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.