the market.
On the hardware side, Sony claims 40 percent of the world market for cd-rom drives, and is a leading vendor of cd Audio as well. While there are still only 1.5 million cd-rom drives installed today, Olafsson claims there will be 2.5 million units in the U.S. alone by the end of 1992, and SEPC’s Robert Headrick says the installed base will rocket to 6.9 million by the end of 1995.
IS CD-I COMING AROUND?
Another surprise of the show was Philips and cd-i. Though consumer response and critical reaction to Compact Disc-Interactive has been underwhelming to date, the company’s absolute dedication to the technology may be paying off.
Not only did Philips publicly demonstrate a working prototype of its full-screen, full-motion digital video module (which it claims will be in stores before Christmas, for “below $200″), but it also showed the prototype of a brand-new and very chic portable cd-i player designed in Japan by Marantz that will be on the market by the end of September. The mpeg decoder chip used in the module is made by C-Cube Microsystems of Milpitas, CA (see Vol. 1, No. 12,
p. 11, for details).
100 titles by year-end. Philips Interactive Media president Bernie Luskin is touting cd-i as “the new Gutenberg,” a new publishing format for everything from full-motion video to electronic books and video games. He says that 100 titles will be shipped for cd-i by the end of 1992 (which will give Sony a run for its money), with “several hundred” on the shelves during 1993.
Philips is also working on a deal with GTE to connect cd-i into cable television systems, and claims it will have a commercial real-time encoding system — encoding being the big bottleneck for digital video titles developers — in 1993.
What’s interesting is that Philips can now fit 72 minutes of VHS-quality, full-screen, full-motion, color video with cd-quality stereo sound (not true Red Book cd audio) on a single compact disc. According to Gaston Bastiaens, director of Philips Interactive Media Systems, this could have real significance for interactive music video and other projects.
Movies on disc? “This will strongly enhance the interactivity of cd-i titles,” he says. “And we are working on developing interactive movies with several studios in this country.” Though Bastiaens refused to state directly that Philips was working on replacing the vcr or the laserdisc player by putting digital movies on cd, he did say that in 1993 the company would be offering a five-disc cd-i carousel that would obviate the problems with length of movie vs. amount of space on a cd. With the carousel, he said, “you would hardly see any break” between disc changes.
“It’s not a new VCR,” he says of CD-I “It’s a movie media system that can play all these things,” including Photo CD discs, CD audio discs and CD-I and CD-ROM XA titles.
Remarkably, Bastiaens claims that Philips is not terribly disappointed with sales of CD-I so far — though by all outside accounts, they’ve been abysmal. “Compared with the first year of CD audio sales, the first year isn’t as good as we wanted, but pretty close,” he says. “By Christmas, when there are more titles and promotion, we’ll pick up sales. ”
PHONES ARE GETTING SMARTER
Michael Grisham, the original inventor of the smart phone and now manager of strategic planning for AT&T’s smart phone systems, was on the show floor to demonstrate the Smart Phone 2100 prototype. It looks very much like a standard, PBX-style telephone except that the Smart Phone 2100 has a liquid-crystal display replacing the traditional keypad that allows customers to touch-screen their way to a whole range of special services that we all hope will eventually be offered by phone.
Some of the services will include banking, bill paying, a “big discount” catalog, and a low-price travel service, according to Grisham. Package deals will be the way to sell the phones, he says. For example, a customer would pay $100 up front and $19.95 a month for access to the services and for the telephone, which they’d own. Grisham says most of the early sales will be package deals like this, but a standalone Smart Phone is likely to cost $400-500.
Although services that consumers actually want are critical to the success of the new generation of smart phones, the software technology that Grisham and team have delivered is very interesting.
The phone is driven by a 16-bit microcontroller (not from either Intel or Motorola) that manages memory, a modem and an object-oriented message set. That message set consists of text objects, choice objects and entry objects — each containing the methods that determine the way they interact with each other — and service providers decide how to snap them together into a user interface.
The Smart Phone software can create macro commands. It can password-protect any button, no matter where it is in the hierarchy. It can download directory assistance information and automatically set up an autodial button for you, if you’d like. If the caller has allowed his or her Caller ID to be received, the Smart Phone can create an autodial for you to return the phone call.
AMAZING RESPONSE
In addition to the welcome news that AT&T has improved the new Video Phone 2500 a bit — it now displays video at 10 frames per second, rather than six (full motion is 30 fps) — (see Vol. 1, No. 9) the big surprise of the show was that on the first day the phone was available, AT&T took $30 million worth of orders. That’s 20,000 phones at the Video Phone 2500’s retail price of $1,500 each.
Despite the rather disconcerting quality of the video picture, it sounds like something may be afoot here — something about video teleconferencing as a way to cut travel budgets, perhaps? A way to get up close and personal with remote colleagues? Or what? Certainly AT&T is breaking ground with a videophone that runs on standard phone lines, and many, many other companies are working on different ways to address this potentially massive market.
David Baron, Denise Caruso
RADIUS LAUNCHES VIDEOVISION
Desktop video publishing product has Apple as competitor
At this week’s Digital World Conference, Radius will launch its first products based on the Touchstone technology it licensed from Apple Computer earlier this year (see Vol. 1, No. 5). Apple, however, made its own announcement last month, with a technology that competes directly with certain aspects of the Radius product.
The Radius VideoVision product line is geared toward the “desktop video publishing market.” VideoVision includes a 24-bit video interface card, an external audio and video input strip, and software.
Users are able to take an external video source, create QuickTime movies, integrate those movies into presentations using third-party software, and display those presentations on a regular TV monitor or record them on any VDR.
Other vendors have also targeted this area in the past year, including E-Machines, Macromedia, DiVA, Sony and others, with products that facilitate the creation of multimedia presentations for “printing” to video tape.
CONVOLUTION FILTERING
The technology includes a filtering process, called convolution, that allows computer information to be displayed on video monitors without flickering. (When a single pixel line is displayed on a television monitor, it will flicker, or vibrate, rapidly. This is due to the video technology that replaces only half of the frame, every other horizontal line at the resolution of a single pixel, every sixtieth of a second.)
VideoVision also provides invisible translation of the different international video standards. NTSC, PAL and SECAM are all accepted as input, and NTSC and PAL are both output options. The software will automatically recognize the incoming video signal and display it appropriately.
The VideoVision card supports the new H-Bus (“H” stands for high performance) that was part of the original Touchstone technology. H-Bus provides an alternate high-speed data pathway between multiple processing cards, avoiding the slower NuBus architecture of the Mac. While the NuBus normally provides data transfer at anywhere between 2 mb and 30 mb per second (depending on the application, system overhead, buffering, other bus traffic, etc.), the H-Bus allows transfer at 60 mb/sec. This kind of bandwidth is crucial for future video applications, which cannot be supported by the NuBus.
Radius says VideoVision will be shipped in the second week of July, at a list price less than $2,000. It will also be bundled with DiVA’s VideoShop and Macromedia’s Action for $2,399.
APPLE’S GOT ITS OWN
Apple announced its own high-speed data transfer architecture last month, called QuickRing. QuickRing and Touchstone were developed by Apple in parallel, until the company decided to focus on one single technology. It then licensed Touchstone to Radius for development and marketing.
QuickRing is a series of specifications that dictate board-to-board communications, including a data transfer system and data management controllers. The technology will provide data transfer rates of up to 200 mb/sec., along with data controller chips, designed and manufactured by National Semiconductor, and an “interconnect” system designed by Beta Phase, a Menlo Park, CA, company that specializes in high-speed data connection systems for supercomputers. The connector system will be manufactured by Beta Phase and Molex, of Lisle, IL.
The QuickRing technology differs from that of VideoVision in that the data travels in a “ring,” with individual input and output data nodes. This allows simultaneous input and output to different boards (thus effectively doubling data transfer rates). The Radius technology is a “bus,” which means that all of the data is traveling in one single direction only. In addition, VideoVision is a specialized technology for pixel data; it only works for video. QuickRing is data-type independent — it will be able to process any type of high-bandwidth data.
The Apple QuickRing technology will not be available to developers until early 1993, which means the first products, i.e., cards that utilize the technology, will probably not appear for a year after that. Ed Colligan, Radius general manager for Mac products, downplayed the competitive aspect of the two technologies, and stated that Radius is “working very closely with Apple, and QuickRing will be very compatible with H-Bus products and vice versa.”
David Baron
TIME WARNER TAPS NEW MEDIA DIRECTOR
Former ME of Sports Illustrated has ‘best job in company’
Time Warner, the world’s largest media and entertainment company, has been great entertainment for media writers this past year.
The 1990 merger of the two companies had yet to produce any of the ballyhooed synergies that management claimed was worth the $11 billion debt it incurred to do the deal. The recession caused ad sales in the magazine division to plummet, which resulted in a 10 percent workforce reduction last fall.
Shortly thereafter, the annual report revealed that management had made a killing in the merger: Co-CEO Steve Ross (former Warner Communications chief) pulled down more than $70 million in compensation, most of it in stock. Then it was leaked that Ross was being treated for prostate cancer. But that didn’t stop him from executing — from his sickbed at home! — the ouster of his co-CEO Nick Nicholas (formerly of Time Inc.).
STABILITY AND A CATALYST FOR ACTION
Stability seems to have come in the past months in the form of the new co-CEO, Gerald Levin. Levin made his name at the old Time in the 1970s by figuring out that unused communications satellite capacity could be used to beam movies to local cable companies in a little venture called Home Box Office. His vision of media undoubtedly caused him to be tapped by Ross and the Board to take the company into the millennium.
A significant shift. Within a few weeks after Levin’s elevation, several new deals were announced to be in the works that were intended to bring Time Warner together with technology companies like Toshiba and IBM. But one announcement, lost in the speculation of office-politics-as-usual-at-Time, has been overlooked and perhaps could be the most significant one for the company and for multimedia.
John Papanek, 40, the managing editor of Sports Illustrated (SI), was, on Levin’s orders, made an offer he couldn’t refuse. On April 24 he was appointed to the new post of director of new media at Time. He was replaced at SI by his predecessor, Mark Mulvoy, who had since become publisher but returned to perform both jobs.
Some saw it as a demotion of Papanek, but he was anything but grieving in his new 34th floor office on the corporate floor of the Time-Life Building, where he was still struggling to link up his new multimedia equipment. “I’ve got the best job in the company,” he said.
‘EXTENDING THE REACH’ INTO NEW FORMS
That job is to develop a strategy for integrating the company’s magazines and books with new technologies. “We needed to get someone into this job right away,” said Time Inc. president Reg Brack. “In John, we’ve got a guy who’s really passionate about these new technologies and who has the journalistic skills and creative flair to make it all happen. John’s mission will be to take our magazines and extend their reach into other media forms.”
“Any technology that you can think of that represents a potential crossover for print is John’s charge,” said Jason McManus, editor-in-chief of all the Time Inc. magazines, to whom Papanek jointly reports with Brack.
He’s all ears. Papanek’s first task was described by McManus as a “tour of the horizon,” which Papanek interprets as developing a near- and long-term strategy for all the company’s print properties, a task that he thinks will take him several months. In his first week on the job he has heard from everyone “from wacko game developers to major hardware companies. So far, I’m just listening,” he says.
Papanek has a healthy skepticism of new media’s promise. Although he clearly loves playing with his new PowerBook 170, he is not buying into it being a book, let alone a magazine.
A LONG WAY TO GO
“I was reading Jurassic Park (a Voyager Expanded Book) on it in bed last night. It was wonderful, the screen was bright and my wife was able to fall asleep,” he says. “But then the next morning on the way to work, I noticed everybody reading the Daily News, for which they only paid 40 cents, which they probably read one-sixth of, and which they threw away when finished.” Hefting his PowerBook in one hand and a tablet of yellow legal paper in the other, he adds, “We’ve got a long way yet to go.”
But don’t interpret this as a Luddite’s view. It is worth noting that Papanek was the youngest managing editor (the top post at Time Inc. magazines) among editorial luminaries at the company and is very comfortable with new technologies. Prior to his appointment at SI, he was the founding editor of SI for Kids, a three-year old start-up for 8- to 13-year-olds. He created it with Macs at a time when the company was still wedded to an Atex-fronted centralized mainframe pagination system.
Editorially, the new magazine won accolades for the way it involved young readers with bind-ins, contests and puzzles — a print equivalent of interactivity, then a novel idea at Time Inc. magazines.
More collaboration with Warner New Media. Papanek is expected to be the magazines’ point man with Warner New Media. Only two products have come to market as a result of joint ventures between WNM and the old Time Inc. A hastily produced cd-rom from Time on the Gulf War won praise for its sprint to the market (six weeks from the final master) but it was clumsy, slow and lacking the panache of its print equivalent.
Another disk on the last solar eclipse, “The View from Earth,” done in conjunction with a Time-Life Books series on the heavens, has just been released. A cd-rom on the Berlin Wall has been delayed for nearly a year but is now slated to be out next month, as is Sports Illustrated Almanac, a reference guide for trivia nuts. The synergies between WNM and Time Inc. have been slow to materialize and have failed to ignite the market.
AWESOME OPPORTUNITIES
“Over the past couple of years they would come through here looking for someone to dance with,” Papanek admits. “But there were few takers.” He says that a combination of budget restraints and the editors’ lack of time and interest prevented much more collaboration. Once he has his plan in place later this year, that should change.
And the opportunities are awesome. The content resources at Papanek’s disposal are some of the richest in all media: Time, Fortune, Life, SI, Money, People, Entertainment Weekly, Martha Stewart Living, Health and Parenting. The company also owns Sunset and the magazines of Southern Progress Corp., which include Southern Living. Time-Life Books is the largest publisher of continuity series with editions worldwide. Little, Brown & Co., Bullfinch Press and Warner Books are their trade titles. The company also holds a 21.9 percent interest in CNN.
Sean Callahan
DIGITAL TELEPHONY BILL CHANGES COURSE
In early June, key computer industry executives met with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to discuss the controversial Digital Telephony proposal that the FBI would like to submit to Congress.
The proposal, which in short would require any maker of telephony equipment — and in this day and age, that includes everything from computer modems to telephones — to redesign their systems so the FBI could continue to wiretap digital phone lines in the same way it has in the past with analog technology.
Since there is a strong trend toward the digitization and transmission over telephone lines of all information, from telephone conversations to financial data, the proposal created an uproar in the electronics community.
Among other things, the original proposal put certification of telephony equipment under the jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission. Since then, it has been revised. Certification now would come under the auspices of the U.S. Attorney General’s office. Though the basic thrust remains the same, some public policy watchers think the change is a hopeful one since the Judiciary Committee tends to raise more questions about technology issues than most government bodies.
Despite severe industry reaction, it’s not likely the proposal will be scrapped altogether. It may, however, be scaled back considerably in the near term, with continuing discussions between FBI and industry about how to meet the FBI’s needs without unduly cramping free enterprise in a world where commerce is conducted over wires.
Companies represented on the industry side include Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Lotus, Apple Computer, Digital Equipment and IBM.
AVID SPONSORS MULTI-VENDOR OPEN PLATFORM ARCHITECTURE
Four years after starting work on its all-digital Media Composer system for video and audio editing, Avid Technology of Burlington, MA, realized that the layers of software it had written to connect disparate computer platforms and video peripherals had a value of its own.
With the support of significant partners — a veritable who’s who of video post-production companies — it decided to launch what it calls the Open Media Framework (OMF) initiative to provide a standard development platform for import and export of digital media types.
Joe Ricotta, director of product marketing for Avid, says there was a tremendous amount of interest in the system from customers who work in video, post-production and film at the recent meeting of the National Association of Broadcasters.
“The idea is, if you want to interchange compositions and data, here’s the format,” he says. “If you create something on your system — a computer or an application or a black box like Quantel — and if you support OMF, then you can exchange your OMF output with anyone else who supports the same format.”
Ricotta says OMF is comprised of two parts: one is the engine, the actual layers of software that allow the manipulation of digital media. The other is a set of interface standards, the OMF Interchange Format, that deals with both media data and compositions.
The engine is a combination player/editor/database, while the interchange format provides a way for any vendor — from SGI to Chyron’s character generator — to “understand” either the compositions, or data, or both, of other OMF-based systems.
OMF supporters already include Alias Research, C-Cube Microsystems, Fairlight, Kodak, Chyron, Grass Valley, New England Digital, Silicon Graphics and Waveform. SGI will be porting OMF to Indigo, in fact, to mesh with its digital media libraries.
Avid plans a three-phase introduction for OMF capabilities. Phase 1 (already completed) will be direct import of digital media between Media Composer and products from multiple vendors. Phase 2 (summer 1992) is the publication of OMF Interchange standards for exchange of digital media without requiring multiple intermediate translations and conversions. And Phase 3, planned for fall of 1992, will be introduction of the OMF Engine, a common software platform for “professional quality” media integration providing open, published interfaces.
NORTHERN TELECOM’S VIDEOCONFERENCING PRODUCTS DEBUT
Entering what may turn out to be the sleeper multimedia market of the decade, Northern Telecom recently announced a new family of desktop videoconferencing products for desktop computers.
Visit Video and Visit Voice, available for both Macintosh and Windows, will be released sometime after October 1992.
Visit Video, which will range in price from $2,900 to $3,500, includes software, a video circuit board, camera and communications hardware to access both public and private telephone networks. However, it does not operate over standard twisted-pair telephone lines; it requires either 56-kilobit-per-second digital service or ISDN1-capable lines.
Visit Voice, which provides telephone management via the computer, sells alone for $99. However, a package including telephone/computer interface hardware is between $299 and $600, depending on network connectivity.
Northern Telecom is also working on developing interoperability for video teleconferencing between Mac and Windows computers. Full-screen sharing and file-transfer should be available by early 1993, but the company says some degree of video capabilities between the two systems will likely be ready by the fourth quarter of 1992.
FLY THE FRIENDLY SKIES WITH PAUL AND FRED
Cast your mind back a couple of months, when it was being widely reported in a number of trade magazines that SkyPix chairman Fred Greenberg was in a heap of trouble on a number of legal fronts. Rumor at the time was that Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, a heavy investor in SkyPix via his Sky King Investment Corp., was maneuvering to take over the company.
SkyPix, you’ll recall, is developing a sophisticated digital video delivery system and subscriber service, hopefully to compete with cable, using direct broadcast satellite. Although the company claimed in a recent story that it will have “several hundred” receivers ready by “end of June, beginning of July,” in fact the company has lost the option of the Hughes Communications’ SBS-6 satellite that it paid several hundred million dollars to maintain.
The following press releases are printed verbatim.
“May 29, 1992
“Sky King Resigns General Partnership Interest in SkyPix
“Bellevue — Sky King Investment Corporation, a corporation owned by Paul G. Allen, announced today that it has exchanged its general partnership interest in SkyPix Joint Venture, L.P., for a limited partnership interest in SkyPix. Sky King’s resignation results from its lack of confidence in current SkyPix management, and, in particular serious concerns regarding current investment offerings, and comes after consultation with counsel. As a result, Sky King is no longer a general partner of SkyPix.
“William Savoy, Sky King’s designated member of the management committee of SkyPix, also resigned today.”
Reporting next, we have a response from SkyPix:
“SkyPix Statement re: Sky King Investment Corp. release, May 29, 1992, ‘Sky King Resigns General Partnership Interest in SkyPix’
“The exchange of general partnership interest for limited partnership interest in SkyPix by Sky King Investment Corporation which is owned by Paul Allen, its representative William Savoy’s resignation from the Management Committee and the statements subsequently released to the press about the management is just another attempt in a long campaign waged to shake the confidence of SkyPix investors so that Mr. Allen’s group would appear acceptable as management of SkyPix. This is the latest in a series of public and private maneuvers taken to seize control of the incredible technology SkyPix has developed.
“We greatly appreciated Mr. Allen’s guidance, direction and assistance on the Management Committee. Through his representative Mr. Savoy, Sky King actively participated in our money raising efforts, an area in which he was intimately and expertly involved.
“Now that he has retreated to the position of Limited Partner and given up the operational and financial responsibility to which he so vocally aspired earlier, we will continue to move forward and realize the returns that SkyPix, and the revolutionary broadcasting industry we are creating, will generate.”
Tangled webs. There’s more to the story than bad blood, bad management and finger-pointing. Hughes, along with Thomsen Consumer Electronics, is preparing its own DBS entry to the market, and some believe it is letting SkyPix die on the vine so it will have no competition when it launches its service in 1994. Without satellite transponders, SkyPix has no service.
TRUEVISION MERGES WITH RASTEROPS — THIS TIME IT’S REAL
Remember a couple of months ago, when graphics and display technology company RasterOps was going to merge with desktop video hardware developer Truevision? They had arranged a stock swap, based on the value of each company vis-ˆ-vis the other. Unfortunately, they had not yet locked down those numbers with a signed and sealed agreement. So, after they announced the deal, and Truevision’s value in the market increased, they could no longer agree on an equitable swap and the merger fell through.
Two weeks ago, that merger rose from the Asch (pun intended). The two companies announced that Truevision will become a wholly owned subsidiary of RasterOps following a swap of 2.4 million shares of RasterOps common stock for all existing Truevision stock. RasterOps has traded recently at $15 per share, putting the total value of the deal at around $36 million dollars.
According to Cathleen Asch, president of Truevision, the original deal still made a lot of sense, but each company was trying to cover too much ground on its own. Merging with RasterOps was still the logical choice. “If you can do it (merge) with a partner that’s complementary, you’ve got the formula for success,” she says.
Both companies are looking to do two things: work cooperatively with each other’s engineering staff, and capitalize on each other’s (very well respected) name recognition. Truevision, for example, has been developing prepress products, but has no color management technology and no developed channels or name recognition for those kinds of products. It will now be able to transfer those technologies to RasterOps, which can market them within its well-established product line for prepress tools.
According to Asch, who will remain the president of Truevision, as well as sitting on the RasterOps board, the two companies are already trading product and technology ideas.
AT&T AND ZENITH TRANSMIT HD WITH NO CLIFF EFFECT
In the first long-distance over-the-air field test of an all-digital hdtv signal, Zenith and AT&T conducted a broadcast from a TV station in Milwaukee 75 miles to Zenith’s technical center in Glenview, IL.
The late-night field test of the Zenith-AT&T “Digital Spectrum Compatible” hdtv system, broadcast on Milwaukee Public Television Station WMVT Channel 36, was the first-ever terrestrial broadcast of digital TV signals using low power over long distances. They claim the test proves that digital hdtv can provide high-quality and noise-free pictures even in the presence of interference from conventional TV signals on the same channel.
Both companies believe the test also shows that their proprietary compression and transmission technology — in the running to be selected as “the” U.S. hdtv standard — can eliminate the so-called “cliff effect,” a total and abrupt loss of TV picture and sound that can be caused by errors in transmitting digital data long distances.
The test compressed a complex, high-definition program into a single 6-MHz channel. The system also prevented “cochannel interference,” or interference that occurs when two channels are operating on the same frequency. An analog TV station in Palatine, IL — less than 10 miles from the Glenview receiving site — also broadcasts on Channel 36.
Before transmission, the test material images were processed through the Zenith-AT&T compression system. At the transmitter site, a digital recorder played a compressed videotape of the materials. At the receiving site, the signal was decompressed and displayed on high-definition monitors.
Zenith and AT&T plan to share the field test data with the Federal Communications Commission’s Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service and its Hdtv Field Test Task Force.
MULTIMEDIA TO GO, FOR CHEAP(ER)
In April of last year, the industry’s first multimedia notebook computer hit the shelves at a rather daunting price of $4,995. A newly lowered price of $2,995 may have buyers taking a second look.
The notebook in question is Scenario’s DynaVision III, based on Texas Instrument’s Travel Mate 3000 Notebook. DynaVision III houses an internal 660-mb, industry-standard Philips cd-rom (not xa) drive, 20- to 120-mb hard disk, a 1.44-mb floppy drive and 2 to 6 mb of ram in an Intel ‘386-based notebook pc weighing 10 pounds. Internal Sound Blaster-compatible audio cards are optional, as are Ethernet cards for networking capability.
The reversible, 10-inch, black-on-white vga display has a screen resolution of 640_480 pixels and supports 32 shades of gray. Although its passive matrix display technology limits screen reaction time and precision, DynaVision III’s triple supertwist side-lit lcd presents an impressive screen.
Unlike other portables with internal cd-rom drives, Scenario’s machine can run both the battery and the cd-rom simultaneously. Battery power will allow continuous access to cd-rom data for 2-4 hours, and 4-6 hours on other functions. The 35-millisecond cd-rom drive enables fast searches through more than 250,000 pages of text.
Such capabilities have drawn a pool of customers in the commercial, government and defense sectors, including McGraw-Hill, the U.S. Navy, the Canadian National Defense, AT&T, Mobil Oil, Thomson Electronic Publishing, Bureau of
the Census, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Social Security Administration.
VIACOM RECRUITS INFO, PROPOSALS FOR A SCRAMBLING SYSTEM
Viacom International Inc. and its Viacom Cable Division are considering numerous responses to their March 1992 Request for Proposal for a set-top-based addressable scrambling system for the Castro Valley, CA, cable system.
The RFP is a part of Viacom’s ongoing effort to rebuild its Castro Valley facility into a state-of-the-art, high-speed, high-bandwidth interactive system. Ultimately, Viacom has plans for the system to be a test bed for future technologies and services in home entertainment and communications. The system is expected to reach completion by year’s end.
Viacom’s involvement in the entertainment and communications industries is not insignificant. Viacom’s international entertainment dealings include the ownership and operation of basic cable and TV shows (MTV, MTV Europe, Nickelodeon, VH-1, Nick at Nite, Showtime, The Movie Channel) serving more than one million customers, production and distribution of programming for TV, and ownership of 14 radio stations and five television stations. National Amusements Inc., which holds 75.6 percent of Viacom common stock, owns and operates approximately 725 movie screens in the U.S. and UK.
Viacom says it’s happy with the response thus far. The converging nature of cable and other technologies is apparent in the diverse range of respondents, which included everyone from traditional cable equipment manufacturers to companies in consumer electronics, computers and other technology fields.
Related to the RFP issued was a Request for Information for input on technology that will enable delivery of advanced services. Specifically,
the RFI was for headend, delivery and home equipment. A number of responses for the RFI are presently under consideration and Viacom remains open to other proposals.
Interested companies can send proposals to Bob Meyers, vice president, planning and development, Viacom Networks Group, 1515 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.
TV GUIDE, AMERICA’S FAVORITE WEEKLY, MOVES ONTO CABLE
TV Guide, the nation’s best-selling weekly publication, has entered into an agreement to develop, test and market an interactive electronic television program guide to be delivered via cable systems. The electronic guide is to be the joint venture of TV Guide and Liberty Media affiliates XPress Information Services, Ltd., and Star Net Inc.
The editorial and data content will largely remain the domain of TV Guide, while XPress and Star Net will pool their technical expertise in the digital data delivery and cable service arenas. XPress specializes in digitized news and information services through an out-of-band cable signal to personal computer users in more than 800 cable systems. Star Net offers cross-channel promotion service to 22 million subscribers.
The companies cite the move as a response to the changing needs of the consumer and the cable industries. With the advent of 150-channel systems and increased pay-per-view options, the companies believe an ever-expanding market for interactive, on-demand services and for TV Guide’s information services is waiting to be tapped.
TV Guide spokeswoman Rachel Breinin says system testing has begun, but no completion date is set.
MOTOROLA-UPS SIGN FOR FIRST NATIONWIDE MOBILE DATA NETWORK
In mid-May, Motorola announced an agreement with United Parcel Service to begin the first nationwide cellular mobile data network. According to the terms of the $150 million agreement, Motorola will provide UPS with more than 55,000 cellular telephone modems (CTMS) for an in-vehicle communications system to be in service by early 1993.
Motorola-supplied modems and telecommunications equipment will enable UPS drivers in remote locations to upload data to host computers at UPS service headquarters in Mahwah, NJ, via CTMS. Drivers will carry hand-held computers called Delivery Information Acquisition Devices (DIAD), which will attach to a DIAD vehicle adapter for the automatic transmission of data to the service center. The network will provide immediate tracking capability of both air and ground transits for the 11 million packages UPS handles daily.
This agreement marks the third radio data communications project between Motorola and UPS and is the first installation of mobile communications equipment for UPS. To further support the partnership, Motorola also announced plans to open a consolidation and service facility near the UPS national air hub in Louisville, KY.
Cellular communications players McCaw Cellular Communications, GTE Mobile Communications, PacTel Cellular and Southwestern Bell Mobile Systems will provide circuit-switched data transmission capabilities for the UPS network. These companies will form an alliance to implement data network billing, network management and interconnections.
>I/O
>READERS RESPOND
INNKEEPING IN CYBERSPACE
There really is a sense of place, out there in the ether
John Coate is director of interactive services for 101 Online in San Francisco, CA, and for many years, director of marketing for The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) in Sausalito, CA.
Coate believes that the focus of online services, and 101 Online in particular, is moving toward personal communication — a trend that he welcomes and encourages. Those who doubt him ought to sign up for an online service and participate in earnest for a month or two. It’s a compelling medium of communication, made mysterious only by the fact that you cannot see it. — Ed.
When you log into an online service, you use new tools for an ancient activity. Even with all the screens and wires and chips and lines it still comes down to people talking to each other.
Language is so ancient a currency of communication that people of the northern hemisphere, from Europe to India, know of their common tribal roots mostly just by the remnant commonalities of the languages. Through all these thousands of years (sign language excepted), language has been either spoken or written.
TALKING BY WRITING
But online conversation is a new hybrid that is both talking and writing, yet isn’t completely either one. It’s talking by writing. It’s writing because you type it on a keyboard and people read it. But because of the ephemeral nature of luminescent letters on a screen, and because it has such a quick — sometimes instant — turnaround, it’s more like talking. The act of conversing over computers is such a new twist that a lasting term for what it is has not yet been coined.
The new with the old. It is also new because you often feel a real sense of place while logged in, though it exists “virtually” in each person’s imagination while they stare at a computer screen. It’s old because even if the village is virtual, when it’s working right it fulfills for people their need for a commons, a neutral space away from work or home where they can conduct their personal and professional affairs.
My work with the WELL in Sausalito, and now with 101 Online in San Francisco, is about building an online version of what author Ray Oldenburg calls the “Third Place.” In The Great Good Place, Oldenburg calls home the “First Place” and work the “Second Place.”
Psychological comfort and support. “Third places,” he says, “exist on neutral ground and serve to level their guests to a condition of social equality. Within these places, conversation is the primary activity and the major vehicle for the display and appreciation of human personality and individuality. Since the formal institutions of society make stronger claims on the individual, third places are normally open in the off hours, as well as at other times. Though a radically different kind of setting from the home, the third place is remarkably similar to a good home in the psychological comfort and support that it extends.”
I’ll say right up front that my love for online interaction is because it brings people together. At the personal level, it helps people find their kindred spirits and at the larger social level, it serves as a conduit for the horizontal flow of information through the population.
THE VIRTUAL VILLAGE: WHO DOES IT ATTRACT?
Online systems attract independent-minded people. People who think for themselves and many people who work for themselves. Freelancers, contractors, entrepreneurs and others who, because they are always looking ahead to that next job, need to have their shingle hung out.
‘Intellectual massage.’ The text display that still dominates online systems appeals to people who love wordplay, language and writing. And it appeals to people with active minds. Good conversation can be a hard commodity to find these days. If you love stimulating conversation — what I like to call an “intellectual massage” — where would you go, say, after work, to find some people to do it with?
It appeals to people who have numerous interests because you don’t have to go from club to club all over town to hang out and talk with people interested in specific things like boating or books. You can get around town without even getting up.
And then there are people who just have unfulfilled social needs and want to meet some people.
EXPENSIVE TOY, BUT A CHEAP TOOL
If you only find entertainment in the various conversations, then it could fascinate you for a long time or it might get old pretty soon at $2 or more an hour. But if it helps you find your next job, or connects you with a new friend, or fulfills that need to have good conversation with a bunch of bright people, then it becomes a real bargain.
And that is the method behind the madness, so to speak. Behind all the screens of sentences are real people making real connections that make a real difference to them.
Potluck for the mind. Ask a question about almost anything and you’ll likely get an answer or a reference to an answer very quickly — often within 24 hours. The informal nature of online conversation encourages people’s amazing generosity in sharing the things that they know. It’s a potluck for the mind.
Unlike network TV or mass market magazines or even parts of other large online services, the information doesn’t flow in a top-down manner, but rather horizontally among the peer group of the participants. People join online systems because they are useful personal tools. The horizontal information flow is really a by-product of this, but it has, I believe, a deep and abiding importance to all of us. Because the free flow of information among the people is essential to the health of a democratic society.
VILLAGE, NEIGHBORHOOD, SALON, COFFEE SHOP, INN
But something more is going on here. Dry terms like “think tank,” “information exchange” and “conferencing network” are too flat, too mono-dimensional. They don’t convey the reality that while you and the other people logged in are separated by miles of phone lines — looking at CRT screens that just display written words — it feels like a real place in there.
And those terms don’t show that it’s just about the easiest way to meet new people that there is. Nor do they describe how, via all this online talk, people form and sustain relationships. This is when it crosses over into something else, something fuller, something more like a community.
A sense of place. In attempts to describe this accurately we conjure up familiar images like village, neighborhood, salon, coffee shop, inn. It’s as if it is all of these things, yet isn’t really any of them because it’s a new kind of gathering. It just helps to hang something familiar onto it so we can picture it.
An online community is one of the easiest ways to meet new people. Certainly it is very low-risk. You come and go at your convenience and comment or not, as you wish. The pressure is minimal.
A level playing field. The great equalizing factor, of course, is that nobody can see each other online so the ideas are what really matter. You can’t discern age, race, complexion, hair color, body shape, vocal tone or any of the other attributes that we all incorporate into our impressions of people.
HUMAN EMOTION IS THE SUBCARRIER
The tangible part is the hardware and the software — the physical network. Obviously you have to have it, and it has to work reliably. The intangible — the people part — is just as important because a system is as much defined and shaped by everyone’s collective imagination as it is by the computers, diskettes and software tools.
Traveling through the chips and wires, as a kind of subcarrier to the words themselves, is real human emotion and feeling. Furthermore, the quality of the atmosphere largely determines whether or not the people involved will develop any affection for the system at all.
Just do it. Ultimately, any network is about relationships. I like to say that, rather than being in the computer business, I am in the relationship business. Some are ad hoc, some are long term, some are for business and some are social. Get online for business or for pleasure. While you can just do one or the other, most people use it for both. I know people who got online just for fun but made contacts that led to a new job. I also know people who joined for business reasons such as getting help on a computer application or doing research and made some new friends through conversing in other non-technical forums.
For the term “village” to be applied to an online scene with any accuracy at all, this blending of business and pleasure must be present. Because that’s what a village is: a place where you go down to the butcher or the blacksmith and transact your business, and at night meet those same neighbors down at the local pub or the Friday night dance.
RIGHTS, RESPONSIBILITY AND THE CONSTITUTION
In order for the best minds to be applied to the task of figuring out the social and legal issues of electronic interaction, we need as open a forum as we can put together.
Closing the gap between rich and poor. Without the goal of improved communication throughout the citizenry, regardless of their opinion or station in life, writers and sociologists who express the fear that electronic technology will widen the gap between the rich and poor — rather than narrow it — may be proved right. Allowing maximum freedom of expression for each person or institution involved is the only way that enough collective intelligence can be gathered so that these matters can be figured out for the common good.
As it is now, there isn’t much case law regarding these various issues, lending still more credence to the image of the “electronic frontier.” Still, there are a few general categories into which most of these issues fall. All of these issues are unsettled and the subject of intense debate.
Free speech. Is electronic conversation talking or writing? Or is it a hybrid of these two that is unique and new? And is this activity protected by the U.S. Constitution just like freedom of speech? If this is a kind of meeting place, is it then an assembly of people that is also protected by the First Amendment? I say these are rights that must be protected.
Privacy. Do your electronic files have the same Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable search and seizure as your personal effects in your home? Is your private e-mail on a subscription-based service truly private? What rights do you have, what are the responsibilities of the operators of a system and what are the limits placed on the government if it should want to look through your electronic files and correspondence?
The Electronics Communication Privacy Act (ECPA), passed by Congress in 1986, made it a crime for someone to gain unauthorized entrance into an online system. It also requires system operators to inform their customers about how much privacy they should expect and then insure that that privacy is not invaded.
But what if the FBI came to our offices and ordered us to give them a copy of everyone’s e-mail? Would we have to do it? What if they wanted to confiscate our equipment so they could comb through the files? Could they do it? According to the ECPA the answer is yes, if they have a search warrant.
Intellectual property. Are online messages a form of publishing, or is it just a conversation that happens to be in writing? Is your every utterance online a standalone piece of copyrighted intellectual property? Does the fact that anything you say in an online system can be downloaded and printed out by anyone who happens to read it create a different class of reproduction than a commercial publication?
This issue is deeply controversial and may never develop really clear-cut guidelines. While I don’t like to see people get too maniacal about what happens to things they type into a system because actual control is already just about impossible, and getting worse, I do think that good manners and consideration of others’ wishes are critically important.
Censorship. Are the owners of a system responsible to their customers and the right of those customers to express themselves freely, or is the system responsible for making sure that some kind of community standards must apply to the electronic dialogue?
And what about “community standards?” Current obscenity law refers to “local community standards” having jurisdiction in deciding what constitutes obscenity. But in the online world, where people meet in virtual space even though the participants may be located anywhere in the world, are there any local standards that even can apply? This one may never get figured out.
THE FUTURE: TRIPPING OVER ITS OWN FEET
The Internet is growing so fast it can barely keep track of itself. Computerized communications reach more people all the time. Surveillance is refined now to the point that satellites can track individual vehicles from space. Photo images can be altered undetectably. Laptops are more powerful than computers that once filled entire rooms. Virtual reality. Genetic engineering.
We’ve been hearing it all of our lives, but it still holds that never before has technology had the potential to do more good or more harm. Above all else, I want these communication tools to help: to be part of the solution and not more of the problem.
To this end, I want to sound a warning about five areas of great concern to me.
The cost of a phone call. The cost of the phone call to an online service is prohibitively expensive for people outside of the local urban calling areas. Even the big packet-switching nets don’t go to cities with populations less than about 100,000. This means that many of the people who could most benefit from being connected online are priced right out of the market.
We all suffer from not having the input and views of people who live in the country. I urge that we press for national information highways that are affordable to everyone.
Remove the ‘computer’ barrier. For our purposes here, society is segmented into computer users and non-computer users. While hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts dial into online nets around the country, the general population is largely unaware that such systems even exist, let alone are potentially as important to them as their cars or televisions.
Still, millions of dollars have been and are being spent to bring online communications to the general public in the form of dedicated terminals such as Minitels and smart phones. But for all the talk I have heard and all the reports I have read about hooking up the “global online community,” little is happening to create systems where computer users and the general public can meet and talk on a common system.
This is incredibly short-sighted. The real communication breakthrough will occur when those who use computers and those who don’t can talk openly and freely because access to the meeting place is not confined by the equipment that gets them there.
Protection from tyranny. I feel great alarm at some of the recent raids on hackers and sysops who, in utter disregard of due process of law, have had their equipment and systems confiscated before any proof or conviction is forthcoming. This is nothing short of tyranny by law enforcement, especially in cases involving morality standards and not actual cracking or file theft.
Keep media ownership diverse. Ownership of media is becoming more concentrated every day. Fewer corporations own more media outlets all the time. And it’s getting worse. Right now the FCC wants to remove the limits on how many radio and tv stations a single corporation can own. For freedom and democracy to survive, we, the people, must increase direct communication among ourselves.
No ‘techno-pacifiers.’ And finally, cyberspace is wonderful. It has the potential to hook us all up in ways that most of us didn’t dream possible only a few decades ago. But the planet’s wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few. Our planetary environment is deteriorating badly. Species are becoming extinct, global warming and ozone depletion aren’t just theories anymore, and the planet’s capability to sustain huge populations while resources are being plundered at unprecedented rates, is in peril.
I don’t want this virtual world to become a substitute reality that serves to placate a population that accepts a world where it’s no longer safe to go outside because the air is too foul, the danger of skin cancer from the sun is too great or the social inequities of the real world are that much easier to ignore.
So I say that those of us who develop and use these tools in these still-early days have the responsibility to make sure that our work isn’t co-opted into some huge techno-pacifier.
BIG WHEELS ARE TURNING
Rather, let us build into these networks a pervasive community spirit that invigorates our society at every level, from local to global, with a new democratic awareness. I don’t think I was ever more inspired than when I learned that the failed coup in Russia was thwarted in great measure because the resisters, holding out in their various enclaves around Moscow and the rest of Russia, stayed in touch through an online network.
More recently, the demonstrators in Thailand maintained their resistance and ultimately prevailed over the tyranny of the military, in part because they stayed in touch with cellular phones after their regular phone lines were cut.
Big wheels are turning around the world right now. Let us make sure that we work to help, and not hinder, this great movement toward democracy and self-determination that may be the only hope for a world that, more than ever, needs to talk freely to itself.
John Coate
>EVENTS
SIGGRAPH ‘92
July 26-31, Chicago
Association for Computing Machinery
(312) 644-6610, (312) 321-6876
Once again this year, SIGGRAPH will demonstrate that the merging of information and visual computing technologies is becoming an ever more powerful means for the advancement and transfer of knowledge.
SIGGRAPH ‘92 is the 19th annual international conference on state-of-the-art computer graphics and interactive techniques. More than 25,000 people are expected to attend sessions, presentations and workshops, and to visit exhibits, the Electronic Theater and Art Show and other interactive offerings. It is designed to be accessible to computer graphic users of all levels.
This year’s event will focus on global, interactive visual communication where art, science, engineering and business converge. An added emphasis will be placed on the application of leading-edge visualization technologies to real-world environments, such as financial services, printing and publishing, molecular modeling and medical visualization.
Technology discussions about visualization, modeling, simulation, visual communication, multimedia, visual computer systems and networks, and visualization policies, ethics and standards, will complement discussions on market applications in the fields of molecular modeling, medical visualization, printing and publishing, and financial services.
On the floor, computer graphics hardware, software and systems, multimedia, telecommunications, virtual reality demonstrations, hdtv and high-performance computing demonstrations will be shown.
Three new venues will be featured this year. “Showcase” will combine computer graphics and visualization within a networked, interactive, visual computing environment; 18 workstations as well as CAVE, a virtual reality theater, will be available. “Guerrilla-technology” will offer interactive, stand-alone, research works-in-progress. And “SIGKids” will provide an environment for young people (age 11-17) to work with visual-based technologies.
SIGGRAPH ‘92 is sponsored by the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics with IEEE’s Technical Committee on Computer Graphics.
Amy Johns
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