Interactive TV's unclear picture - the real future of the telecommunications revolution - Cover Story

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 20, 1993 | by Philip Chalk

The other familiar form of interactivity is audiotex, telephone-based information data banks. New York Newsday offers such a service with information on the weather, sports and current events that is keyed by a four-digit number code accompanying relevant articles in the daily paper. In the future, the paper would like its display ads to include a two-dimensional bar code that can be read by a wand scanner.

Invented by the Long Island company Symbol Technologies, the 2-inch-square codes carry a kilobyte of information (enough to record the Gettysburg Address) and are a form of high-volume information transfer without any medium other than paper and ink.

Rod Durst, Symbol's senior director of product marketing, calls the codes personal data files and says that as soon as readers have the technology, the codes can be used to turn on a TV automatically and access online data banks - all with the wave of a wand.

"We need to identify what the electronic alternatives are for all the elements of our newspaper," says Fred Tuccillo, Newsday's director of electronic publishing, "and be the implementers of that, in order to keep the information franchise."

Still, popular interest in living on line may be less than avid. Bill Battino, a partner in the consulting firm Coopers & Lybrand in Washington who tracks developments in communications, says his research detects a qualified enthusiasm. "We saw a fairly high level of interest in interactivity," says Battino, "but cost was the mitigating factor - equipment expense, transmission fees, as well as learning and behavioral costs. We found that when all those factors were taken into consideration, there was a fair resistance."

Michael Noll, dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California, puts it more strongly. People won't want to live on the information highway, he says, because most have no need for such vast amounts of information. "We had the British experience with ViewData, the Knight-Ridder experience in southern Florida, the Times Mirror experience [in California], and a number of countries have experimented with videotex," he says, referring to tests involving electronic newspapers and related services, "and it has been a clear-cut bomb."

Home banking is another solution to a problem that doesn't exist, Noll says, along with "videophones - that obvious Edsel." AT&T tried the videophone 20 years ago and it failed. "The new AT&T one has bombed, too," he says. "People would pay extra not to have the videophone."

Noll even has doubts about video-on-demand, which many industry observers consider an obvious boon within technological reach. "If we could wipe out all the home VCRs" it would work, he says, but the level of satisfaction with current technology is likely to keep most consumers from making sizable investments in new electronics.

Shopping networks are equally misguided enterprises, according to Noll, because shopping is as much an excursion as a purchase. "The trick is not to figure out ways to keep people at home," says Noll, "the trick is to try to entice people to go out ... and while they're out there to try to figure out ways for them to consume."