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

To: Robert Cohen who wrote (851)	3/28/1999 10:39:00 AM
From: anthony karpati	Respond to of 13157

Good article posted on Yahoo: messages.yahoo.com@m2.yahoo.com Interview with Tom Jermoluk: part 5 No Place Like @Home page 5: Going national How are you going to expand your 330,000 subscriber base to being truly national? We'll create a funnel, and Excite will be the front end of that funnel because they're ubiquitous. Excite will be our outward basic brand. Then we'll use the tie-in with AT&T and WorldNet. Wherever we go with Excite, we'll start trying to pull people in. We'll create a marketing program around [the idea that it's] good not only to be an Excite registered user, but [also] an Excite subscriber. Wherever we don't have cable footprint yet, we'll say, "We can fulfill you as a subscriber with WorldNet. We'll give you a narrowband connection, and then the minute we come to town, we'll upgrade you to broadband." [We'll] spend every dollar we can building the Excite consumer brand. We and our cable partners will leverage our connections and [keep]growing with Excite. We [have] 70 million AT&T long-distance customers. We have 70 million cable customers out there. And we're going to leverage those relationships and market the hell out of [those customers]. How long will it take you to get that broadband network up? We ended [1998] with [access to] 13 million homes, which is good, considering where we came from. Our goal [this year] is 23 million. I think we'll blow that away. AT&T recently announced [that it plans to spend an additional] $2 billion to upgrade TCI and [its] affiliate [plants]this year. That's a big deal because only 3 percent of TCI's plants are two-way. They were the laggard, and that's why it's good having AT&T come in. What's the compelling argument for Joe Six-pack TV user to buy into broadband cable? There [are] two different strategies: [one for PC users and one for cable TV]. Our broadband subscriber story closely to Internet and PC penetration. As that market grows, it's building our market because all those users will become disgusted with the speed at which [their Internet connection] runs. I have almost unlimited ability to [increase] that market share. The television I look at differently. I [don't] believe in Web surfing on TVs. I don't think people are interested in typing on keyboards and leaning forward and trying to interact with their televisions. I believe in one-button, one-click interactivity on the television set: See an ad, one click, buy the product, or [with] one click, go to another. Or, say you're watching CNN election news, and they start [announcing the results from] Georgia. You can say, "I want to see [the results from] California." You click a button and bring [them] up. It's interactive TV. I almost hate to say that because five to 10 years ago, people had a bad taste in their mouths [about interactive TV]. People have been talking about interactive TV for decades. But it's here now. We're going to be able to do this. One-click interactivity. People channel-surf today; it's nothing more than that. [Now] you'll have a choice, and that's going to be killer, and [the whole thing will] be funded by advertising. Our best estimates are [that] in the year 2000, $288 billion will be spent on television advertising. Today, the advertising [money] spent on the Web [is about] $2 billion. During the next two years, how much of that $288 billion do you think could shift into supporting interactive TV? [That could be] a dramatic shift.