• THE PUZZLING PURCHASE OF PARAMOUNT

No matter what the outcome in the bidding war, many people in the new media business are scratching their heads over the intensity of Viacom International and QVC Network, Inc.’s desire to acquire a big, old-fashioned media company such as Paramount Communications.

Leaving aside stock-price machinations and “mirror, mirror, on the wall” speculation, what’s really interesting about the pending sale of Paramount is what two innovative companies such as Viacom and QVC, both well along the path of creating 21st century entertainment from whole cloth, have to gain from the deal.

• TELCOS’ NEW ROUTES

Local telephone exchange carriers are seizing on new technical approaches to delivering video and other broadband services that could lead to a much faster rate of network expansion than once seemed possible.

Buoyed by the prospects for new business growth under less restrictive regulations, the regional Bell operating companies and major independent telephone service providers are rethinking traditional fiber-based designs in an effort to drive broadband network costs below $1,000 per household, which is less than half the costs once contemplated for such expansion.

• BELL ATLANTIC & TCI: NO HOLDS BARRED

In a late-breaking announcement stating that they intend to merge, Bell Atlantic and TeleCommunications, Inc. have set the stage for a wild, no-holds-barred spending extravaganza in the nation’s pursuit of an advanced telecommunications infrastructure.

With US West, Nynex and BellSouth already in minority partnerships with media concerns that own cable properties, and Southwestern Bell buying a large Washington, DC, area operator outright, the proposed $16 billion-plus Bell Atlantic acquisition of TCI leaves little doubt that other cable and telephone companies will be lining up partners to secure the capital and market reach that has become the price of survival in the Information Age.

• I/O
Interactive marketing conference focuses on profit, not people.

• CHANNELS
The importance of packaging.

• CABLESOFT EQUALS CABLE CHAOS?
The undone deal a symbol of the chaotic state of interactive TV.

• CD-R WRITERS
Microboards ships inexpensive desktop device to press CDs.

• DIGITAL PARLOR GAMES
PF Magic ships group-oriented entertainment software.

• A NEW GAME AT DIGITAL PICTURES
Entertainment company eases into new game genres.

• PCS ALLOCATION RULES ANNOUNCED
FCC divides the pie, prepares to count its money.

• BRIEFS
Wireless Access; BMG-Ion; McCaw’s Claircom; US West-3DO; Scholastic Online; Zenith HomeWorks; C-Cube’s encoder; Colossal’s Moxy; Media Vision titles; IVDS licenses; Public domain music; Windows Sound; Copyright bugs; Bill & Al online; HP, Time Warner.

• EVENT
Virtual Reality ‘93.

>I/O
>READERS RESPOND
HOW LOW CAN THEY GO?
‘Interactive marketing’ focused on schlock TV

Authors Cathy Cook and Allison Thomas are marketing and public relations consultants. Cook has a masters degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Thomas began her career at the Carter White House, then moved to California to work on technology and competitiveness policy for Jerry Brown and Alan Cranston. In 1985, she founded Allison Thomas Associates which now represents “digital convergence” companies.

The Digital Revolution sure means a lot of things to a lot of people.

We recently attended a so-called “interactive marketing” conference in Phoenix that brought together members of the advertising industry to discuss the potential of interactive media. Looking forward to a stimulating discussion about how to realize the full promise of this technology, instead we found ourselves in the midst of 300 Miles Drentells (the head of Thirtysomething’s ad agency) — advertising agency managers, “interactive media” sales types, 900-number operators, major consumer products companies, and TV and cable sales representatives.

For us, it was an exploration of the dark side of the interactive media business: technology solely in the service of the profit motive.

BUZZWORDS AND BASICS

We all know that sales-types sell hype, but this conference showed how low they could go. Interactive has become the buzzword of the hour, used to describe everything from 900-number interactive Trivial Pursuit (actually a telephone service, and not what most people think of as “interactive” in the new media sense), to toy doggies with a penchant for coded video.

We suppose it’s okay that cable and telephone service companies are using the telephone (800 numbers for children, 900 numbers for adults) as the feedback loop and calling it “interactive” like it’s something new.

Oh, brother. But couldn’t they think of something a bit more innovative? The Game Channel, for example, is offering “interactive Trivial Pursuit” where users call a 900 number during regular programming breaks to play the game. In a stroke of creative genius, these game breaks are split around either side of traditional commercials because producers believe that’s how to make interactive gamers watch the commercials. However, we were pretty sure they’d be able to tear themselves away from show host Wink Martindale long enough to make their Dagwood sandwiches during the ads.

But our personal favorite was Toby the Terrier, a product based on technology by Portland, OR-based Interactive Systems (sold by Tiger Toys), which bills itself as “a pioneer in the interactive television industry.” Toby is a toy programmed to bark and wag its tail when a coded video is played on the VCR. The coded video doesn’t do anything except make Toby wag and bark. That’s it. Aside from being an incredibly stupid concept, is there anything left for the kids to do anymore?

TECHNOLOGISTS SEE CHOICE, ADVERTISERS SEE CONTROL

What generally happens when new media technologies are widely adopted (like television in the 1950s) is that advertising migrates to whatever offers “more bang for the buck.” The result is that use of the old technology shrinks — i.e., radio shows like the Lone Ranger and Jack Benny folded due to lack of advertiser support soon after TV caught on, as did the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s and Look magazines — while the new media is increasingly exploited as an advertising platform.

New ways to target. As TV advertising has become increasingly ineffective, the advertising industry’s biggest fear has been that the onslaught of interactive digital technologies would put them out of business. At the same time, many people like us believed that new interactive technologies would allow advertisers to target their message in new ways, and enable them to be in closer touch with their customers than ever before.

To the technology futurists, for example, interactivity conjures up the vision of being able to select an item of clothing — worn by a TV character, or from a broadcast catalog — and to watch it modeled on a figure with the buyer’s dimensions. This ability for “mass customization” enables manufacturers to be in touch with consumers in unprecedented ways and give viewers buying choices they wouldn’t otherwise have.

Peddling to the peddlers. But choice didn’t seem to be what the folks at this conference had in mind. The word most frequently used at this gathering of marketing mavens was control. George Orwell would roll over in his grave at this stuff. Here are some examples of how the peddlers are marketing these interactive technologies to their peers in the advertising world:

• “Viacom wants to work with the consumer to change behavior,” said one company representative from the podium. Pardon me? Any of you actively pursuing a cable company to help you change your behavior?
• Nickelodeon marketing representatives stated that they “use two-way communication to become an important force in kids’ lives.” In other words, to sell the little tykes a few more Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
• Ogilvy and Mather Direct described interactive multimedia as a “surrogate sales agent in the home.” Just what we always wanted; Joe Isuzu in our living rooms.
• The Time-Warner people promised that “interactive media will change the viewing, shopping and buying habits of consumers. And it will, most importantly, be a vehicle for a new type of marketing communications.”

And here all along we thought interactive multimedia was a vehicle to establish a global community, offering access to information and communications of all forms, to all classes of people, when and where they choose. We didn’t know we were dealing with a “vehicle.”

ARE THEY JUST CLUE-IMPAIRED, OR WHAT?

Strangely enough it is our views, at least according to a survey by Eon Corp. (formerly TV Answer), that are shared by average consumers. These consumers want interactive TV first and foremost to access information and watch interactive educational shows. Last on the list were product purchasing and play-along sports shows.

Regulation is anathema. Clearly, these programming and cable folks don’t bother seeking out or listening to market research. Certainly they’ve never heard of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is trying to ensure that the electronic superhighway doesn’t (immediately, at least) go the way of television’s massive dedication to commercial interests. Instead, they see themselves as the railroad barons of the nineties, to whom government regulation is anathema.

One particularly memorable quote captured this disdain for any kind of government involvement when a cable industry executive shrieked, “Do you want the people that brought you the Susan B. Anthony dollar to regulate our industry?”

Remember the promise. After this clear display of intention, we’re frightened that the advertising industry and its clients — via interactive shopping, etc. — is first in line to become the principal financiers of the new interactive media industry.

We’re hoping that at some point, someone will remember the original promise of interactive media — to turn television from a passive into an active medium, to encourage education, communication and thoughtful entertainment. We can’t afford anymore schlock TV.

Cathy Cook, Allison Thomas

>FOCUS
THE PUZZLING PURCHASE OF PARAMOUNT
Why do Viacom and QVC want materiel to fight the last war?

No matter what the outcome in the bidding war, many people in the new media business are scratching their heads over the intensity of Viacom International and QVC Network, Inc.’s desire to acquire a big, old-fashioned media company such as Paramount Communications.

Leaving aside stock-price machinations and “mirror, mirror, on the wall” speculation, what’s really interesting about the pending sale of Paramount is what two innovative companies such as Viacom and QVC, both well along the path of creating 21st century entertainment from whole cloth, have to gain in the deal.

As one person close to the battle zone said, “(Paramount’s) assets are materiel to fight the last war, not this one.”

PARAMOUNT ON PAPER, AN IMPRESSIVE SHOWING

Certainly Paramount’s assets are impressive on paper. In motion pictures, it owns Paramount Pictures (for production and U.S. distribution); United International Pictures (50 percent ownership, with MCA Universal, for foreign distribution); Paramount Home Video (U.S. distribution); CIC Video (with MCA, international distribution); and a motion picture library of 890 titles.

Paramount Television produces or syndicates 18 series or continuing programs for the 1993-94 season, including Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, Entertainment Tonight, Hard Copy and Maury Povich. It owns 50 percent of USA Networks (which includes the Sci-Fi Channel), and wholly owns Wilshire Court Productions (which develops and produces films for cable), Premier Advertiser Sales (a TV syndication barter advertising division), and a library of 6,100 TV programs.

Paramount owns seven TV stations, with an overall U.S. TV household reach of more than 11 percent. It owns the Famous Players motion picture chain, and jointly owns both the Cinamerica theater circuit and United Cinemas International. It owns five theme parks in the U.S. and Canada. The company also owns the 20,000-seat Madison Square Garden and a 5,600-seat multi-use theater located at the Garden, as well as two professional sports teams, the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers. It also is developing pay-per-view programming using its Madison Square Garden Network cable sports network (with 5 million subscribers) in conjunction with Capital Cities/ABC Video Enterprises.

Paramount believes that “publishing holds significant growth opportunity because

Paramount Publishing appears to be the source of the company’s steadiest cash flow. It claims that investing heavily in educational publishing and niches such as travel, children’s books, business, technical and professional publications, as well as educational technology and computer publishing, pushed the publishing group’s revenues to $1.6 billion last year from $200 million in 1982. Paramount’s imprints include Simon & Schuster, Prentice Hall and Pocket Books, and the company claims it publishes more than a thousand consumer titles annually.

WHEN IS AN ASSET NOT AN ASSET?

Paramount’s heavy expansion into publishing 10 years ago, it says, was based on its belief that “(p)ublishing, like motion pictures and television, holds significant growth opportunity because it is characterized by creative, proprietary products that can be repackaged and delivered through a wide variety of media.”

A weighty assumption. This is a critical assumption that is arguable, at the very least — especially at this moment in time, when all bets are off when it comes to which media will even continue to exist into the next century. Certainly no one is betting on print as a growth business. (And in fact many speculators think this business would be the first to go if either company prevails.) Thank God the company doesn’t own any newspapers — that would certainly be the kiss of death — but even without that particular millstone around the neck, the ability to carry forward such weighty properties will be difficult at best. Just ask those who are trying to do it today.

It’s not that books won’t continue to be published; of course they will, and we will still buy them and read them. But the economics of old-style publishing are becoming increasingly brittle, and no one has yet been able to figure out a graceful transition to the “electronic book” format, since most people still hate anything resembling a computer.

That’s entertainment. Then let’s look at its entertainment assets. Depending on how you view them, Paramount’s distribution properties alone might be considered priceless in an era when vastly more entertainment products are trying to find viable channels.

But again, these distribution companies are designed for old media, not new. The so-called information superhighway that’s in the process of being built is a perfect delivery vehicle for entertainment products; movies-on-demand that eliminate the middleman between studio and viewer are always cited first as the best example of the benefits of interactive TV. Paramount would have to sell an awful lot of movies to pay for both the loss of its old distribution business and the costly retooling to a high-speed digital delivery system.

The myth of repurposing. Paramount’s movie and TV libraries are almost always cited as major assets in the deal at hand. However, not much is said about what value they provide the company today. Even considering their potential as programming fodder for a zillion-channel cable system, it’s hard to see how 900 old movies and 6,000 old TV shows could pull a profit — especially after one subtracts the cost of digitizing these archives for electronic distribution over an interactive TV network.

The concept of repurposing old media for new is a myth. In great measure, consumers buy what is new. If we don’t rent a movie now, it’s even less likely we’ll want to rent it tomorrow, even if we don’t have to drive to the video store.

Neither is it likely that we will want to see old movies chopped up into video games. The idea isn’t all that compelling, whether or not the original artists and directors were inclined to release their intellectual property rights (which they likely are not, unless they’re desperate for money). The idea of shooting sequences for a companion video game during the filming of a movie is just now starting to become useful, but then we wouldn’t be talking about existing assets, would we?

TV, theme parks, theaters. What about Paramount’s TV stations? In an era of declining ad revenues, the anticipated cost of upgrading to digital broadcast equipment, and an increasing emphasis on narrowcast programming, owning a TV station could easily be considered as much a liability as an asset.

Much the same is true of Paramount’s theme parks and theater chains. People are still going like gangbusters to the movies, but high-end digital delivery systems for theaters are under development to control piracy and eliminate material costs for printing and distributing expensive film stock. And there is much excitement in the digital world about the development of interactive, “virtual reality” attractions at theme parks, but they also require non-trivial investment to bring them up to snuff for digital technology.

As a large cable operator, Viacom can already provide electronic distribution for analog media products. Its commitment to a full service, interactive TV system (via its Castro Valley project) is likely to make it a leading contender as a distributor of digital media products in the future as well.

It also rightfully considers itself a pioneer of new forms of entertainment: MTV has already become a cliché as the perfect example of what can be gained by taking creative risks with innovative, little known artists. Viacom New Media is extending that paradigm into the digital world as well, by focusing on creating a new entertainment experience rather than using interactive technology because it happens to be the industry’s latest buzzword (see Vol. 2, No. 5, p. 12).

The Diller factor. Though the nature of its business is different from Viacom’s, QVC is also a major electronic distributor of interactive media today. With its phenomenal computer network and its connection to TeleCommunications, Inc., the largest cable provider in the U.S., QVC is in an excellent position to become a major player in digital distribution as well.

Even more significantly, QVC’s chairman, chief executive officer and publicity magnet Barry Diller is already making moves — notably via QVC’s new Q2 network, and his recent hiring of an executive in charge of new media — toward creating the next generation of entertainment products.

In possession of certainty. Since both companies already have so much going for them, it’s hard to figure any other (rational) motive than absolute certainty they could deliver significant returns on a $9.8 billion investment. Both companies swear they won’t take on debt to finance the Paramount purchase, but in exchange for bringing in partners, the winner becomes cowboy to an unruly herd of conflicting interests.

As Diller has often said, synergy simply doesn’t exist in these environments. And considering the fluid state of media investments (not to mention cable-telco alliances) these days, not only would such a strategy be extremely risky, but very little innovation is likely to take place in such a splintered environment. In some ways taking on debt might be a preferable alternative, but constant focus on debt repayment has been an ongoing and visible struggle for many of the world’s largest media conglomerates, including MCA/Universal, Time Warner and Sony.

CONTENT VS. SUBSTANCE IS THE NEXT FRONTIER

With all this in mind, it’s a mystery why either Viacom or QVC want to take on either the financial or the creative burden of taking Paramount into the 21st century.

An American friend recently visited Japan and sat down to dinner with an entrepreneur interested in new media technologies. The young man asked if the American was in the “substance” business — a slightly askew but charming translation of the term “content.” Upon retelling the story, the perfection of his question struck us both: the biggest problem in the transition to new media is that too many people don’t know the difference between the two.

Square pegs, round holes. This is not to say that Paramount is not making a great effort to move its properties into the 21st century. Keith Schaefer, the head of Paramount Technology Group, is smart and earnest and with great support from Paramount, he is working on a number of fronts to help the company leverage its assets into new media (see Vol. 2, No. 8, p. 16).

But in a time when people don’t have a clue what is compelling about interactive media, his group is often in the unenviable position of taking a linear property, such as a book, and transforming it into an interactive CD-ROM, the quintessential case of a square peg in a round hole. Paramount’s own public statement, noted earlier, bears out this corporate strategy in most of Paramount’s known new media projects: for example, Richard Scarry’s Busytown was recently released from Paramount on CD-ROM, and the company is working with Spectrum Holobyte on a VR theme park attraction based on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Cracking the status quo. Based on history and what we’ve seen so far, it is already axiomatic that no existing studio or other large media entity will create the Next Big Thing in the world of new media. Most of these companies, Paramount included, are too focused on wringing every last dime out of the investments they’ve already made to truly be free thinkers.

Innovation inevitably wriggles out of a crack in the status quo; the only way to hasten its arrival is to find a way to widen the crack. In the case of new media innovation, the best method is to pour money on it. Before very long, interesting things will start to happen.

Almost everyone working in the new media trenches shares the same puzzlement at this firestorm of desire for Paramount. What would happen, they ask, if QVC or Viacom took the same staggering amount of money they’re willing to spend on Paramount’s old media and invested in a few hundred worthy startups? If what both companies really want is a piece of the future, it’s the only sure bet.

Denise Caruso

Editor’s note: Some believe the purchase of TCI by Bell Atlantic will affect the Paramount deal. That story begins on p. 12.

>MEDIASCAPE
TELCOS FIND NEW ROUTES
Goal is broadband at less than $1,000 per sub

Fred Dawson, formerly editor and publisher of the highly regarded Cable-Telco Report, has joined Digital Media as contributing editor.

Local telephone exchange carriers are seizing on new technical approaches to delivering video and other broadband services that could lead to a much faster rate of network expansion than once seemed possible.

Buoyed by the prospects for new business growth under less restrictive regulations (see Vol. 3, No. 4, p. 3), the regional Bell operating companies and major independent telephone service providers are rethinking traditional fiber-based designs in an effort to drive broadband network costs below $1,000 per household, which is less than half the costs once contemplated for such expansion.

QUESTIONING THE ALL-FIBER ASSUMPTION

For years local exchange carriers (LECs) assumed that an all-fiber approach was the route to the broadband future. Fiber optics, with its virtually unlimited bandwidth, would eventually replace the traditional twisted pair copper wires, providing a transmission medium that accommodated the standard plain old telephone services (POTS) and a full range of new services, from video conferencing and multimedia to high-definition television.

Under this scenario, the high-capacity fiber would map to the replaced copper network topology all the way to the home, so long as regulators could be convinced that sheer aging of existing wiring (referred to as “plant”) or new market demands for higher capacity services or some combination of both justified the cost of adding fiber without creating upward pressure on standard telephone service rates.

Costly conversions. But driving fiber all the way to the customer premises requires an optoelectronic conversion at each household to accommodate signal transport over copper and coaxial cable links within the home. About five years ago it became evident that costs of such conversions at each household would unreasonably delay the evolution to higher capacity. This led to industry-wide acceptance of the idea of an optoelectronic conversion at an optical network unit (ONU) serving a cluster of eight or so premises from a curbside cabinet, via twisted pair copper drop lines for voice circuits and coaxial cable for video and other broadband services.

Now, even this fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC) scenario is viewed as too costly by a growing number of telcos, who fear that regulators will balk at allowing them to incur such costs without a better understanding of how new services rather than higher voice service rates will defray the expense. While FTTC costs are coming down, other approaches have been found that appear more likely to satisfy regulators’ insistence that network expansion costs pay for themselves.

Following cable’s lead. The leading alternatives to FTTC include fiber/coaxial configurations similar to cable television industry network designs, short-haul wireless access links and high-capacity copper wiring. Increasingly, telcos are not so much looking for a single design solution as they are seeking to match particular design attributes to specific network conditions, including variations in the age of the plant as well as the locale, whether it’s urban, suburban or rural.

“Our goal is to identify the network design best suited to a particular serving area, which could mean different approaches are taken from territory to territory,” says Larry Plumb, spokesperson for Bell Atlantic. “The key thing is that all the last-mile elements must be compatible with the operating core.” By this he means that alternative means of distribution to the customer must connect economically with the existing array of switches and the standard operating protocols of the telephone industry.

A key advantage to the new flexibility in network design is that the placement of broadband capacity does not necessarily have to depend on obsolescence of existing copper plant. The way the game is played today, if an area requires new telephone lines, a large share of the costs of installing the fiber that will support broadband services can be shifted over to the narrowband side, which helps overcome cost-conscious regulators’ resistance to capacity expansion.

But because the age and condition of last-mile telephone wires varies widely, even within small areas it’s hard to find a rehabilitation scenario large enough to support the scale of construction that’s required in a conversion to fiber.

ALTERNATIVE NETWORK DESIGNS FOR “SERVING AREAS”

The leading network design alternative in the telcos’ search for a way around the narrow/broadband cost linkage is the fiber/coaxial “fiber-to-the-serving-area” (FSA) topology being championed by the cable television industry, where fiber extends to coaxial serving areas of 500 to 2,000 homes each. Such a network can be overlaid on an existing telephone network, connecting at key switching points and sharing trenches and conduit, without matching the layout of the twisted pair copper network line by line.

According to John Czak, executive director of network systems and planning at US West Communications, the FSA “star/bus” approach costs less than FTTC because the coaxial network beyond the fiber termination point or node follows a “bus” distribution concept, where one line goes down a street, serving all homes via short connecting “drop” extensions.

This contrasts with FTTC, where individual fiber links extend to each eight-home cluster all the way from the switch, which can be three miles or more away. Thus, there are far fewer aggregate miles of distribution cable in the fiber/coaxial scheme than in the FTTC approach.

“We’re getting a message from our customers that’s loud and clear,” notes Larry Burton, director of advanced technology and products at Reliance Comm/Tec, a leading supplier of last-mile distribution equipment. “If the consumer is getting what he wants over a 30-channel cable system, that’s the price to beat if you’re a telephone company.”

REGIONAL BELL COMPANIES MOVE TOWARD FSA

US West began the trend toward telco FSA late last year, saying it would deploy FSA broadband at a pace of 500,000 homes per year, following a year’s worth of testing in 1994. The first iteration of the system, will serve 10,000 households in Omaha, NB, starting early next year.

Groundswell of interest. Rochester Telephone of New York and Southern New England Telephone have also chosen FSA topology for initial tests of video services, although they have made no commitments to the design beyond the initial trial stages. But vendor sources say there has been a groundswell of interest among most of the major local exchange carriers during the past few weeks, with the likelihood that several others will at least go to the trial phase using FSA architecture.

Sources also report that Ameritech has distributed a formal solicitation for information on FSA designs, laying groundwork for a possible request for proposals (RFP) from vendors later this year. Nynex is also taking a hard look at widescale deployment of fiber to the service area, according to the same sources. Neither company would comment other than to say they are looking at a variety of networking options.

Cable’s logic hard to deny. “It’s getting hard to deny the argument for the cable FSN (full service network),” says a strategist at a telco that hasn’t declared its design preference. Requesting anonymity, he adds, “Broadband is where the new revenues are, so why hogtie expansion to rebuild schedules?”

Czak of US West says another big advantage for FSA is that it supports low-cost “broadcast” delivery of analog programming networks, which comprise the lion’s share of video services that would be available over a video dialtone network anytime in the near future. Where FTTC broadband is all-digital and all-switched right out of the chute, FSA supports gradual evolution to such capabilities as market conditions require, Czak says.

Coax can supply power, too. Ron Foster, vice president for telecommunications at Scientific Atlanta, a cable equipment supplier that some believe will provide FSA gear to US West in Omaha, also notes a key advantage for FSA can be found in the ability of the coaxial plant to supply electrical power to the customer’s telephone, which fiber can’t do. “The telephone companies have gone down a lot of rabbit holes trying to find a cost-effective way to power CPE (customer premises equipment; i.e., telephones),” Foster says, “but nothing has been found that matches the ability of coax to deliver service and power together.”

“The important thing to recognize,” he adds, “is that FSA can be evolved to do all the things commonly associated with telephone broadband. This isn’t about making compromises with the future.”

WIRELESS ACCESS GAINING POPULARITY IN TELCO CIRCLES

Another low-cost alternative to FTTC that is beginning to gather steam in telco circles is wireless access, where radio transceivers (transmitter/receivers) with a serving radius of anywhere from a few hundred feet to half a mile would communicate with transceivers mounted on exterior walls of customers’ homes and offices. Nynex has been testing narrowband wireless access in urban and suburban settings, with calculated installation and maintenance savings of between 10 and 20 percent as compared to copper access lines and considerably more as compared to FTTC.

But while radio connections might reduce the cost of replacing wires for traditional phone service, the larger advantage to radio lies in the ease with which such connections can be upgraded to full broadband capacity. Instead of new wire installations, the process would merely require modular add-ons at the transceiver sites, notes Paul Donovan, staff director at the Nynex Telesector Resources Group.

PCS opens a conduit. The Federal Communication Commission’s recent provision for telco use of a portion of the newly allocated Personal Communications Services (PCS) spectrum in the 2 GHz region opens a conduit for narrowband wireless access. In this scenario, customer premises equipment might be connected by wire, rather than by radio, to the outside wall-mounted transceivers linked directly to a neighborhood microcell. But the spectrum for moving to broadband wireless access would be found in another region of the microwave spectrum, at or beyond 28 GHz. (For more on PCS, see p. 21)

These very high frequency areas have suddenly come open to mass communications, thanks to the pioneering work of CellularVision, which recently gained Bell Atlantic as a partner in construction of an all-wireless multichannel TV service in New York (see Vol. 3, No. 4, p. 3). The availability of these high frequencies, largely unused in terrestrial communications, has driven the wireless access concept to the front burner at US West, Nynex and Bell Atlantic.

Shorter distance, lower cost. Bernard Bossard, a partner in CellularVision, says that the shorter propagation distances of these frequencies can translate into lower costs for transmitters, which with advances in semiconductor technology could conceivably dip down into the $20,000 range from about $125,000 today.

Such a transmitter is capable of delivering all forms of communications, including voice, data and video in one-way or interactive mode, given a relatively clean line of sight between transceivers.

US West has been testing a prototype broadband wireless access system operating at 28 GHz, according to company sources. Results so far have put wireless access on the short list of possible options as the RBOC moves to widescale roll out of full-service networks in the next year or so.

CONNECTIONS AND COST-PER-HOUSEHOLD KEY ISSUES

A key issue concerns positioning the transmitter to ensure dependable connectivity to all customers in an area. At average suburban densities, a one-mile wide cell, covering a little less than one square mile of territory, would serve about 225 households, which would result in very low costs for the last mile of access — something on the order of $300 per household, counting customer premises gear. A lower power cell transceiver, with radius of a few hundred feet, would cost less than the one-mile cell system, but, with fewer homes served, would produce a somewhat higher cost per household.

Such costs, of course, don’t factor in the costs of bringing fiber to the transceiver site. The larger the transceiver serving area, the less fiber required, so the range of cost possibilities for wireless access is fairly broad. But it appears to fall under the wireline alternatives by a considerable margin.

ADSL getting better. Rounding out the search for cheaper routes to broadband is the widely reported technology known as ADSL (asymmetrical digital subscriber line), which employs advanced modulation and compression techniques to expand the capacity of existing copper wiring. The name refers to the ability to deliver high-bandwidth data such as video into the home, while preserving a much smaller amount of bandwidth for the return — i.e., interactive — path. Here again, Bell Atlantic is among the leading experimenters, with a video dialtone trial using ADSL now underway in the suburbs of Washington, DC.

Bell Atlantic believes ADSL offers a way to bring movies-on-demand, multimedia and other advanced services to the market immediately on a customer-by-customer basis, without waiting for fiber loop deployment. “This is a technology you pay for as the customer requests it, which is a very cost-effective approach to introducing new services,” says Arthur Bushkin, president of Bell Atlantic Information Services.

ADSL, which has drawn sharp criticism from Southwestern Bell and a lukewarm response among several other telcos, keeps getting better. Bell Atlantic is the only company committed to a market trial, but its efforts are viewed as pivotal to go/no-go decisions at a number of other companies.

Massive multitasking with DMT. Earlier this year the Bell companies’ task force on high-speed copper lines endorsed an ADSL variation known as discrete multitone (DMT), which its developers say can deliver four 1.5 Mbps one-way (or two 3 mbps) video signals along with two ISDN B channels, a data channel and an analog voice channel simultaneously over a single twisted pair copper line at distances up to 12,000 feet. In late August, the standards group went even further, endorsing a 576 Kbps channel for high-quality videophone connections along with a 64 Kbps control channel on top of the video channels and analog voice.

These loop distances are sufficient to cover the lion’s share of dense urban markets and represent over 50 percent of all local distribution plant. The technology supports lower levels of capacity at longer distances, with a combination of at least one 1.5 Mbps video and voice and control channels at distances up to 18,000 feet, generally the maximum in telco serving areas.

Not so cheap. Naysayers contend the service isn’t flexible enough and is likely to cost more to install than optimists realize, making it harder to shift capital to fiber deployment when broadband becomes a justifiable expenditure. While the four 1.5 or two 3 Mbps video channels can serve separate TVs with different programming, these rates are below the threshold for NTSC television as envisioned in the emerging MPEG-2 standard. The technology can also support one 6 Mbps channel, which would cover NTSC, but one channel per household is viewed by many strategists as a non-starter.

A final draft on ADSL, which will permit full scale manufacturing to proceed, is slated for the second quarter of 1994. A number of telecommunications manufacturers are gearing up to compete for the anticipated business, including the three largest — Alcatel, AT &T and Northern Telecom.

$250-per is hard to beat. What that cost will be on a per-line basis, Bell Atlantic’s Bushkin won’t say. The goal is to get DMT onto a single chip, which means every household box would have a DMT chip and a decompression chip or, possibly, a large-scale integration of both, as well as sufficient computer power to support customer navigation through thousands of viewing and data source options.

The cost increment at issue vis à vis some other digital networking option is the DMT portion, which, given cost trends, might turn out to be in the neighborhood of $500, counting hardware at both ends of the line. Assuming a 50 percent customer take rate, this would work out to $250 per household. In an all-digital video dialtone mode this might be hard to beat, even for wireless access.

Bushkin and other ADSL advocates stress that the technology is not meant as a replacement for fiber in the loop but rather as a step along the way. As customer demand for initial video services offered over copper loop hits stride, he says, the telco will have the revenue justification for extending fiber and broadening the service options.

Fred Dawson

>CHANNELS
PACKAGING: THE PRIMARY SALES AGENT

Multimedia titles’ distribution is primarily through mail order and retail, and is currently accepted in software stores and computer superstores. As we have discussed in previous columns, the distribution channels for multimedia titles will expand into video and audio stores and ultimately to bookstores during the next couple of years.

This broad-based distribution presents an interesting challenge to publishers of new media titles. They must create an image for their company and product line, and prepare packaging that will be successful across all of these diverse channels. This challenge is sharpened by the understanding that packaging is the primary sales agent for a multimedia title. This is particularly true because there is currently no “preview” mechanism, such as movie trailers or commercials for multimedia titles, and because the current market is so small, it does not justify the cost of full-page advertising.

In recent meetings, I have seen distributors accept a new media title for distribution on the condition that the packaging is reworked to their satisfaction. It is likely the distributor understands the success of packaging in a retail environment better than the publisher, and in this case the suggestion might be supportive and helpful.

However, if it is August or September and the product should be on the shelf in a couple of weeks, a package redesign will delay its release into retail by some six to eight weeks, missing a good portion of the Christmas selling season. Therefore it’s probably a good idea to figure out the intricacies of packaging before this critical time.

JUMPING OFF THE SHELF, AND INTO CUSTOMERS’ HANDS

Packaging must succeed in both retail and catalogs. The package must jump off the shelf into the customer’s hands. He must be able to see it, and be attracted to it, in a store cluttered with hundreds of other items.

This same box design becomes the “thumbnail” visual in CD-ROM and software mail-order catalogs. The half-inch or inch-square thumbnail of the box shot becomes the visual for the advertisement in the catalog, placed next to three or four lines of descriptive text.

NO STANDARDS, NO SPECIALISTS

Furthermore, there is no standard for packaging CD-ROM titles in any of the channels: there is no software box standard and no strict standards in bookstores. The packaging standards for CD audio and for video, stringent in their industries, will ultimately apply to multimedia CD-ROM titles and must be anticipated. This means that publishers must design their boxes to suit four different industries and retail situations, to suit catalog selling, to generate rental interest, and to succeed in all these environments.

To complicate matters further, there are very few graphic designers or packaging designers specializing in the new media. Publishers must choose among designers specializing in software, audio, video or book design. And each of them will specialize in their genre, selling off the shelves of those particular kinds of retail or catalog outlets.

LET IT BE SEEN

It is important that the title and the publisher be in bold print, vivid enough to be read from 20 feet across the room. The contrast ratio of the title to the rest of the box must enhance this clarity. Therefore the title, any subtitles and the publisher must be large and clearly visible. Most retailers prefer primary colors for their software boxes. However, some software boxes succeed with a black background and black packaging always sells well in video stores.

Compton’s New Media has attempted for years to set a standard with its box design, which has a black background, but so far the standard has not been accepted industry-wide. Many publishers prefer the Compton’s box size, but vary the design and color.

Publishers should take care with subtitles, so that the name of the product or product line is not confused with its secondary title. It helps to have extensive input from professionals and focus groups if two titles will appear on the box. Sometimes the subtitle is better than the product line name and should be emphasized graphically.

AN IMAGE FOR THE WHOLE COMPANY

It is best to create an identifiable image for the publishing company and for each product line and title in a series. The creation of these various levels of images is best left in the hands of professionals, to allow the images to work together to support the whole.

These professional designers should specialize in each of the industries that will retail the product: software, audio, video and books. The skills of packaging design for each of these industries is established and quite sophisticated.

The standards for each industry (or lack of them) affect the design. There is much less space on a jewel box or a CD, whether audio or multimedia, than is available on a large box for display on a software store shelf. The standard video box is limited in different ways. Packages designed for bookstores, if larger than the accepted measurements, may find themselves in an oversized book display, in the back cases of the bookstore.

Although software stores and bookstores are somewhat flexible in the kinds of boxes and packaging they will accept, the audio and the video industries are rigid. This is because their standards apply not simply to retailers’ shelf preference, but to the shipping cases, palates in trucks and in the warehouse, and store fixtures that display the items. These industry-wide standards for packing, shipping and shelving will not change for new media. Therefore new media packaging must conform to these standards. And these standards may not be applicable to other channels.

START NOW

It is imperative that publishers begin now to plan their company and product-line imaging to succeed across all four industries and their distribution channels. The design must not only sell off the shelf, but off the catalog page in a one-half inch to one inch square format. Product names and subheadings must become memorable and descriptive of the product in only a few words. Copy must be brief and hard- hitting. The product competes for the buyer’s attention with hundreds of other items on the shelf and dozens of items on the catalog page.

THE 20-SECOND SELL

The publisher has 20 seconds of the browser’s attention span in which the prospective buyer will pick up the product and read the box, or in which he will stop scanning the catalog long enough to read the description. The multimedia industry is currently devoid of direct sales reps to the end-user, experienced sales people in retail, preview mechanisms and full-page advertising. So the box must do all these jobs, and do it in 20 seconds. The planning for the success of this 20-second sell will take months. It is important to begin now.

Joanna Tamer

>NEWS
BELL ATLANTIC, TCI TO MERGE
Malone: realignment will be good ‘for the little guy’

In a late-breaking announcement stating that they intend to merge, Bell Atlantic and TeleCommunications, Inc. have set the stage for a wild, noholds-barred spending extravaganza in the nation’s pursuit of an advanced telecommunications infrastructure.

With US West, Nynex and BellSouth already in minority partnerships with media concerns that own cable properties, and Southwestern Bell buying a large Washington, DC, area operator outright, the proposed $16 billion-plus Bell Atlantic acquisition of TCI leaves little doubt that other cable and telephone companies will be lining up partners as fast as they can to secure both the capital and market reach that has suddenly become the price of survival in the Information Age.

Clear direction. “I think the situation we all face is obvious,” said Allen Gerry, CEO of Cablevision Industries, the 12th-ranking MSO (multiple system operator) with about one million customers. “We’ve been talking to telephone companies, just like everyone else. There will be many different types of deals, depending on sizes of companies and other conditions, but the direction is clear.”

For smaller companies, Gerry said, the pattern might be closer to the BellSouth/Prime Management deal, which was announced the day the Bell Atlantic/TCI agreement came to light. BellSouth would acquire 22.5 percent of Prime’s stock for an undisclosed sum and would lend $250 million to Prime as part of a $450-million recapitalization of its Las Vegas-based cable property, Community Cable Television.

A week earlier Nynex said it was investing $1.2 billion in Viacom International, which, along with programming networks, owns the tenth largest cable MSO. Although the deal was pegged to programming, the tie-in with Viacom Cable added to the widely shared sense of urgency among cable and telephone companies that the ante has gone up dramatically in the information transport arena.

THE PURPOSE IS TO OPEN NETWORK CAPACITY

TCI CEO John Malone, at an Oct. 13 press conference in New York, made clear the purpose of the merger with Bell Atlantic is to open vast capacity and functionality across a combined service base of 23 million customers as quickly as possible.” There’s no time to waste in deploying this infrastructure,” he said.

A waste of cash? But if time isn’t wasted, a good deal of cash might be. Given the current state of the regulations, which bar cable and telephone companies from merging or jointly owning facilities in mutually held territories, the capital commitments in deals such as Time Warner/US West and Bell Atlantic/TCI point to head-to-head, house-to-house competition between telco and cable franchise holders, each offering to connect the customer to competing infinite capacity networks, each delivering the same services under the rules of open access.

Just ahead of the Bell Atlantic action, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House telecommunications subcommittee, let it be known that he was embracing the idea of legislating an end to restrictions barring telcos from entering the cable business. But he made clear that the aim of such legislation must be to preserve network competition, which means rules preventing in-territory buyout of one provider by another would remain in place.

Chaos and overkill. Just how the chaos and overkill of duplicate multi-billion dollar investments in local facilities by competing telco/cable alliances would result in low-cost introduction of advanced services was not addressed by Malone and Bell Atlantic chairman Ray Smith, who will be the chairman of what they referred to as “the New Bell Atlantic.”

Instead, the emphasis at the press conference was on the upside of open access by service developers to high-capacity networks, where even the smallest producers could rent storage space on the local system server and compete with the giants for customers on the merits of the content.

LOWERING BARRIERS FOR CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT

“We are stimulating creativity by drastically reducing entry barriers for producers of services,” Malone said. “There’s a massive initial investment in facilities, but the marginal cost of putting something on (the network) is very small.”

TCI, which is in the process of re-acquiring the programming interests that were spun off into Liberty Media two years ago, will be a relatively small contributor to the programming lineup that is available over the new Bell Atlantic’s full-service platforms, Malone noted. “We can be a fertile medium for creative development,” he said. “Our role is to define the consumer’s needs. The nation’s creativity will fulfill them.”

It’s for the little guy. The result, he said, will be a “massive realignment” of the entertainment and services sectors, with potential elimination of the distribution bottlenecks that keep “the little guy” from gaining direct access to the public.

But, in the meantime, as TCI’s networks continue in the traditional cable mode, the creative output of TCI’s farflung programming interests, ranging from Turner Broadcasting to the Sega Channel, will have a proprietary connection into the marketplace, establishing beachheads that any little guy would be happy to hold.

Fred Dawson

CABLESOFT BECOMES CABLECHAOS
Silicon Graphics, Microsoft lead scramble

The cable industry’s approach to introducing digital media to the public is rapidly shifting from a cooperative search for long-term compatibility to a chaotic scramble for near-term revenues.

Three months ago, a take-it-or-leave-it deal on operations and applications interface software appeared to be in the offing from TeleCommunications, Inc. (TCI), Time Warner and Microsoft. Now the situation suggests that for a long time to come, it’s going to be everyone for themselves on the issue of protocol selection.

“We’re still very early into that process,” says Jim Chiddix, senior vice president for engineering and technology at Time Warner Cable. “As usual, the rumor mill [regarding CableSoft] has been far ahead of reality.”

CHANGES IN REGULATIONS PUSH NEED FOR SOFTWARE

Operational compatibility between cable systems would guarantee the widest possible market base for developing multimedia and interactive television services, and this remains the primary goal of a joint venture formed last summer by Time Warner and TCI. Chiddix says the introduction of digital, interactive services will happen “much faster if it’s a single platform, if (suppliers) can count on writing applications that will be deployable in many markets.”

But several factors are contributing to factionalization rather than cooperation, starting with the fact that, unlike the telephone industry, cable is at ground zero in software development. “We’re playing major league catchup in software,” acknowledges Richard Green, president of CableLabs. “There are a lot of issues that need to be resolved all at once.”

To the point of urgency. Until recently, the long-term prospects for multimedia and interactive services — together with a gradual turning to digital compression — seemed to be the primary drivers in the cable industry’s search for digital platform compatibility. Today the software selection process has been accelerated to the point of urgency, leaving little time or incentive for achieving broad consensus as companies react to changing market conditions.

The biggest factor in the shifting software agenda is the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) new rate regulations promulgated under the Cable Act of 1992. Because the rules exempt premium services from control, cable systems are converting in droves to so-called à la carte tiering of programming, allowing cable subscribers to select the mix of services they want beyond the bare-bones basic packages that fall under rate regulation.

The rush to à la carte. This rush to à la carte carries with it a need to simplify subscriber access to programming, most obviously via electronic navigation systems that require computerization of the settop boxes and attendant decisions on operating software now rather than later. “If you’re going to 80- or 110-channel analog systems with à la carte pricing, you’re going to need a navigation tool for the subscriber whether you use digital compression or not,” notes Hal Krisberg, president of General Instrument Corp.’s Jerrold Division, a leading manufacturer of settop and other cable gear.

NO SINGLE APPROACH WILL PREVAIL JUST YET

How a cable company goes about setting up the technical wherewithal to permit flexible, individualized packaging and billing of services depends on two things. First is the type of technology already in place. And second is the operator’s assessment of what the most cost-effective approach to implementing the new packaging might be.

Consequently, even within a given system operator’s purview, different cable systems are pursuing a wide variety of approaches offered by the manufacturers of headend and home terminal gear, from off-premises “interdiction” systems to various in-home “addressable” systems, all with distinct software components.

“We’re building a flexible platform that can work with a variety of operating systems, because we don’t see any one software approach prevailing at this point,” says Gary Trimm, president of the subscriber technology division at Scientific Atlanta (S-A), another leading settop supplier. “The best approach is to give the customer what he wants.”

Aggressive alternative to Intel. SA’s next generation settop terminals, slated for delivery starting next summer, will employ Motorola’s Power-PC RISC (reduced instruction set computing) microprocessor and ScriptX multimedia system software developed by Kaleida Labs, the joint venture between Apple and IBM.

PowerPC, the fruit of a two-year joint development project with IBM, Motorola and Apple, operates in the range of 40–90 million instructions per second, representing an aggressive alternative to the souped-up Intel ‘386 processor that the Jerrold Communications division of General Instrument Corp. plans to use in its computerized settops.

But Trimm emphasizes that the choice of Kaleida software is aimed at supporting access to many different multimedia formats, with no intention to make it exclusive to S-A boxes. “These enabling technologies are not exclusive to anyone,” he says.

Time Warner’s Chiddix wants to see compatibility extend to the primary operating systems in settop terminals, but he will settle for less, given the difficulties the two largest cable companies face in finding common ground on technical issues. At minimum, Chiddix says, there needs to be agreement on the interface between the operating system and application programs, often referred to as the applications program interface or API. This echoes the concept outlined by Bob Frankenberg, vice president and general manager of Hewlett-Packard’s Personal Information Products Group, at this year’s Digital World conference (see Vol. 3, No. 1, p. 39).

“It’s possible to foresee a model where there would be a single applications interface,” Chiddix notes, “but below that interface, making that interface work, would be one of, let’s say, two different operating systems, each focused on a different processor. That may not be quite as efficient as having everything optimized around a single processor, but it may be much smarter for the cable industry.”

SGI NAVIGATES WITH ‘FLYING BUTTONS’

Time Warner’s selection of Silicon Graphics as supplier of software and hardware for servers and home terminals in its Orlando full-service network project has drawn the two companies together in the search for broad software solutions. Navigational software is especially important at this point, Chiddix notes.

“One reason we chose Silicon Graphics (in Orlando) for the home terminal platform was for the graphics power that brings to us,” he says. “SGI has a demonstration that’s kind of interesting. It’s software they’ve developed for their workstations, which they call Flying Buttons. You see a screen with nine very attractive three-dimensional-looking buttons. When you click onto one of those buttons, it tumbles out into the foreground with its backside toward you, and on the backside are nine more buttons.”

A computer shield. He adds, “Now that’s really just like going down a list of nine choices, selecting one and then getting nine more. But it’s a heck of a lot more fun. It’s sort of ironic. What we’re trying to do is use a great deal of computing power in order to shield our customers from the fact that there’s a computer there.”

With Time Warner working closely with SGI, TCI and Microsoft have resumed negotiations, following a breakoff several weeks ago attributed by cable insiders to TCI CEO John Malone’s distaste for the negotiating tactics of Microsoft’s chairman Bill Gates. (Gates put a somewhat different spin on the situation, telling reporters at an August briefing that “people like John Malone are very into joint ventures — he owns 20 percent of that and 30 percent of this and 40 percent of that, and so it’s a new thing for us.”)

TCI, MICROSOFT DEAL INCLUDES ENERGY MANAGEMENT

Nonetheless the two parties are (still) reported to be close to an agreement, which along with establishing terminal operating, interface and presentation software, would incorporate a way to add energy management functions to the system processing capabilities. This last issue is a significant driver in the deal, sources say, given the fact that revenues from multimedia and interactive TV appear to be a long way off.

Cable companies have begun taking a hard look at online energy management, owing to mounting support for the concept in utility circles. The concept, as currently tested, calls for remote meter reading, real-time billing to encourage off-peak energy use and automated management of energy consuming systems.

Strategic spending plans skewed toward networking rather than power plant expansion are beginning to show up in proposals at public service commissions in several states, posing both a threat and an opportunity where cable and telephone companies are concerned.

So far, two major power companies — Entergy Corp. and The Southern Co. — have made firm commitments to testing the use of wide-band wire line communications to manage energy conservation. Entergy is the primary power provider for Arkansas and Louisiana, while Southern is parent to five utilities in Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Mississippi. Another utility company is said to be preparing to work with TCI to do the same thing.

Michael Niggli, a senior vice president at Entergy, says company studies suggest a third of its consumer base or some 440,000 households could benefit from online management, leading to reduced capital outlays for expansion of power capacity.

While some observers argue that the scale of potential savings — $500 million or $1,200 per household over 20 years for a company like Entergy, by Niggli’s estimate — could underwrite construction of advanced broadband networks by utilities, the more likely direction is cooperation between utilities and existing network operators. Along with TCI, Cablevision Systems Corp., another large cable system operator, is pursuing discussions with energy companies, and it is likely that other companies are as well.

General Instrument, already contracted with Microsoft for supply of the operating system in next year’s computerized terminals, is one of at least three suppliers of cable gear looking at the possibilities. The utility revenue potential could add significant clout to Microsoft’s efforts to penetrate cable.

Many other new cable revenue streams outside the entertainment mainstream are on tap as well, all of them requiring software support. These include extensions to local area networks over cable, employing Ethernet protocols, proprietary tie-ins to databases of every description, including Internet, and a variety of specialized telecommunications services.

Add all this to the long-term digital media requirements, and it’s hard to envision how the two top cable operators will lead the industry to settle on even two sets, let alone one, of operating protocols. Some people are betting heavily that it won’t happen for at least another two years.

WHOLE LOTTA TESTING GOIN’ ON

Trip Hawkins, on the cusp of watching his company’s first 3DO Multiplayers hit the stores, takes talk of megadeals with software developers with a grain of salt, or so he suggests in his assessment of the possible TCI/Microsoft deal. “I don’t care if TCI and Microsoft do some big deal and get GI or anybody else to supply the boxes,” Hawkins says. “TCI isn’t the type of company that’s going to stack all its chips in one place. There’s a lot of testing to be done before things settle out.”

[As this issue went to press, Hawkins announced 3DO's participation as settop terminal technology provider in a US West-sponsored interactive TV test in Omaha. See story, p. 24]

There is some built-in momentum behind the two-system scenario, however. SGI already has an API agreement with Microsoft, which allows SGI’s high-powered workstations to have wider access to applications software than would otherwise be the case. If well implemented, that bridge could be the girding that holds up an otherwise unlikely joint venture on system protocols between TCI and Time Warner.

“I’d hate to see us going toward a two-system approach, but it can work if there’s agreement on an API,” says a senior cable engineering executive, who is rooting for a one-system solution. Asking not to be named, he comments, “Outside of Microsoft, no one has gone as far as SGI toward addressing our concerns.”

Fred Dawson

CD-R WRITERS CATCH ON
Microboards releases affordable CD-ROM writer

Increasing numbers of personal computer users have been standing in line waiting for a moderately-priced desktop box that can press CD-ROMs. Among those biding their time are individuals charged with archiving or distributing large tracts of data in-house and CD-ROM developers who need to create one-off discs for testing and premastering purposes.

With the introduction of the $3,899 PlayWrite system from Microboards, Inc. of America, it looks like the wait may be over for many DOS, Macintosh and Unix users.

New, not first. PlayWrite is hardly the first kid on the block. A little more than a year ago, JVC Information Products began marketing its Personal RomMaker. The system holds a half-height CD-R (CD-ROM Recordable) mechanism and a dedicated 700-MB hard drive that allows you to create a virtual disc image prior to actually burning a CD-ROM. Also included in the system is Personal Publisher, a first-rate software package for the DOS and Mac platforms. Priced from $9,995 to $12,799, the JVC system has proven a boon for a variety of CD-ROM developers.

Other vendors preparing CD-R products are Sony Electronic Publishing, Philips Consumer Electronics, Eastman Kodak and Pinnacle Micro. The advantage of the $6,495 Sony CDW-900E as a premastering system is that it leverages Sony’s long experience as a CD-ROM mastering house; in fact, some users are actually jumping straight from the desktop-created disc to glass master.

Because Sony’s software (particularly for the Macintosh) is fairly sparse, developers generally add third-party software, such as CDogen from CD-ROM Strategies or QuickTopix from Optical Media International. (Both packages are available only for the PC, but a Mac version of QuickTopix may be shipped by the time you read this.)

The CCD-521 from Philips and the PCD Writer 200 from Kodak share hardware technologies and list for about $6,000. Besides being able to utilize the software packages listed above, options for these CD-R systems include Easy-CD Pro from Incat system and Personal Scribe from Meridian Data, Inc.

Again, both packages are PC-only so far. (If you purchase CD-R software as a stand-alone product, it generally runs about $2,500, but a variety of hardware/software bundles that include your choice of CD-R drive bring prices down to more reasonable levels.)

Finally, there is the former price champion, Pinnacle Micro’s $3,995 RCD-202. Based on JVC hardware, the drive has proven most useful for individuals wishing to archive data cheaply and easily.

A VIABLE, BUT LIMITED DEMAND FOR CD WRITERS

The modest but steady sales figures for existing CD-R products prove that there is a viable, if still limited, demand for desktop CD-ROM writers. If the market is to reach full potential within the next year or so, it’s clear that there is a need for reliable, flexible and affordable hardware/software packages that work with a variety of authoring platforms as well as write to a spectrum of formats.

Enter the PlayWrite system. Microboards has been designing high-end CD-ROM authoring systems for some time. It developed the first CD-I authoring units for Philips, for instance. This is the company’s first foray outside its experience as a provider of equipment to other manufacturers, and it brings its experience, connections and price advantage to the table.

Drawing on an exclusive distribution relationship with Ricoh Company, Ltd. of Tokyo, Microboards includes Ricoh’s first CD-R mechanism in the PlayWrite. The system can afford to be aggressively competitive in price because Ricoh’s long history in optomechatronics and in the development of optical storage media allows for in-house design and production of the mechanism.

While several of the previously available CD-R drives are based on 300 KB per second double-speed mechanisms, Ricoh currently offers only a 150 KB per second unit.

Downside, upside. The downside is that it takes longer to create a disc on the PlayWrite system. The upside is that many double-speed CD-R systems choke when faced with keeping up a steady flow of data, particularly when working with older CPUs and slower hard drives or faster hard drives that incorporate sticky thermal recalibration routines.

Also helping to keep things flowing, the PlayWrite includes a 1-MB RAM buffer. (Early CD-R drives squeaked by with tiny 64K buffers; the Sony CD-R drive boasts 4 MB of RAM.) The box can reside anywhere on a SCSI chain and the footprint is a neat 9 by 5 by 13 inches.

Hardware is less than half. Hardware is, not so surprisingly, less than half the story when it comes to writing CD-ROMs. The software for the PlayWrite system, CD-Record 2.0, was designed by Dataware Technologies, Inc., a company known in the high-end CD-ROM reproduction world for its robust authoring and retrieval software. CD-Record allows DOS, Macintosh, or Unix machines to serve as the authoring platform and it writes to an impressive array of formats: ISO 9660, Macintosh CD-ROM, CD-ROM XA, CD-I, HFS, Unix v2.1, Rockridge and Red Book (16-bit, 44.1KHz audio).

Although we haven’t yet tested PlayWrite, the fact that the company claims conformity to true Frankfort specifications for multi-session recording is encouraging. The PlayWrite also supports mixed-mode recording, which allows you to include data for more than one platform or CD-ROM and audio files on the same disc.

The future is the desktop. The PlayWrite’s pedigree and price point guarantee that it will be a strong contender in the CD-R arena, but given the number of hardware and software vendors making noises about tossing their own products into the ring, the obvious winners will be the individuals hooking up CD-Rs to their desktop machines.

Of particular note for the future is an enhanced, lower-cost drive from Sony, entries from Yamaha, Mathematica Inc., and Trace, as well as Kodak’s just-announced PCD Writer 600, a CD-R that promises to record CD-ROMs at speeds six times faster than its single-speed competitors. A bevy of new software packages linger in the wings; Meridian Data’s Netscribe software has been designed to channel data from several sources on a network, for instance.

Suzanne Stefanac

PF MAGIC’S DIGITAL PARLOR GAMES
Social interaction via machines is the goal

The San Francisco-based interactive entertainment company PF Magic, which has been quietly stockpiling content, creators and strategic partners, including AT&T and Sega, for the past two years, is on the verge of shipping its first product — an interactive parlor game that is different than any new media title we have seen.

With the group-oriented entertainment product — called 3rd Degree — expected to ship next month for Philips’ CD-I platform, PF Magic’s founders opened the doors of the company and let Digital Media take a look inside their bag of tricks.

Nothing up m’ sleeve. PF Magic is a privately held company, officially launched in August of 1991, and funded primarily through private investments and through a minority equity investment from AT&T Consumer Products division. The four-person management team collectively has an impressive track record in the computer, interactive gaming and consumer electronics markets.

THE PF MAGIC PLAYERS

John Scull, managing director of PF Magic and the company’s chief deal maker, was formerly CEO and president of Macromedia, a multimedia tools developer based in San Francisco. Prior to his stint running the authoring software company, Scull was with Apple Computer, where he had a leadership role in the late 1980s, helping to determine Apple’s strategy for developing multimedia technologies and for creating market opportunities for itself in that emerging marketplace.

Digital video, my dear Watson. Dave Feldman, who joined PF Magic shortly after it was launched, comes from Icom Simulations, a well-established video game company now owned by Viacom New Media. During his tenure as the vice president of product development, Icom produced award-winning cartridge and PC games, including Déjà Vu and Shadow gate. He also pioneered the use of digital video in an interactive title with the creation of Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective, which includes more than 90 minutes of digital video on a CD-ROM.

The newest addition to the PF Magic management team is Jim Guerard, who was brought on about two months ago as director of finance and operations. Guerard most recently held that same position at The Walt Disney Company, where he oversaw all finance and operations activities for Disney’s publishing division and its art and licensed publishing businesses.

Game designer extraordinaire. The visionary behind PF Magic is Rob Fulop, the company’s creative director and its cofounder. Fulop has been involved in video game development since the glory days of Atari back in the late 1970s. He is the creator of some of the most successful home video games ever developed, including Missile Command, Night Driver, Demon Attack, which was voted Billboard’s Video Game of the Year in 1982, and Cosmic Ark, which sold more than 1 million copies.

As an independent producer for Hasbro between 1986–1988, Fulop engineered the design and production of three feature-length interactive movies, including the infamous Night Trap, a title that involves scantily clad women defending themselves against masked men whose intent is violent, to say the least.

Avoiding the trap. While Fulop’s and Feldman’s previous titles are pretty standard fare for the 16-year-old male gaming enthusiasts, the PF Magic team says they are committed to avoiding the trap of creating titles such as Night Trap. “I don’t think we need to do blood and guts to have fun,” says Fulop. Instead the company plans to focus on what he calls creative social action products. “We are most interested in how we can use the computer to encourage human interaction,” he says.

COMPUTERS, GAMERS: NOT A ONE-TO-ONE RELATIONSHIP

Certainly the company’s first title, 3rd Degree, is designed to generate that social interaction. It is the first interactive group-oriented title we have seen. As the name infers, the game revolves around the players — there must be at least three — putting each other in the hot seat.

Each player is presented (through a series of still images and digital audio) with a moral conundrum and then asked what he or she would do in that situation. For instance, you have just rented an X-rated movie and you run into one of your former (and quite prim) school teachers. She sees your selection. What do you do?

That’s what friends are for. You are asked to pick your answer using the CD-I joystick from four different options. Your answer is registered in the computer, but is kept secret from the other players. It is then up to the other two players, who in essence don the robes of prosecuting attorney and judge, to decide first what your answer was, and second, if they think you were being honest in how you answered. You get to find out what they think you would have done.

One can imagine that the conversations could get pretty lively as friends and family begin testing and questioning the strength of each other’s moral fiber. This is not a kid’s game; it is targeted toward adults, who still enjoy playing games, turning them into a centerpiece around which banter and conversation flows. Similar to Trivial Pursuit, the company plans to develop a series of 3rd Degree software that will include themed questions that will appeal to different age groups and types of people.

It is PF Magic’s hope that these digital parlor games will motivate people to stay home and “fire up the TV set” when looking for a little interactive fun. The product is expected to be shipped in the first week of November; it is priced at $39.98.

Of magic tricks and flicks. The second two titles to come out of PF Magic are also for the CD-I platform. Both are still in development and are expected to be shipped in early to mid-1994.

The furthest along of the two in terms of development is a children’s interactive magic kit/game that may trick some adults as well. Based on mentalist Max Maven’s actual magic act, the title offers “one-button magic, with the banter,” according to Scull.

Based on the demo we saw, MaxMagic looks promising. The main character, a digital magician, should captivate children’s attention; he looks a lot like the mystical arcade magician in the movie Big. We imagine that the kids will play with MaxMagic by themselves but then want to show off their magical prowess to family and friends, mimicking Max’s running patter as they perform the tricks they learned under his tutelage. While some of the magical tricks we saw were absolutely transparent, for instance, guessing someone’s astrological sign by a process of elimination, others were clever. (We are still trying to figure out how one of the tricks was done.)

The original cliffhanger. The third title, which the PF Magic team was reluctant to discuss in any detail, is based on vintage cliffhanger serials, such as The Crimson Ghost, featuring Clayton Moore of Lone Ranger fame and licensed (non-exclusively) from Republic Pictures Corp., the company that created the classic matinee Cliffhanger serials during the 1930s and 1940s.

Code-named Flicks, the title is an interactive movie/game in which players will be able to mix and match episodes. It includes 45 minutes of video excerpts from The Crimson Ghost.

To combat the “replayability” problem that exists with many of the digital video games that are available today, Fulop says players of Flicks will need to play the title dozens of times before they can figure the game out. He says in the final product, gamers will have a different experience each time they play. (We can’t judge, because we didn’t see the title even in development.)

Making the most of CD-I. Each of the PF Magic games discussed takes advantage of what CD-I technology does best and doesn’t bother with the rest, according the Fulop. He calls it constraint-oriented design, a rather generous way of putting it.

“CD-I is great for [still] pictures, graphics and audio,” he says. And to that end, he and the PF Magic team used a lot of high-quality still images in a montage format to give the illusion of motion and developed computer-based characters with limited movement. For example, MaxMagic is really a “Mr. Potato Head”-like character that remains immobile, except that his mouth and eyebrows move when he speaks. In addition, the company focused heavily on the audio aspects of each of the titles, hiring San Francisco Bay area talent to do voiceovers for the digital characters.

PHILIPS NEEDED TITLES, DEVELOPERS NEEDED CASH

Despite the known limitations of the player, PF Magic says it opted to support Philips CD-I because it needed funding to develop titles, and didn’t want to give away pieces of the company in order to raise that money. Instead, PF Magic agreed to give PIMA exclusive rights to both 3rd Degree and MaxMagic; PF Magic has rights to Flicks and plans to bring it out on other platforms.

While today that deal may seem one-sided in Philips’s favor, in 1991 when PF Magic signed on, Philips was the only large media company funding small new media publishers for interactive development. Today, both the size of the market and the number of moneyed media companies looking for interactive development teams has grown, putting PF Magic in a better position to negotiate its creative rights on a variety of platforms.

“We need to see the success of the CD-I player this Christmas in order to make a commitment to continue developing for CD-I,” says Scull.

Works in progress. On average, development costs for PF Magic’s titles have ranged in price between $350,000 and $500,000. In addition to its commitment to Philips, PF Magic is creating at least one original title for the 3DO Multiplayer as well as a couple of Sega games and Macintosh and MPC-based CD-ROM games.

The PF Magic team was reluctant to discuss any of these works in progress since, according to Scull, they don’t want “to drive the multimedia hype machine that so many other interactive companies get caught in.” They will talk about the titles as they move closer to final products. PF Magic is also a registered developer for Nintendo. The team says they are “platform-agnostic” and will develop content for any appropriate distribution medium, including interactive television systems.

PLAYING ON THE EDGE WITH SEGA AND AT&T

Perhaps the most exciting news at PF Magic is the upcoming release of the hardware the team is creating in conjunction with Sega and AT&T. Called The Edge 16, the communications device attaches to Sega Genesis machines and allows two Sega Genesis players in different locations to play and talk with each other over a standard phone line.

The Edge is built around a fast (9600 baud) modem that plugs directly into the top of a Sega Genesis machine. Game cartridges then slide into the top of The Edge. The design allocates half of the modem’s bandwidth to the game’s joystick and the other half for voice, a very clever device that allows a single home phone line to be used for gaming and talking simultaneously.

Both players fire up their Genesis games, then one calls the other via The Edge modem. The ingenious design tricks the Genesis system on either end into acting as though the phone input is actually a second joystick, so all actions are duplicated on each player’s screen as though they were in the same room.

Digital trading cards. In addition, The Edge will contain four slots for “custom game enhancement cards.” About the size of a credit card and containing embedded intelligence, the portable cards are unlimited in their capacity, but because of economics, PF Magic says most cards will hold the equivalent of 4K of RAM and 32K to 128K of ROM. Thus, a Genesis player can save his or her favorite team or character or game scenario on a card, or add a new character to an existing Edge-compatible game. The folks at PF Magic envision a market for wizards, for example, or warriors. According to Scull, the company is investigating ways for players to take characters they’ve created and place them in a completely new game.

The Edge 16, which was designed by PF Magic and manufactured and marketed by AT&T, is not compatible with existing Sega Genesis game software. Many of the large game developers, however, including Sega, Electronic Arts, Tengen, MicroProse and Gametek, are among the 30 companies that have publicly agreed to support the technology.

There’s no reason they shouldn’t, since the design could create a rich new revenue stream. Game developers could create new characters, new weapons and new game scenarios for existing software and then sell them separately on Edge cards.

The Edge 16 is expected to ship in the summer of 1994 for about $150. It will support any standard IBM/AT-style keyboard. A customized keyboard is in development within AT&T. The individual data cards will retail for less than $20.

By the time The Edge ships, PF Magic believes it will be ready to support and access AT&T’s ImagiNation Network, formerly known as the Sierra Network, an online gaming service. Although none of the companies involved will publicly discuss their plans in detail, there is no technical reason The Edge peripheral could not connect Sega Genesis systems to other online services, including Compuserve, America Online and Prodigy.

In addition, there’s been no public announcement on whether The Edge will work with the new Sega Channel interactive cable network. We would be surprised if it didn’t, since each of these companies — most notably AT&T — is looking for a direct pipeline into the home.

OUT OF THE HAT, AND INTO THE FRYING PAN?

PF Magic believes it is creating the original software and hardware to build a digital home arcade, where we can still interact with our peers but don’t have to face the dangers of a real urban “fun house” (not necessarily so fun in some cities) or the prospect of a road trip.

Even if PF Magic fails to fulfill its vision, the company’s initial offerings — even if they are not your idea of fun — has added a new dimension to how we perceive an interactive gaming experience. Titles such as 3rd Degree, for example, help dispel the notion that video games require a one-to-one relationship between man and machine, and we use the gendered term advisedly.

That title, as well as The Edge technology under development, encourages and even requires human interaction. Though somewhat unseemly in today’s overheated video game world, the premise of group-oriented interactive media is an idea worthy of consideration.

Janice Maloney

DIGITAL PICTURES OPENS UP
New titles, genres, possible technology licensing on horizon

Digital Pictures, the Palo Alto, CA-based company that hit the jackpot with its Night Trap and Sewer Shark video games for the Sega CD system, is releasing three new titles under its U-Direct interactive “movie” label and considering licensing some of its core technology for interacting with video data, which is the company’s specialty.

CHANGING THE STATUS QUO ABOUT VIOLENCE, WOMEN?

DP’s new titles seem less aggressively violent and/or sexual in tone than their predecessors (and, we should add, than the standard for video games).

You may recall that Night Trap, Digital Pictures’ first title, was banned in the United Kingdom and got a great deal of flack in the U.S. because of its plot: scantily clad adolescent girls left alone at home for a slumber party being stalked by a hoard of black-suited and masked men.

But since then, company CEO and president Tom Zito and his team have started to change the status quo. For example, Amanda Lathroum, producer of one of DP’s new titles, Ground Zero Texas, says she worked hard to “raise consciousness” around such controversial issues such as violence while the game was being designed and built.

In Ground Zero Texas, for example, the plot centers around destroying a party of aliens taking over a small Texas town. Part of the challenge of the game is to kill only aliens; if the player shoots a human, even by accident, the game is over immediately. A small step perhaps, but a start.

The “beefcake” division. In addition, Zito says, Lathroum will take on the task of creating a women’s software division at DP. The fact that he half-jokingly calls it the “beefcake” division is testimony to one genre of games DP is likely to develop for women and girls (Fabio Interactive was actually mentioned), but having met Lathroum — who has a Ph.D. in linguistics and an undergraduate degree in fine art — we have faith that she will broaden the charter.

SWITCH DOES GENRE-BENDING WITH VIDEO, GAMES

Digital Pictures has done some genre bending with another of its new U-Direct titles called Switch, directed by Mary Lambert (who directed the Pet Sematary movies and Siesta) and starring singer Debbie Harry, teen heartthrob Corey Haim and R. Lee Ermey, the drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket. (Music is by Thomas Dolby.)

The game centers around an apartment building in a bad neighborhood, where one of the residents has built an elaborate security system to trap nogoodniks. But he’s found himself accidentally trapped in the basement, and it’s up to the player to snag the bad guys until he can figure a way out.

Tricky video. Switch finds a nifty way around the problems we’ve anticipated with using real video footage in video games; i.e., the literal imagery either detracts from the game play itself or the ability to keep playing it over time (see Vol. 2, No. 7, p. 17).

The Switch video does just what you’d expect video to do: it keeps you occupied. But while you’re gawking at the pretty pictures, an onscreen floor plan shows where the bad guys are entering the building. If you aren’t paying attention and they keep getting in and escaping without your trapping them, you get kicked out of the building and you lose.

A reason to get good fast. Less politically correct but technically impressive is the new Prizefighter title that makes excellent use of both black-and-white videography (a homage, says the producer, to Raging Bull) and the first person point of view. Game play evokes a fairly visceral response, especially if you’re a lousy boxer, since every time you take a punch, the camera jars the screen image in such a way that you feel like your head got hit. We aren’t wild about this one in terms of subject matter, but it’s quite well done.

A POTENTIAL MARKET FOR DP’S PROPRIETARY TECHNOLOGIES

DP’s Zito says outside game producers are approaching the company about some of its proprietary authoring technology. He claims a number of CD-ROM developers have asked about licensing DP’s DigiChrome scheme for color reduction (the Sega can only display 32 colors at a time) and compression (nearly 100:1).

In addition, its Instaswitch technology for interleaving multiple tracks of video — which controls how to buffer and switch video coming off a compact disc — virtually eliminates the usual and annoying lag time between “click” and action in interactive CDs.

Though Zito says that DigiChrome is getting the lion’s share of the attention from potential licensees today, he believes Instaswitch will become very important to the company if and/or when digital cable becomes a significant force in interactive television.

Denise Caruso

RULES FOR PCS ALLOCATION ANNOUNCED
FCC divides the pie, prepares to count its money

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will hold an auction in June 1994 to allocate 120 MHz of radio spectrum for wireless Personal Communications Services, or PCS.

The FCC’s plans for the allocation of PCS, while not quite answering all of the questions facing people with an interest in PCS, show that the agency is thinking about many of the complex political and social issues before making its intentions public.

Divide and allocate. Based on Rand McNally data, the commission will divide the country into 47 major and 487 minor economic regions. Auctions will be held for licenses to provide service in each of these areas. Of the 120 MHz, each major region would have two 30-MHz chunks, and the smaller regions would be allocated one 20-MHz block and four 10-MHz blocks of spectrum, giving each region the potential of seven different PCS operators.

Since the wavelength for PCS is on the higher end of the radio spectrum, and therefore less powerful, the radius of coverage around each transmitter would be smaller — approximately one city block. Initially, the technology would enable telephones to act as part of a home or office system, but switch seamlessly to a wireless network when out of the range of the home or office.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR A HUGE BUSINESS

In breaking down the country and the spectrum into small pieces, the FCC is attempting to provide opportunities for smaller companies and companies owned by minorities or women to participate in what is certain to be a huge business. The FCC intends to make certain provisions to the auction that grant incentives to these groups, but those plans have not yet been announced, prompting one commissioner to vote against the plans.

Leave it to the market. By implication, the FCC’s plans leave many PCS issues to sort themselves out in the market. While no single company can own more than a third of the available spectrum, and existing cellular operators are forbidden from owning spectrum in the same region where they provide cellular service (with some exceptions), most other issues are up for grabs.

For example, it will be possible for licensees to combine or resell their licenses in order to create larger blocks of spectrum and/or wider service areas. Under this scenario, a number of different organizations may combine to provide nationwide coverage, giving more people opportunities to have a piece of this pie.

Consortiums ahead. One such consortium is already established, headed by the long-distance telephone carrier MCI. The PCS Consortium now boasts more than 200 participating companies, including local telephone companies (not regional Bells), cable television companies (including Viacom, Jones Intercable and Times Mirror Cable), paging companies, and utilities. The consortium’s goal is to be able to compete effectively against AT&T/McCaw and the RBOCs in the emerging PCS market.

The standards thing. Another issue left unresolved is the data standards to be used over the airwaves. With so many different blocks, there could be incompatibility problems. The FCC, however, felt that rather than dictate these standards, it would let the licensees sort it out. This could prove to be a very messy situation.

In addition to the 120 MHz allocated for licensed services, an additional 40 MHz will be set aside for unlicensed use — small “campus-wide” communications applications that do not require government licensing, but are essentially wireless and private local area networks. (Please see Vol. 2, No. 6 for more on licensed and unlicensed PCS.)

LICENSING FEES MAY BE WINDFALL FOR FEDS

It is clear that one of the primary goals of the auction is to raise money for the federal government coffers. Some estimates put the potential income at more than $10 billion, which the government could apply against the federal deficit.

Greed or good sense? The auction of spectrum appears to be an unabashedly greedy course of action on the part of the federal government. After all, an auction by definition means the license goes to the highest bidder. Previous allocations of spectrum have been handled by lottery, with the government collecting only application fees.

But the lottery method generated rampant speculation once the original license was won, with people immediately reselling their licenses on the market to the highest bidder. While the government is certainly making a buck out of this process, it makes more sense for the FCC to collect the revenue than speculators. There will certainly still be reselling, but this should cut down on the outright gambling that was apparent in the cellular lottery, for example. License grantees are also required to offer services within a certain time period, or risk losing the spectrum.

David Baron

>BRIEFS
WIRELESS ACCESS IS IN THE CARDS

After two years in development, Silicon Valley-based startup Wireless Access unveiled its first-generation “all-in-one” PCMCIA card that can provide multiple communication services for personal digital assistants and mobile computing devices.

The AccessCard conforms to the form factor mandated for the PCMCIA card architecture — the credit-card-size circuit board that slips into electronic devices to add additional functionality and memory — but it packs some custom (patents pending) design concepts and technology that to date have left it without competition.

In its initial release, AccessCard will provide one-way messaging services and is the first such device to include a high-powered antenna inside the card to prevent breakage.

In addition, the card has what Judy Owen, president and CEO of Wireless Access, calls an “object-based communications design environment.” The company has developed an application-specific digital signal processing (DSP) architecture so that multiple communication services can be placed on the same silicon without compromising functionality. The DSP is designed so that these “communication objects” are only activated as needed.

Potentially this architecture will enable the company to provide multiple communication services running independently on one PCMCIA card. According to Owen, this will allow the company to help customers migrate to better solutions as communication infrastructures change over the years.

An additional benefit of the AccessCard’s ability to use only the services called upon is a power-conserving architecture and, therefore, extended battery life. According to Owen, the card has a battery life of about 30 days for one-way paging — better than most of today’s standard pagers. The card can be powered internally or by the machine hosting it.

AccessCard supports all 900-MHz paging carrier services and is capable of supporting 16 “cap codes” — a feat even its closest rival Motorola cannot match — which allows paging carriers to provide a wide range of information and communications services.

The AccessCard, which is expected to be available to consumers this December for about $400, is initially being licensed to mobile computer manufacturers and companies providing communication services. Wireless Access has received agreements from BellSouth MobileComm and SkyTel. Both companies plan to distribute the card — under their respective labels — and their paging services in bundled packages. Owen says the company will make more announcements regarding the support of additional paging carriers in the coming months.

The company has also won the support of two of the existing handheld computing devices: Hewlett-Packard’s HP100LX and the Casio Zoomer. Both manufacturers demonstrated the AccessCard running on their systems at the Telocator Conference in New Orleans last month and have publicly announced their support for the technology. Wireless Access says it is in discussions with several other mobile computer makers, including Microsoft and Apple Computer.

The company has received more than $6 million in funding from venture capital companies and strategic partners. They include Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers; Hook Partners; Olivetti Ventures, the investment unit of Olivetti; and Mtel Technologies, a unit of Mobile Telecommunications Technologies Corp. Also included are three Japanese firms: JAFCO, Nippon Enterprise Development and Kawasaki Steel Corp.

BMG, ION JOIN TO FORM INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT LABEL

In its first foray into the emerging interactive entertainment field, the Bertelsmann Music Group, the $3 billion-a-year company that is a division of Bertelsmann AG, the second largest media conglomerate in the world, recently announced that it has partnered with Ion, a small, interactive media startup based in California. The two companies hope to turn Ion into an interactive entertainment label on par with BMG’s traditional entertainment labels, which include RCA Records, Arista and Ariola.

The multimillion dollar deal — an exact figure was not disclosed — is the culmination of about eight months of discussions between the four founders of Ion (which we covered in depth in Vol. 2, No. 12, p. and BMG’s Christian Jorg, who is now vice president of BMG’s New Technologies division. The New Technologies group was founded in June with a charter to explore and integrate emerging technologies and cultivate talent through Bertelsmann’s worldwide distribution network.

The joint venture provides BMG with a 50 percent equity stake in Ion. In addition, it provides the music giant with a foothold in the emerging digital entertainment market. “Let’s face it,” said Jorg in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, “we don’t know how to program CD-ROMs. But we do have capital, distribution and access to repertoire.” (Repertoire in this case includes BMG’s music and video libraries — which include Elvis Presley’s recordings as well as access to individual recording artists.)

For Ion, which to date has no revenue and no product, the pact offers a much needed cash infusion.

According to John Eric Greenberg, president of Ion, the deal will provide the core members of the multimedia publishing startup with their first paychecks in a year. It will also provide them with access to BMG’s vast content libraries and its video and audio retail channels as they become more established as distribution outlets for CD-ROM. (Ion will initially distribute its interactive content through mail order software catalogs and direct mail.)

One of the most important aspects of the Ion/BMG joint venture is that Ion will remain an independent company from BMG.

While the two companies have formed a management committee consisting of two executives from BMG and two of the founding members of Ion, both claim Ion will ultimately be responsible for developing and implementing its own business plan. Ion will be free to work with media companies outside of the Bertelsmann family umbrella and can do work for hire on outside interactive publishing projects, according to Greenberg.

“If we don’t start producing [i.e., turning a profit] in the next few years, BMG is going to start coming down on us,” says Greenberg. “They are in business after all, but for the next few years we have a chance to prove ourselves and really try to make our mark in the new entertainment industry.”

Ion’s first title is expected to be released early next year. It is an interactive music CD-ROM based on David Bowie’s recent hit single, Jump They Say. The title, which was expected to ship in June, has been delayed because Ion is in the process of patenting technology it developed while creating the CD-ROM.

The company plans to release three or four additional titles next year, according to Greenberg. Although BMG and Ion will not discuss what those titles might be, Greenberg says an interactive compilation based on RCA’s extensive jazz library is not unlikely. In addition it makes sense that Ion would take advantage of RCA’s extensive Presley library.

Since the Ion announcement, BMG corporate has announced a deal with TeleCommunications, Inc. to form an interactive music channel that will enable viewers who have cable to buy music videos and related merchandise and services directly. Although details on the service were unavailable at press time, the national launch of the music channel is expected in mid-1994.

MCCAW’S CLAIRCOM SIGNS AIR-TO-GROUND SYSTEM DEALS

As promised by Craig McCaw at Seybold’s Digital World conference in June, the fully digital, nationwide, air-to-ground communications system operated by Claircom Communications, a joint venture of McCaw Cellular and Hughes Network Systems, now allows continuous call connectivity across the nation. This means that passengers on cross-country flights could be connected during the entire flight and never drop the call. The company has also recently signed agreements with five major international airlines for air-to-ground communications services.

By early next year, in-flight capabilities will include information services such as real-time stock quotes, news headlines, in-flight shopping services and arrival information such as weather connecting gates, customs clearance, airline, hotel and car rental reservations, according to the company. Claircom is not providing the in-flight services or even video screens. The company will look to other companies, such as Nintendo on Northwest’s fleet, to provide these services. (For more on Nintendo’s planned services, see Vol. 3, No. 3, p. 22.)

Claircom’s continuous call connectivity technology is made possible by software developed by Claircom and AT&T. Since Claircom’s founding more than two years ago, AT&T and Claircom have been close technical partners. In August, AT&T acquired McCaw and, consequently, 51 percent of Claircom. The two companies expect to continue working together much as they had before the acquisition, according to Todd Wolfenbarger, spokesperson for Claircom. (For more on AT&T and McCaw, see Vol. 3, No. 4, p. 3.)

Long-distance, in-flight calls using the Claircom AirOne system are routed through AT&T’s network. By employing a technology called call hand-off, calls are never cut off as they drift out of one service area. In addition, passengers using the AirOne system have access to the same AT&T calling services as they would on the ground, including calling card calls, commercial credit card calls, operator assisted calls, 0+ dialing and AT&T Language Line Service.

In order to increase call security, all calls and information entered on the phones (such as credit card numbers) are coded and encoded during transmission. The system is not foolproof, but Wolfenbarger says it is more secure than analog cellular systems. “The nice thing about running a digital signal is that you can continually upgrade the software to increase security,” says Wolfenbarger.

During the past year, Claircom has signed contracts with Northwest Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Alaska Airlines and, most recently, Air France and American Airlines to provide air-to-ground communications for passengers. Claircom will install phones in the seat backs and hand rests of more than 1,400 planes in the fleets of these airlines.

Claircom says its AirOne phones will be compatible with whatever in-flight entertainment service is chosen by the airline. AirOne phones include controls to work with these services. Flush-mounted buttons on the side of phones can control functions such as on-screen scrolling or video game action. Also, RJ-11 jacks for communications devices are being added to phones, according to Wolfenbarger.

3DO MAY PROVIDE TECHNOLOGY FOR US WEST ITV TRIAL

In a highly irregular move, 3DO made public its agreement with US West to supply its graphics engine technology for use in a US West interactive television trial that is still pending FCC approval. According to sources close to the deal, 3DO appears to have pre-announced that it will be a service provider — as a subcontractor to the actual settop terminal manufacturer — if the Federal Communications Commission gives US West the nod to move forward on its proposed video dialtone testbed in Omaha, NB.

Not surprisingly, the announcement came the same week that Panasonic released its $700 REAL brand 3DO Interactive Multiplayer into retails stores nationwide.

According to 3DO’s chief operating officer Hugh Martin, the company will supply its 32-bit RISC chip technology as well as its parallel processing technology for US West’s proposed two-way broadband trial in Omaha. The trial, if approved, will be the largest ITV trial in the United States, with the actual two-way broadband technology passing about 60,000 homes. US West expects that 9,000 homes will actually participate.

According to Martin, the strategy behind the proposed US West trial is to “prove out the technology and to understand the buying habits of the public.” He says US West selected 3DO because the platform exists and because developers are already creating programming for the player. To date, some 150 3DO software licensees are actually developing content.

“If you look at the economics of a trial today, it is really tough to justify developing interactive programming that will only reach 4,000 homes,” he says. “But in our case, we already have content [in the form of the] titles being developed for the Multiplayer.”

Martin says 3DO will create a file format conversion tool for the Multiplayer that will allow 3DO content to be accessed via US West’s ITV servers.

US West declined to comment on why the telco selected 3DO. “We do not make public the reasons why or why not we choose a service provider,” says Terri Howell of US West. “We explain the reasoning behind our decisions to each of the companies involved.”

In addition, US West declined to publicly name other service providers expected to participate in the Omaha test, since the two-way broadband trial is still pending FCC approval. It is rumored, however, that Scientific Atlanta will develop settop box technology and that Digital Equipment Corp. will supply the server hardware. (Martin says that the settop terminal will have a connector on the back to plug in a CD-ROM drive.)

For US West, FCC approval cannot come fast enough. Not only will it mean an end to the rumor mill — the telco says it will identify its selected service providers if and when the FCC okays the trial — but will also give it an opportunity to get to work before winter begins in Nebraska.

“Under the best of circumstances we would have liked to have begun work [laying cable underground] in July,” says Howell. “We do not want to disrupt the lives of the people involved in the trial by digging up the ground around them and leaving it like that until after winter.”

US West plans to initially conduct a technical trial in Omaha, which includes four to six months of developing and testing the hybrid, ITV system. Then the company plans to begin the actual market trial, which is expected to last about one year. The deal between 3DO and US West is non-exclusive.

SCHOLASTIC ROLLS OUT ONLINE SERVICE

Scholastic Corp., one of the nation’s leading publishers and distributors of children’s books, classroom and professional magazines and other educational materials, recently launched an online service called the Scholastic Network. The Scholastic Network, or SOL for Scholastic Online, provides education professionals in K–12 with access to curriculum materials, lesson plans, news and classroom-tested ideas and activities. Several hundred schools were members of the network at the time of the launch, according to John Lent, director of Washington, DC-based Scholastic Network.

The company’s foray into the online business was prompted by unsolicited input from educators. “We started to hear from educators saying, ‘Are you online? Can we send you an article online?’” says Lent.

Working exclusively with the America Online service, a test of SOL involving more than 20 educators across the U.S. has been in progress since February. Scholastic purposely enlisted people who weren’t familiar with online technologies because “that’s our marketplace,” says Lent. “Most teachers haven’t had experience with telecommunications.” The objective was to create a service that was useful and easy to use.

Lent said they quickly discovered that teachers most valued a high level of interaction on the network. By far the most popular feature of the service were forums in which teachers would exchange advice and offer support on issues ranging from the first day of school to ways to teach certain subjects and strategies for dealing with difficult classroom situations.

SOL says the network is designed primarily for educators, rather than students, because the installed base of computers in the classroom is very low. While in the 1992-93 school year, some 98 percent of the 103,000 public and private K–12 schools in the U.S. had computers in the classroom, the ratio of students to computers was 16 to 1, according to a study by Market Data Retrieval.

Despite the figures, several forums for kids exist on SOL. Once a week, the network hosts a forum with children and young adult authors. Kids are encouraged to ask the author questions and share story ideas. Other areas designed for kids include a kids publishing center for posting original poems, letters and essays, tag team writing projects to encourage collaborative work, and a “you gotta read this” area for book recommendations.

In addition, Scholastic sponsors nationwide student investigation projects in which classes across the nation team up to solve curriculum-based problems. Scholastic expects that teachers will monitor student’s use of the service.

Several different kinds of tiered accounts are available. Schools can buy a basic account with five hours free online time a month for $295 a year. The most expensive offering is 20 hours for $1,375. Each account allows five private mail boxes. Individual memberships begin at $16.95 a month for five hours of service. With a minimum of five accounts per school, schools can purchase a private area on the network for $6,500 a year. For school districts that subscribe to a minimum of 20 school accounts, the cost is $1,000.

“This is relatively inexpensive compared to what some schools have spent on technology,” says Lent. “We think this will bring some new life to old hardware in schools. Some people may dust off some old IBMs and Apple IIs which work with this service.”

Still, Lent admits, the cost may prohibit some schools from participating. He says Scholastic is working with experts in government to learn how resources such as chapter funding and federal grant money, frequently allocated to poor school districts, could be directed toward the network and other new technologies.

ZENITH DEBUTS HOMEWORKS FOR CABLE-PC CONNECTIVITY

Zenith Electronics Corp. recently announced a new interface for personal computers and cable television systems that uses the cable pipeline, fiber optic or coaxial, to send data to PCs. The system, called HomeWorks, is being tested by TeleCommunications, Inc. and Utah Valley Community Network in cooperation with Zenith.

HomeWorks is designed for home office computing, electronic resource services and distance learning applications that require large amounts of data to be sent over a network. Zenith hopes the technology will be adopted for use by business, in particular the finance, legal and medical communities, as well as schools.

Before consumers or businesses can access any cable-PC services, Zenith must convince cable companies to dedicate a portion of their conduit to the system. The system is being marketed to cable companies primarily as a way to expand their revenue and increase their service offerings, according to John Taylor, spokesperson for Zenith. Zenith has not announced any deals with cable companies.

With HomeWorks, a single cable TV channel can be split to carry four subchannels of data that can operate at 500 kilobits per second, according to Zenith. Its performance is faster than a 9,600 bits per second telephone modem or even ISDN at 56 kbps, claims the company. In addition, data can exist alongside regular cable TV channels without interference to either transmission.

TeleCommunications, Inc., Zenith and Utah Valley Community Network, a group founded to promote the development of community networks in Utah, are conducting distance learning trials of the technology in Provo, UT. The test, which has been ongoing since July, has involved more than a dozen institutions and individuals, including Brigham Young University.

In the home, Zenith’s new HomeWorks gateway product was used to provide access from a personal computer to a Novell-based learning server located in the TCI business office. The learning server contained files and data provided by schools and institutions involved in the test. For example, BYU used the system to allow its 30,000-plus students to access the school’s file server outside of the over crowded, on-campus computer lab. Other tests, with participants such as Salt Lake City-based System Integration and Analysis, involved sending video and multimedia data over the system.

“Most of the people who have seen it have been excited and said the quality was great, especially the data-transfer rates and the cost,” says Paul Venturella, general manager of TCI Cablevision of Utah. The goal of the test for TCI was to try out the system in a variety of settings. The groups involved did not conduct measured experiments or studies. Venturella says TCI does not have any immediate plans to implement the technology.

A HomeWorks PC gateway card and RF modem should be available by year’s end or early next year for $495, according to Zenith. A higher end system called LAN 4000, which is capable of operating at 4 Mbps, will be also available. The $895 system is intended for commercial applications.

C-CUBE SHIPS REAL-TIME MPEG ENCODER

C-Cube Microsystems has announced that production quantities of real-time MPEG digital video encoders will be available in the first quarter of 1994.

Though some are still trying to figure out what digital video is good for, others say that we’ve been held back from knowing by the lack of real-time compression technology. Scott St. Clair of Milpitas, CA-based C-Cube says, for example, that JVC — the company that did the first MPEG-based product in the world — designed non-real-time encoders to compress the 6,000 karaoke titles it offered with its Digital Vision product.

“It took them a year and a half to encode 6,000 titles; that’s too long,” says St. Clair. “It’s an enormous impediment — it takes 40 times as long as if you could just do it one-to-one. You just can’t make a business out of (digital video) without real-time encoding.”

The products, called CLM4600 and CLM4500, are based on C-Cube’s VideoRISC Compression Architecture and provides the same quality as an offline encoder. St. Clair claims the processor is “very programmable,” so much so that it can be used for MPEG2, MPEG1 and JPEG compression and decompression in real time.

“This is the first microprocessor developed specifically to process video as a data type,” says St. Clair. “There will be others that conform to the architecture, in the ‘better, faster, cheaper’ Silicon Valley paradigm.” But, he claims, they’ll all be backward compatible so that applications developed on today’s chips will run on C-Cube’s next generation processor.

C-Cube’s announced customers for the new encoder chips include Scientific-Atlanta, Compression Labs, TV/Com and Japan Business Television, which have designed the high-end chipset into satellite uplink and cable head-end encoders. Supporters of the consumer chipset, the CLM4500, include JVC, Commodore, Sony and 3DO.

MOXY, THE FIRST REAL-TIME CARTOON, UNVEILED

At an event that was surreal for the children in attendance and a thrill for those who’ve been waiting for the technology of real-time animation to hit prime time, San Francisco-based Colossal Pictures and the Cartoon Network unveiled Moxy — TV’s first real-time-animated cartoon character — late last month in New York City.

Moxy, a canine janitor whose distinctive voice and rabid personality is provided by comic Bob “Bobcat” Goldthwait, is powered by a Silicon Graphics computer and character animation software invented by Brad deGraf, director of new media for Colossal.

Though similar in concept to the VActor (virtual actor) system sold by Pasadena, CA-based Simgraphics, de-Graf, along with his former partner Michael Wahrman, pioneered the design and concept of performance animation software and showed it publicly for the first time at a computer graphics expo in 1988.

At the Moxy debut, Goldthwait controlled the character’s mouth movements through a special program while the designer of Moxy’s character, John Stevenson, “puppeteered” Moxy’s body.

The result — Moxy smart-talking to people in the audience from his monitor at the front of the crowd — definitely entranced the children in attendance. But it was doubtless a bigger thrill for those adults in the audience who’ve been looking for a way to lower the cost and time-to-market of animated figures.

Stuart Cudlitz, creative director of new media for Colossal, says that characters created with its real-time animation system were “designed to be performable. No matter what the character does, it’s acting,” he says.

That’s because, deGraf says, the animation software is designed so that any subtle motion by the puppeteer becomes expressive: the fingers of a hand at rest droop down, a raised knee drops the foot from the ankle.

Both De Graf and Cudlitz think performance animation has a future in the creation of CD-ROM content, since an actor could perform every iteration of a character in a fraction of the time it would take to animate manually. “It’s much better than using someone else’s authoring system,” Cudlitz says.

Moxy will make his public debut on Friday, Nov. 26 — a massive TV viewing day — as the host of the Great International Toon-In cartoon marathon, which will be seen on six different networks including the Cartoon Network, TBS Superstation and TNT. All six Turner Entertainment Networks will pre-empt their regular schedules for 14 hours of animation.

MEDIA VISION LAUNCHES FIRST TITLES

After five months of development, Fremont, CA-based Media Vision, a multimedia hardware company that founded a software publishing division this past May, is ready to release its first four titles.

All of the titles were developed for Media Vision by outside producers. The titles fall into two general categories: children’s educational and entertainment, and interactive videos and games. They are available on Macintosh and IBM-compatible platforms for $59.95 (Garden and Peak Performance) and $79.95 (Quantum Gate and Critical Path).

Quantum Gate, is the first in a series of science fiction adventure CD-ROM titles to be developed by Bellevue, WA-based Hyperbole Studios for Media Vision. Quantum Gate features more than 1,000 pages of text, almost two hours of video, as well as music and a multi-layered, 3D software interface developed by Hyperbole known as VirtualCinema. (For more on Hyperbole, see Vol. 3, No. 2, p. 49 and Vol. 2, No. 10/11, p. 17.)

The Forever Growing Garden, is an animated interactive title primarily for children ages 4–8. In Garden, which was developed by San Francisco-based C-Wave, players can plant and tend botanically correct gardens (which grow in real time even when the computer is off), play games and listen to music.

Peak Performance, the third title, features a race across the United States in which players earn points by answering trivia questions and participating in experiences such as hollering contests or a visit to the world’s smallest police station. The title, developed by Ken Bell Productions of Cambridge, MA, features video clips and still images from tourist attractions in the U.S.

The fourth title is Critical Path, an action-adventure game developed by San Francisco-based Mechadeus. Critical Path follows the adventures of Kat, a 24-year old renegade helicopter pilot who must navigate through dangerous terrain inhabited by a gang of thugs and an insane dictator. Video and animation are integrated into the game.

Based on the descriptions of these titles, they do not sound like breakthrough new media (we have not had an opportunity to review the titles). Stan Cornyn, founder and former president and CEO of Warner New Media and now executive VP of Media Vision, says these titles are the first offerings from a new and growing publishing division. His objective is to develop “intelligent” titles based on original content. The group will create a significant number of titles in house (with gestation periods of nine months or more), and will also maintain close relations with a number of outside content developers, according to Cornyn.

The Media Vision Multimedia Publishing group is headed by Cornyn and Min Yee, former publisher of Microsoft Press and VP of Microsoft’s multimedia division, now executive VP of Media Vision. Cornyn and Yee maintain separate offices of less than 10 employees each in the greater Hollywood and Seattle areas respectively. (Yee also coordinates development with Hyperbole Studios, a new media developer under contract with Media Vision to create several interactive titles for the company.) The two divisions of the publishing group function independently, but “not at odds” with each other, says Cornyn. “We individually create what we think is interesting.”

The first titles developed in house at Media Vision will be available in June, according to Cornyn. Cornyn says the content of titles from the group “will be all over the map.” Generally, though, they will leave the 8–14-year-old boys market to Nintendo, Sega and others.

Cornyn and Yee were lured to the new publishing division because it offered an escape from the “burden of content” that they had found in their previous positions, according to Cornyn. “Both of us knew the good conditions for doing [new media publishing] — to start fresh and not bring with you an existing medium, but to start anew,” Cornyn says. “There has been a lot of talk of content companies getting together with computer companies and that makes for a rather awkward pairing. That leads to adapting and not creating.”

Media Vision corporate in Fremont provides the publishing division with sales, manufacturing and testing resources. Approximately 10 Fremont employees work exclusively with the publishing division, according to Cornyn. Initially, the company will target proven channels for distribution, says Cornyn. Titles will be sold primarily in software retail outlets and by direct mail.

The company is keeping an eye on other distribution channels as well as developing for CD-I, 3DO and interactive cable. “When these mediums seem right to us, we will adapt,” says Cornyn. “We are future-proofing ourselves for these technologies.”

An additional six titles, including a series of multimedia daily planners, will be released by Christmas, according to the company.

INTERACTIVE TV SPECTRUM LICENSED IN NINE U.S. CITIES

The Federal Communications Commission has been busy this month. In addition to appointing Reed Hundt as its new chairman and announcing rules for PCS (see story, p. 21), the regulatory body announced tentative licensees for interactive video and data services (IVDS) in nine U.S. cities. An IVDS license gives the holder the right to operate a radio frequency-based interactive television service in a particular market or service area.

The licenses, selected by a random lottery, have not yet been finalized. For the next 60–75 days, the FCC will be reviewing secondary paperwork filed by the winners after the drawing. In this paperwork, the prospective licensees must show that they plan to meet the technical and engineering requirements as well as a rollout schedule for service established by the FCC. The FCC requires that IVDS licensees cover 10 percent of their service area in the first year, 30 percent in the third year and 50 percent by the fifth year. To deter speculators, the FCC has ruled that the licenses cannot be sold until the system is built.

The 18 IVDS licensees will have access to one-half megahertz of radio spectrum for broadcasting interactive data services in their market. The markets for IVDS include New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, DC, Dallas and Houston. The total number of television households served by these areas is 21,794,200, representing 23 percent of the 92 million households in the U.S., according to the FCC.

Although the applicant pool of more than 4,100 included major telephone, computer and media companies such as IBM, Bell Atlantic and NBC, the winners were primarily individuals and investor groups.

Several companies, such as Eon Corp. and Interactive Network (see Vol. 3, Nos. 3 and 4, respectively), say they are courting prospective licensees to adopt their interactive television technology and programming. Eon and Interactive Network provide data transmission via radio spectrum for interactive television programming. Neither Eon nor IN would comment on whether they had reached agreement with any prospective IVDS licensees.

So far, details about what the IVDS system will look like and the functionalities the sliver of radio spectrum will deliver are hazy. The winners of the lottery have not publicly disclosed their plans for developing the infrastructure or the content that will be delivered on the systems. However, the fact that licensees are capable of operating outside the yet-unbuilt interactive cable system may present some interesting opportunities for programmers who see ways to add value in the broadcast TV market.

MASSIVE LISTING OF PUBLIC DOMAIN MUSIC NOW AVAILABLE

As the cost of licensing intellectual property becomes an increasingly visible issue in the making of interactive media, developers may be happy to know that noted copyright and licensing specialist Barbara Zimmerman recently published The Mini-Encyclopedia of Public Domain Songs. Zimmerman claims this is the most complete listing of music now in the public domain. Any piece of music listed in this book can be used in any way free of charge.

Zimmerman is the president of BZ/Rights Stuff, Inc., a copyright clearance agency operating out of New York. She specializes in acquiring rights to music, public figures, film and video footage, literary works and graphic images for advertising, film and interactive multimedia projects.

Her book includes more than 600 listings of songs that are no longer controlled by copyright law. They are sorted by alphabetical listing as well as category, such as classical, traditional, children’s, holiday, etc. The catalog also includes composers and lyricists, as well as where the song originated, i.e., in a musical, movie or opera.

Some of the music listed include works of Beethoven, Chopin and Debussy; the music from The Pirates of Penzance, by Gilbert and Sullivan; “Meet Me in St. Louis,” by Andrew Sterling and Kerry Mills; and the traditional Irish folk song, “Molly Malone (Cockles and Mussels).”

A caveat: while the music itself is available for use, a particular performance may not be. Unless you make your own recording of a public domain song, you still may be required to clear performance rights and pay royalties. The book preface lists these “important cautions” detailing many of the copyright issues that still face users of public domain material.

The book will be available from BZ/Rights Stuff, Inc. for $299, which includes free telephone consultation on specific song usage questions. Every year, as new material enters the public domain, BZ/Rights Stuff publishes updates to the encyclopedia.

WINDOWS SOUND SYSTEM SUPPORTS TRUESPEECH

Just one year after Microsoft introduced its Windows Sound System technology, targeted toward business users who wanted to add voice annotations to their spreadsheets, the company has released a new version of the hardware/software audio computing tool that is designed to attract individuals outside of the business environment.

The system, which was made public in early October, is available in a software-only version that includes a custom-designed (and very cool looking) standalone directional microphone for $79. (A sound card is required to use this version.) The second version is a complete audio package that includes software, microphone, a set of headphones and 16-bit audio board for $289.

In addition to improvements in basic functionality, the new system has an advanced version of Microsoft’s Voice Pilot speech recognition technology. According to Bob McBreen, audio products group manager at Microsoft, Voice Pilot now includes the ability to switch from application to application, and easily create voice macros. Also new is a two-step confirmation process to deter cretinous coworkers from using a voice command to shut down your computer as they breeze by your desk, and expanded vocabularies.

Perhaps the most significant addition to Windows Sound System 2.0 is its integration of TrueSpeech, an audio compression technology developed by the DSP Group of Santa Clara, CA. The DSP Group developed the first chipset that could store messages on silicon rather than magnetic tape, and originally created the TrueSpeech algorithm for the digital telephone answering device market. DSP then licensed the technology to Compaq and Microsoft. Other licensees are expected to be announced during the next few months.

TrueSpeech compression is based on mathematical algorithms (patent pending) that are derived from the way airflow from the lungs is shaped by the throat, mouth and tongue when we speak.

According to the DSP Group, TrueSpeech converts these bursts of air, or words, into digital numbers that describe the bursts and the action of the vocal tract. Representing speech this way is up to 20 times more efficient than other methods of digital voice storage. For example, a one-minute long voice file that uses other PC audio technology would consume as much one megabyte, according to the company. With TrueSpeech, the company says the same file would be just more than 60 kilobytes with no noticeable degradation in sound quality.

The TrueSpeech technology was impressive in a demonstration we listened to. While certainly not matching audio CD quality sound, the technology offers sound quality that is more than adequate for voice mail, voice annotation, dictation and computer-based video conferencing and teleconferencing.

LAW LIBRARIES COPYRIGHT COMMITTEE EXAMINES NOTICES

As digital and interactive media commence to bend the definitions of intellectual property on an ad hoc basis, groups like Project Gutenberg — the not-for-profit, volunteer organization that hopes to distribute a billion public domain electronic texts, which it calls “e-texts,” by the year 2000 — and others who support more open access to information are paying closer attention than most to the letter of today’s copyright law.

For example, Project Gutenberg recently reported via electronic mail that the American Association of Law Libraries Copyright Committee is working on a project to collect examples of copyright notices that attempt to place more restrictions on use of materials than the standard “Copyright 19xx” statement does.

“Many Gutenberg volunteers have expressed ire in the past at particular notices,” said Mary Brandt Jensen, a professor of law at the University of South Dakota, in a news bulletin from Project Gutenberg’s headquarters in Urbana, IL. She asks that anyone with a favorite “abusive” notice send her a photocopy or fax of the notice, which she will forward it to the committee.

“I would tend to include all those that claim ‘All Rights Reserved’ when parts are obviously Public Domain material,” adds Project Gutenberg’s director Michael Hart. It would behoove hopeful multimedia developers who repackage public domain material for profit to be careful of how they relabel their new products.

Notices can be sent to Jensen in care of the University of South Dakota School of Law, 414 East Clark Street, Vermillion, SD 57069; fax (605) 677-6357.

WHITE HOUSE GOES ONLINE

Have an opinion on President Clinton’s health care reform proposal? Want to put in your two cents about the President’s plan to reinvent government? Among the many things the new presidential administration has tackled since entering office is the installation of an electronic mail system.

For the first time in U.S. history, the President and the Vice President can be reached via the Internet. Their addresses are President@WhiteHouse.GOV and Vice-President@WhiteHouse.GOV. You can also correspond with the White House via online services such as America Online (keyword Whitehouse or Clinton), Compuserve (go Whitehouse), The Well (type Whitehouse), Fidonet (see Echomail Whitehouse) and Peacenet or Econet (see pol.govinfo.usa).

But you may want to hold off on penning any impassioned political treatises or poison pen letters. Neither Bill nor Al reads the E-mail at this address. E-mail sent to the White House serves primarily as a source of immediate feedback on issues for the administration, much in the same way as calls to a senator or member of Congress does today. All E-mail messages are immediately acknowledged with a receipt, but are read, recorded and tallied by subject matter at a later date.

By the end of the year, the White House hopes the system will be capable of sending out tailored responses. For now, however, E-mail messages are printed out and responses are sent via U.S. Mail, so if you send a message to the White House, they ask that all communications include a return address.

HP, TIME WARNER TO DEVELOP PRINTERS FOR ITV SERVICES

As Digital Media went to press, Time Warner and Hewlett-Packard announced their plans to develop color printers that will connect to cable-TV settop boxes, allowing users of interactive TV services to print out sales coupons, advertisements, invoices, maps, magazine articles and color stills of TV shows (the potential copyright nightmares involved in the last two scenarios stagger the mind.)

Although neither company would comment, it is expected that the printer will be made available by April free of charge to 4,000 households in Orlando, FL, the site of Time Warner’s first interactive television trial. (The cost of the printer after that experiment has yet to be determined.)

According to Reuters, Hewlett-Packard says the service would be based on its Vidjet pro print manager technology, which is scheduled to be available in December. The technology permits video images from any source to be printed quickly on plain paper or transparencies.

>EVENT
VIRTUAL REALITY ‘93
Nov. 29–Dec. 2, New York City
Meckler
(203) 226-6967, fax (203) 454-5840

After years of speculation and media frenzy, virtual reality is finally becoming an industry. Meckler’s VR event, which incorporates a two-day conference program and an exposition, is designed for business developers, researchers and investors.

Prior to the conference, a handful of tutorials will prime attendees on leading VR software packages. In addition, a day-long introductory tutorial will be offered for those unfamiliar with the field.

A two-day, multiple track conference program will highlight major VR applications and the businesses that are emerging to serve both actual and potential marketplaces via products or services.

Overviews of international projects, including those from the National Advanced Robotics Lab, the Human Interface Technology Lab, IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, EXOS and the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, will open the conference.

Other tracks include health and safety, building a business ecosystem, medicine, VR development for persons with disabilities, software, entertainment, networking, design, business applications, investment opportunities, legal and financial pitfalls for start-ups, mirror worlds, defense conversion, hardware and simulations.

Two evening keynote sessions are scheduled. Dr. Robert Sonte of the National Advanced Robotics Laboratory in Salford, England, will review European applications and markets. Ben Delaney, editor and publisher of CyberEdge Journal will present American VR developments and applications.

More than 50 companies will be exhibiting their wares. Exhibitors include Silicon Graphics, Division, Sense 8, Polhemus, Sega, Virtus, Dimension, VREAM, EXOS, National Advanced Robotics Lab, Rockwell International, Worldesign, Virtual S, Katrix, Cybervent Group, Patricof & Co., Edison Brothers Mall Entertainment, Battletech, Iwerks, Vivid Group, StrayLight, W Industries, Simgraphics, Park Place Productions and Zombie.

On the last day of the event, a forum for venture capitalist and financiers and VR businesses will be held. A number of VR firms seeking capital will make presentations.

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