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

To: yousef hashmi who wrote (40011)	4/20/1999 5:07:00 PM
From: VidiVici	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Jeez, what a joke... upgrade, downgrade, do the Herky-Jerky & spin 'er all around... It's making me sick. Either it's worth something, or it ain't. Think I'll go now.

To: yousef hashmi who wrote (40011)	4/20/1999 5:34:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Ellison promotes interactive TV.............................. nab.org Ellison Promotes Interactivity By Ken Freed TV Technology "I remember making this same speech about interactive television 10 years ago," said Oracle Corp. Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison as he began his MultiMedia World keynote in the Sands Convention Center on Monday evening. "The difference is that back then we called it the 'Information Superhighway,' and it was way off in the future. Today we call it 'digital convergence,' and although interactive television didn't appear as fast as we thought or in the way that we thought, it is happening, and it's happening now." 200 Channels Ellison used his keynote to announce the commercial deployment in the United Kingdom of a 200-channel interactive television service, British Interactive Broadcasting (BIB), owned and operated by Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB satellite service. Using all-Oracle technology, Ellison said, BIB is attracting 100,000 new customers per month, and the service just reached critical mass with a total of 1 million subscribers. The Oracle "iTV" platform employed by BIB and on display at NAB99 is billed as the first prepackaged scalable system that enables any broadcast, satellite, cable, or telecom to deliver the basic services associated with interactive TV, including near and true video-on-demand, e-commerce, distance learning, Web access, and email. The BIB implementation uses a narrowband phone-line return path, he said, but it will work even better with a broadband return, such as fiber, coaxial cable or a digital subscriber line (DSL), "and that's when the sort of things you can do on the system gets really interesting." Know Who's Watching Using Oracle database technologies, Ellison said, an iTV operator can know who is watching the television at any given moment and show the person targeted advertising and programming that matches the individual viewer profile. "Those who get these targeted ads are more likely to pay attention to the ads and buy what they see advertised," said Ellison. "And with online e-commerce, for better or worse, advertisers will have instant feedback on the effectiveness of their ad campaign. They won't need to rely on surveys after the fact." The same principle applies to television programming, he noted. With real-time information about who is watching what show, today's program-rating systems based on sampling would become obsolete. "And when you know what shows people are watching, it becomes even easier to target the advertising they see," he said. Additional Revenue Ellison stressed the opportunities for television service providers to use Oracle iTV database capacities for generating additional revenue. "When you can match people who buy stuff with the products they want to buy — like ballet tickets versus football tickets — you can do a better job of selling stuff to them," he said. iTV operators can take a piece of this action. During a demonstration of the BIB iTV setup, Ellison amused the audience by playing with the VCR-like control for video-on-demand. At one point he observed that his system does not allow viewers to fast-forward past commercials. "I wonder why," he quipped. He was more serious when commenting on the economies of scale made possible by centralizing databases of on-demand programming. Instead of costing up to $1,000 for a set-top box that can record up to 30 hours of programming, the nonrecording Pace box used with the BIB system costs a fraction of that amount. Ellison said Oracle is enabling iTV deployment for as little as $200 to $400 per video bitstream. "And that's why we think Oracle offers the only scalable interactive TV system that can be deployed right now," he said. "And we expect the price of interactive TV to get lower and lower every year."