No matter what delivery vehicle, it’s on the road

Much of the promise of digital media is based on content — the combination of video, audio, graphics and textual information, folded into a multisensory experience that will shape a rich, new means of communication for tomorrow.

Content comes in many forms today, and there are more on the drawing boards. Already, the applications sold by today’s successful (read: profitable) content providers — most notably, CD-ROM-based text and graphics databases — seem almost mundane, despite the fact that 20 years ago, the thought of publishing thousands of pages of text or hundreds of clip-art images on a single, silvery disc was a fantasy to most people except, perhaps, Vannevar Bush, who first wrote about such a concept in the 1940s.

The near dead and the unborn. After a brush with mortality, content-laden videodiscs — connected to personal computers for the sake of interactivity — have risen from the ashes as “video textbooks” of sorts, and they are being welcomed into schools as a way to help teachers re-engage a generation of video-saturated children into their studies.

Other delivery vehicles for content loom in the future: cable television, consumer satellite services and the phone companies will battle it out to provide interactive television programming, where the once-passive viewer participates in the program. They’re liable to tussle as well over the provision of media-enriched online databases — accessed via fiber-optic telephone lines — to deliver information services, shopping and entertainment.

Interactive CDs loom. Looming nearer on the horizon today, however, is the interactive compact disc. Similar to the screamingly popular audio CD, the so-called “CD-ROM” (for compact disc, read-only memory) can contain digitized text, photographs, graphics and, with increasing frequency, video as well as audio.

Most of these products are made interactive via the connection of a CD-ROM drive to a computer (at this point, the Macintosh is the computer of choice), which provides a way to browse and/or interact with the information via keyboard or mouse. Today only a handful of companies produce these disc-based “multimedia” products, though their ranks are growing.

And “consumer players” that connect to a television monitor (essentially, computers that come with compact disc drives and without keyboards or mice, using instead a remote control device), such as Commodore’s CDTV and the Compact Disc-Interactive (CD-I) standard proposed by Philips, have been motivating a new breed of developers as well.

A Mac-like zeal. Most developers and producers of these interactive, media-based products come to the task with a zeal much like that of Macintosh software developers in the early days.

Mac software developers also had a long wait before a market caught up with their vision. And similar to early Mac developers, die-hards such as Voyager and tiny startups such as Interactive Productions are staking their futures on interactive technologies, while larger companies can afford to bide their time.

How long can they wait? But how long can any of them afford to wait for a standard consumer player, or even a decent, media-capable computer that will allow us to participate in their visions? How do they decide which platforms to develop for today? What does it really take to produce an interactive media title, in cash and human labor? How are the little guys holding on, and how will the big players such as Sony and Time-Warner affect their ability to wait out the long stretch between vision and market?

Though we will explore all the various genres of content publishing in upcoming issues of Digital Media, the following story will examine the business strategies of this new breed of interactive developers — where they’re staking their bets and how they’re feeding their families and paying their rents until the rest of the world decides that the ability to interact with media in all its myriad forms is an idea whose time has come.

Denise Caruso