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Technology Stocks : IATV-ACTV Digital Convergence Software-HyperTV -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Mulis who wrote (5719)	7/27/1999 4:36:00 PM
From: Eqmx	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13157

This refers to ACTV. From today's TVGuide press release: <<<<<< We are also on track to deploy a software download later this fall that will add interactive advertising into the TV Guide Interactive portal in all of our over two million homes.>>>>>>> biz.yahoo.com

To: Jim Mulis who wrote (5719)	7/28/1999 11:18:00 AM
From: Mike Fredericks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13157

. We are also on track to deploy a software download later this fall that will add interactive advertising into the TV Guide Interactive portal in all of our over two million homes. Serious question - Back a while ago I was debating with someone here about the number of digital boxes available to IATV customers. The other poster's point was that we need to wait to roll out Fox Sports so we can get decent penetration numbers. I had hoped to cite a TVGIA news release to him showing that there are 2 million digital boxes out there (see the 2 million customers listed above) but in my searches found that most of these 2 million TV Guide Interactive customers still have analog boxes. (So he was right and I was wrong). This leads me to the conclusion that if TV Guide is going to roll-out interactive advertising to "all of our two million homes" by this Fall, one of the following should be true: 1) All of the TV Guide customers will have moved to Digital boxes by then. The interactive advertising could then conceivably be an IATV solution. At the same time, there should then be enough digital boxes out there to roll out Fox Sports, so there's no good reason for delaying Fox Sports past the Fall. 2) The TV Guide customers will still be mostly analog by then. The interactive advertising solution will then have to be analog-based for their analog customers and digital-based for their digital customers. IATV doesn't have an analog solution. So either IATV gets the digital business and someone else gets the analog, or one company gets both the analog and digital and it's not IATV, or IATV has developed an analog solution that they haven't talked about too much (they were developing this at one time). What I don't know is how difficult it is to produce interactive advertising, and whether it's easy to product interactive advertising that is usable on two different interactive platforms... IE can they easily produce the ad and make it viewable on Wink's analog platform and IATV's digital platform? 3) The press release exaggerates; only the digital subscribers are going to get Interactive advertising. The interactive ads will be available to "all two million homes" (as soon as those homes migrate to digital). Obviously, I'd prefer #1 above, even though that would re-open the debate of "why haven't we rolled out." One more question - is the interactive advertising a hyper-tv app or a multiplexed-signal app? I think that the former would enable a much higher level of interactivity, because the possibilities are almost endless. However, hyper-tv also requires lots of computers to support it... hence the 100k user NOC that was built a couple months back. If an interactive advertising solution used Hyper TV then we would need many many more NOC's. Hypothesize that all 2million TVGIA customers all with hyper-tv enabled IATV-interactive advertising... how many of those users would use the interactive advertising at once, and how large a NOC would we need to support them... -Mike