New name signals expanded scope for ‘Gates’s other company’

To date, much has been rumored and little said about Interactive Home Systems or IHS, also known as Microsoft chairman “Bill Gates’s other company” based in Bellevue, WA. Most press reports have centered on the company’s sketchy initial plans to acquire digital licensing rights to art from museums and collectors and transmit and display those digital images into the home (see Vol. 1, No. 4, p. 19).

Many things about the company have changed since then — most recently its name, to Continuum Productions Corp. But far more significantly, its work in home systems has led the company to greatly expand its scope. In an exclusive Digital Media interview, Continuum president Steve Arnold mapped out the company’s new direction in general terms and detailed some of the challenges that face Continuum.

The mission is in the name. Inventing the future —especially inventing the future for Bill Gates — is a pretty tough challenge and Arnold knows it. “We were looking for a way to describe the position of what we were doing, and we saw that the notion of ‘continuum’ really captured it,” says Arnold. “What we’re about is a continuum between old and new media.”

This particular continuum is one that nearly every media and technology company is addressing, but it’s safe to say that most are still at the beginning of the learning curve. Although the company has work in progress, Arnold made no product announcements.

BUILDING DATABASES AND WINDOWS INTO THEM

The company is openly focused on building large databases of digital media and, in fact, recently announced the acquisition of rights to four large image archives (see Vol. 2, No. 5, p. 20). But in addition, it is beginning to focus on what Arnold calls “the point where content or programming in media sense intersects with programming in computer sense.” The software that Continuum will develop addresses this intersection point by improving the quality of interaction with digital information —giving people “more choices, more of what they want when they want it, and making some assumptions about things they will want when we’re able to give them interesting and meaningful things in a high-quality media environment,” according to Arnold.

“The concept is fundamentally different than a CD-ROM that does any single category really well,” he adds. “A lot of what people enjoy is to navigate across concepts and ideas, instead of getting deeper and deeper into a narrow category of information.” But, he says, if Continuum can provide a window into a “broad and vast information resource” that consumers could explore, then maybe what it would be defining is a new kind of programming that sits on top of a pool of information.

Between now and 1995, Arnold says the company will concentrate on inventing that new kind of programming — by acquiring and bringing content into the digital domain, as well as cataloging and organizing it in a software environment that’s accessible to people as an information resource.

That environment, which has been under development in Bellevue for some time, is key to Continuum’s vision. Designed specifically for interactive media, this software — variously referred to by Arnold as a “visual information system,” a “navigable information environment” or a “media environment” — will hopefully lower the barriers between people and digital information. Arnold says the company may actually publish a few titles in the nearer term, more to test concepts than for revenue.

The sophisticated software system Arnold envisions will be invented at Continuum. To date, the company claims no religion regarding hardware platforms and wants to encourage deep and fruitful collaboration with many vendors and media companies involved in the same transition as Continuum.

Pretty pictures weren’t enough. The company’s “interactive home” activities will continue in a separate division and include projects such as Gates’s much-discussed home art gallery and other areas where the design of integrated media meets environmental systems.

It was while working on the interactive home business that Continuum was initially trying to create — via moving massive amounts of high-quality visual media into the digital domain — that the team realized it made no difference how gorgeous or high-resolution the images if people didn’t get any additional value from viewing them in digital form.

That spurred the company’s first forays into “visual environment” research, but soon it realized it needed to go much further. This new environment would have to be able to sit on top of the large pools of media that Continuum was building; in order to earn its keep, it would also have to be adaptable to many different applications, from business to home to theme parks to location-based entertainment venues such as movie theaters and shopping malls.

This also meant expanding Continuum’s early emphasis on visual media into a new kind of digital studio that is capable of producing digital information in all media — from 3D simulations to sound, video, still images and text. The resulting database would be designed to be capable of easily “repackaging” itself into different combinations at the will of the user.

Knowing what to want. Arnold has rightfully tagged one of the most significant problems facing the industry as it moves toward interactive media: No one really knows the will of the user, most especially the user. Consumers don’t know what to want from interactive media any more than developers know what to give them. And, he says, to the extent that people inventing hardware haven’t known what to want, they are being sold crippled platforms that haven’t lived up to the possibility of what can be done.

RESPONSIVE TO USERS IN A FUNDAMENTAL WAY

Because an interactive environment will be responsive to its audience in the most fundamental way — not an interactive retrofit of existing media — the programming itself should be able to cross categories among business, entertainment, home education, etc., in such a way that is likely to obviate hard-wired platforms. This combination of a media database plus a visual interaction environment will yield what Arnold dubbed “a new kind of programming in the media sense.”

To invent this new programming, he says, is likely to require the remaking of some of today’s media libraries. “If you were to take a library of characters and apply them to CD-ROM titles,” he says, “you could do some interesting extensions of the video game paradigm that maybe would add value —better animation, better sound. That may go a long way to helping to develop this market.”

For example, a company like Disney might allow its characters to be used as part of an interface that could cut across genres such as entertainment and education.

Getting into the studio business. An integral part of the Continuum plan, then, is also to become a digital production studio, either for its own material or for analog libraries that need to be converted into the digital domain. “We probably won’t be the place to go if somebody has a large text library and just wants to put it into a database,” says Arnold. “But to the extent that the information is of interest to a general audience, you can expect our environment to be good at tagging that material, and making it accessible in a lot of different ways for a number of different applications — publishing, creating other titles and direct delivery to consumers in one way or another.”

A PROJECT OF ‘STAGGERING SCOPE’

Arnold admits that the scope of what Continuum is attempting is “staggering,” but, he adds, “it’s also the most important thing on the planet if we can pull it off. It will mean personal empowerment and democratization of media, it will open the editorial agenda, it will even allow people a channel to upload their responses to information into this domain. It is an awesomely complex task, but it is the thing that is worth doing.”

In fact, one of his main concerns right now is that the industry hasn’t set its sights high enough. “There is the risk in all of this that people will underwhelm the opportunity,” he says. “They’ll settle for a standard or a technology or a platform or a distribution medium that’s not sophisticated enough to live up to the promise.”

First Cities not enough. Arnold believes that Continuum’s commitment to transition into a digital world is much stronger than, for example, that of the First Cities group, 11 companies that have banded together to explore home multimedia markets. “The First Cities initiative is great,” he says. “There ought to be more places where media and technology and networking companies all come together, but it has to be done in a context. We want to talk about the experience that we can deliver to people, and use technology to enhance it. We don’t want to get hung up on the technology itself. We want to change the relationship between people and information.”

Toward that goal, Continuum is talking to content creators or what Arnold calls “keepers of content,” and says the company will certainly create some of its own. “We’re also willing to collaborate with anyone who’s thinking about the evolution of how to make content available to people,” he says. “We think of this as a way to bring new content resources into existence.”

Exerting some influence. The company doesn’t intend to ignore the important work that must be done with hardware vendors and distribution media providers like telephone companies and cable operators, and Arnold hopes Continuum can work with them to influence what they do.

“What we have to do, all of us, is make sure that we understand what’s possible and interesting and meaningful,” he reiterates. “The question is how to communicate a vision that’s substantive enough. If people want 30 channels of cable, maybe they’ll want 150. But they’ll need a new kind of programming, which we think will be powerful software technology coupled with high- quality content. We want to focus on that end of the continuum.”

RISING ABOVE THE STIGMATA OF MICROSOFT AND GATES

Of course, a project of this scope plops Continuum right in the thick of all things digital media, a position where many people fear the power of someone like Bill Gates. “That’s the challenge for us,” Arnold says. “We have to be able to rise above the politics and the business issues and the personality issues. We are going to build an information resource that will be a redefinition of the support of human imagination. But in the short term, I know people will say that, one, it is too huge, beyond comprehension; and two, they’ll say it’s just Bill trying to own the world.”

Another concern is that Continuum’s ambitious long-term goals will lead people to believe the company is nothing more than a “flaky think tank that some rich guy is funding.” Although Gates’s financial power enables Continuum the luxury of aiming toward some very long-range goals around designing a new medium of communication, Arnold says the company’s goals and short-term milestones are clear.

“We want to make this a good business because if we don’t it won’t happen,” Arnold says. “But what we’re about is long-term relationships, nonexclusive rights, partnerships to evolve a new understanding of what’s possible and adding meaningful interactivity — delivered via computer technology — to the domain of media. We have to figure out a way to define partnerships so it makes sense to us and to them, and to evolve our vision slowly and carefully.”

“We aren’t Microsoft.” More than anything, Arnold knows his biggest task will be to separate Continuum and its goals from Microsoft, which has an unflattering reputation in the computer software business for being rapaciously competitive and pre-emptive.

“We aren’t Microsoft. They’re in a different business than us, and we may even compete with them in some areas,” says Arnold. “In order for us to be successful, we need to earn our own reputation. This is a little flame, and in spite of the fact that Bill has a lot of resources and a high-level commitment, we’ll be snuffed out if we aren’t perceived as leading with vision and that what we’re doing is interesting and powerful in a way that is good. I don’t know if there’s anybody in the world who would make this kind of commitment other than Bill.”

Denise Caruso