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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Rieman who wrote (35301)	8/20/1998 2:11:00 AM
From: Tim McCormick	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50808

More on Cable and Wireless from the Financial Times. CWC: Cable group strikes interactive deals By Cathy Newman Cable and Wireless Communications, the UK's biggest cable group, will today announce it is setting up its own interactive television service, stealing a march on British Interactive Broadcasting, the venture part-owned by British Telecommunications and British Sky Broadcasting. CWC will reveal it has signed deals with a number of companies, including Barclays Bank and British Airways, to offer subscribers home shopping, banking and other interactive television channels. CWC's interactive "TV Mall" will be offered as part of its 200-channel digital service to be launched next year. The news will come as a blow to BIB, which last week lost its second chief executive in a year. BIB, which has yet to announce any deals with retailers, is owned by BT, British Sky Broadcasting, Midland Bank and Matsushita Electric. Other companies that have signed letters of intent with CWC include the joint venture between Littlewoods Home Shopping Group and Granada Media Group. ITN, and Associated News Media, a subsidiary of Daily Mail and General Trust, are to provide inter-active news and information. Peter Howard, director of programming and content at CWC, said the company had talked about using BIB's product instead of developing its own. However, he added: "In the absence of any concrete business from BIB, we want to get on and launch something." Mr Howard said retailers had been attracted to CWC's planned service because the company had decided to adopt internet-based operating systems. BIB, which will provide home shopping services for BSkyB's 140-channel digital service, had originally planned to use a technology platform incompatible with internet-based operating systems. That would have made it more difficult for retailers to adapt their internet applications to run on BIB's service. CWC, which has 800,000 analogue subscribers, may offer its service to other cable companies and On Digital, the terrestrial pay-TV group. And from the C&W website cwcom.co.uk (click on Digital TV) "We have been working with one of the market leaders, General Instrument, as our turnkey supplier for a year now to design and build our highly sophisticated digital headends. Our extensive use of fibre means that our cable network is already capable of carrying broadband signals, so the only real changes which have to be made to provide digital services are at our headends." Of Course C&W is the largest shareholder of Hong Kong Telecom which has thier IMS service. Settop boxes? c-cube.com Tim