HUGE NEWS - Looks Like MSFT Just Picked An Interactive TV partner - and it aint SRCM... Note this interactive TV company has based its software on the new open standard for interactive TV (noted here in july 28/98 release) Message 5359276
developed in part by Microsoft and NC.....
INTERACTIVE TV STARTUP
SENDS MIXED SIGNALS
By Dan Mitchell
Red Herring Online
July 27, 1998
WebTV may be living up to its name. At the Herring on Hollywood conference in Santa Monica, a company called Mixed Signals on Monday demonstrated a product that allows broadcasters to meld Internet content with television programming. And several big companies have apparently signed on to an open standard that will allow the technology to run on almost television broadcasting platform. Details aren't yet clear, but such a standard -- if it is truly open -- could represent a major breakthrough for interactive TV after several years of failed experiments.
News of the proposed standard came as Mixed Signals president Alex Thompson demonstrated her company's Interactive TV Authoring Suite.
Mixed Signals' product is a software-hardware hybrid that enables broadcasters to add interactive components to programs, allowing viewers to easily call up Web content that relates to TV programs and
commercials they are watching. Microsoft is supporting the product in both its WebTV Plus set-top boxes and the Windows 98 operating system.
Broadcast power "There has never been an easy way for broadcasters to do this, and there hasn't been a way for consumers to view it," says Ms. Thompson. Earlier efforts at interactive TV -- particularly the cable system-based efforts of the early 1990s -- were stymied, she said, by the employment of proprietary technologies and the difficulty of incorporating data into TV programming. But the Internet has changed all that, she said: The product is designed to make it easy for broadcasters to fold the Web's HTML-based content into programming. And with open standards, all kinds of Web developers can potentially create content to go with TV shows.
Home viewers watching, say, a newsmagazine show on the debate over tobacco legislation can click on a button to see a Web page containing the proposed legislation, or be taken to any number of related sites.
Movie viewers will be able to click on a page containing facts about their favorite stars, or even order a movie made by the same director.
One outfit is planning to use the system to offer music lessons. Violin students, for example, can watch an instructor play a piece of music on television, then download the sheet music and illustrations of fingering techniques from the Web.
But the real breakthrough may be in commercials. Mixed Signals has created an interactive component for spots hawking the prescription allergy drug Claritin. Because of federal rules governing what information can and cannot be conveyed about prescription drugs via television, commercials for them are often so cryptic that it's impossible to even tell what ailments the drug is meant to relieve. But the enhanced Claritin ad contains links to pages of detailed information regarding effectiveness, availability, and side effects. Mixed Signals is also testing interactive spots for Maytag and several other companies, potentially opening a whole new avenue for electronic commerce.
The Web portion of programming is sent through that portion of the vertical blanking interval (VBI) used for closed captioning. Viewers have any number of options for assembling Web and TV content on the screen at the same time. A competitor, Wink, uses a similar VBI-based broadcasting system.
Standard fare The charm of Mixed Signals' authoring tools is that content can be delivered on multiple devices. Interactive TV experiments in the early '90s failed because proprietary systems burdened content developers with supporting many interactive platforms. "Everyone wanted to have their own special box," said Ms. Thompson. "It wasn't going to work."
But in describing the market for her product, Ms. Thompson apparently jumped the gun, telling the conference crowd that several big companies have signed on to an open standard for interactive television.
According to Ms. Thompson, as she left the stage, and WebTV "jumped all over me for saying that. They were really mad." She wouldn't say any more about the announcement, so it's unknown which companies have signed on -- though it's a safe bet that Microsoft is one of them. Microsoft and WebTV both refused to comment further.
Because of the information blockade, it's impossible to tell whether the standard will be truly open -- like the Web's Hypertext Markup Language -- or whether it will only be available to developers willing
to code to a company's specification, like the application programming interfaces of Windows, controlled by Microsoft and unavailable for inspection and modification.
Ms. Thompson said Mixed Signals is testing the system on USA Networks, PBS, several local TV stations, and other broadcasters. A test with
KTCS-TV, Seattle's PBS outlet, has led to discussions with PBS stations nationwide.
Ms. Thompson formerly worked for Power Computing, which had been a successful cloner of Macintosh computers until last year when interim Apple CEO Steve Jobs discontinued licenses for cloners. She ran Power Computing's trade show events, which became famous for their wartime imagery, with employees dressing in camouflage and shouting battle slogans.
The idea for Mixed Signals struck her when she was still at Power Computing, when she attended a presentation by Artemis Research, which later became WebTV. Artemis had the client-side technology down pat, but Ms. Thompson saw that there was no easy way for broadcasters to
incorporate Web content into their programming. "We also noticed that a lot of people were surfing the Web while they watched TV," she said. "And we thought they should be able to do it all on one screen." |
