Is this technology a competitor or an additive to HAUP? Thanks.
May 24, 1999 08:38 PM
NEW YORK, May 24 (Reuters) - Shares of WorldGate Communications Inc. WGAT rose 19 percent Monday after the company said it received government patent approval for its technology linking television shows to related Web sites.
Bensalem, Pa.-based WorldGate, which provides Internet links to cable television customers using conventional set-top boxes, said the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office approved all 62 claims of its application to patent "Channel HyperLinking" technology.
"It provides broad patent coverage of the whole issue of linking television to Internet on a real-time basis," Hal Krisbergh, WorldGate's chairman and chief executive, told Reuters.
The shares rose $6.0625 to $38.625 on Monday on the Nasdaq stock exchange, at more than twice average volume. In April, the company had its initial public offering at $21 a share.
Although giants like AT&T Corp. T plan to roll out specialized set-top boxes offering a mix of Internet, television and other services, WorldGate has already begun to deploy interactive Internet TV using the latest generation of regular cable-boxes.
To provide speedy Web access through cable boxes that have next to no processing power, WorldGate installs computers at cable offices with enough punch to make up for that weakness.
That allows the company to offer Internet speeds four times faster than a 28.8 modem with the current cable boxes, and 900 times faster with the newer, digital boxes, in a service costing less than $12 a month with no large up-front costs to consumers.
WorldGate also has a patent application pending on this aspect of its business, Krisbergh said.
Krisbergh hopes that AT&T and other big cable companies will be customers, choosing WorldGate as the interactive face of their service. Possible competitors include companies like Microsoft Corp.'s MSFT WebTV, which might want to put its own browser on the TV screen.
Internet service providers like AtHome Corp. ATHM that use cable modems are currently used more on PCs than television screens, but could become competitors in the long run.
"The big guys are coming," Krisbergh said, which is why WorldGate is seeking patent protection for its ideas.
WorldGate's biggest cable partner right now is Charter Communications, which is controlled by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Charter began rolling out WorldGate's service to consumers in January, and the company currently can offer the service to about 500,000 homes. In the first quarter, WorldGate had revenues of only $549,000, up 17 percent over the fourth quarter, and lost $8.3 million, or 93 cents a share.
Krisbergh, the former head of General Instrument Corp. GIC cable equipment operations, said the company is working with more than 70 television network partners, including ABC, CNN and MTV, to provide Web links from their programming.
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