WebTV and Microsoft vow for a PC/TV union. Intel uses
Ray Van Eng (04/16/97)
Although both Paul Allen and Bill Gates, founders of the Microsoft Corporation have personally invested in the WebTV venture, this mega acquisition is the biggest for Microsoft in Internet related products and services. Under the banner "Better PCs and Better TVs", Microsoft sees WebTV as the impetus for bringing about hybrid TV-PC technologies to the market before other competitors in the computing, entertainment and consumer electronics industries do. To that end, Microsoft is leading the charge to build a networking infrastructure that is multi-dimensional. To hasten the merger of Internet and television, the Seattle software giant is also proposing an open standard to allow digital Internet content to be delivered over existing TV broadcasting systems by making use of the vertical blanking interval (VBI) portion of the TV signal. During the Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, GA last year, Intel and NBC has experimented with the VBI concept (the Intercast technology as it is known) to combine real-time sports reporting with athelete stats and other information. So far, Intercast broadcasters include QVC and CNN (with 24 hours a day Intercast service), and NBC who is using it for Homicide, Dateline, and NFL, and NBA games. MTV will jump onboard soon. Coming to PC screen near you later this year are ESPN, Lifetime TV, Home and Garden, and The Weather Channel. You need to purchase an add-on Intercast card ($100 - $150) for your Pentium PC in order to recieve the service. Intel hopes to have 2 million users by the end of 1997. Just recently, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled that the four major networks and their affiliates must start broadcasting digital TV signals before November 1st, 1999 and by that time more than 50% of the households in America will be able to receive TV programming in streams of bits and bytes. The FCC has tentatively set the year 2006 as the point when the broadcasting of analog signals will end. However, High Definition TV (HDTV) won't come cheap for both the consumers and the TV stations. The initial HDTV sets expected by Christmas 1998 will have a price tag between $2000 to $5000. To equip a local TV news crew for HDTV production will cost some $8 to $10 million per station. To offset the hefty investment, the TV stations were allowed to use the digital airwave spectrums not only for digital broadcasting, but also for the transmission of computer data or even paging services. So what will our digital furture looks like? Audio, video, Internet IP data will all be accessible through a number of medium: land-bound, satellite, wireless, cable and broadcast TV etc. providing consumers and business with services that can be customized to suit different market segments: entertainment (wide-screen TV, interactive content, and gaming), business (news broadcast, remote access, financial, paging and computer data), personal (shopping, communication, banking, health care) etc. Of course, all these activities surrounding the convergence of TV and the Internet are about eyeballs. Pundits have predicted that there will be 250 million pairs of them focusing on the Internet by the year 2000. |
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