Think congress will be buying GMST Monday?
thestandard.com
Congress Gets Preview of AOL-TV
To allay criticism of its merger with Time Warner, the online giant tries to show that AOL-TV won't discriminate against other services.
America Online (AOL) typically gives Wall Street analysts a sneak peek at soon-to-be-announced products, but for the new AOL-TV service to be publicly unveiled on Monday, the online giant came to Washington this week to give Congress a preview, too.
The demonstration was meant to soften heaps of criticism being circulated by rival Walt Disney and others in a high stakes lobbying battle to slow or block AOL's megamerger with Time Warner (TWX) . Complaints about the proposed combination have already drawn attention from lawmakers, as well as regulators reviewing the deal at the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission.
While showing off the new service's ability to let TV watchers surf the Web, read e-mail and send instant messages from a TV set, AOL officials also sought to demonstrate that the service would not discriminate against other programming providers nor improperly reuse TV shows without the permission of broadcasters.
For example, the service's electronic-programming guide that lets subscribers navigate through dozens or even hundreds of channels would list the channels in alphabetical order within categories. AOL said it would not sell channel placements to give certain channels top billing in the guide, which is a common practice in the cable TV industry.
And AOL's interactive features that link TV programming to Web content are built on open standards from Liberate Technologies (LBRT) , which let ordinary TV broadcasters create linked sites that would pop up on a user's screen. A broadcaster could send AOL-TV users a message that links to a Web site over AOL-TV by using the open standard and including the data in the vertical-blanking interval of a television program. The vertical-blanking interval is a part of a TV signal that can carry data other than video or audio, such as closed-caption text. AOL said it would not create interactive links for programs without first striking a deal with a show's owner.
Disney and others have argued that combining AOL's position as the dominant Internet service provider with Time Warner's many cable systems and popular media products would give the merged company a stranglehold on the distribution system for news, entertainment and everything else in an increasingly digital world.
AOL plans to announce details of the new service to the public on Monday. The service was previewed at several industry trade shows earlier this year, including the National Cable Television Association forum in May in New Orleans.
AOL-TV uses a special set-top box that will be sold in retail-electronics stores for a few hundred dollars. The box plugs into a satellite or cable TV box and connects to the Internet over an ordinary phone line. Like Microsoft (MSFT) 's WebTV, the service will allow TV watchers to surf the Internet, read e-mail or send instant messages without needing a separate computer.
Also today, AOL moved to allay criticism of its closed instant-messaging system by unveiling a plan to let people send messages between competing IM products. The plan would have to be adopted by the Internet Engineering Task Force and then incorporated into new products before messages could be exchanged freely, which could take a year or more. |
