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

To: Champolion who wrote (4115)	5/24/1999 10:09:00 AM
From: Mike Fredericks	Respond to of 13157

Champ- In a previous message I asked you to list your sources stating that IATV's allies (Liberty and AT&T) have invested in services that directly compete with IATV. Rather than list your sources, you said that I should go read every single AT&T press release and possibly I would find something. I am in the process of doing that (but AT&T has a bunch of news every day). Could you at least provide a time frame? I'm concerned that you have sent me on a wild goose chase, and just like certain posters here refused to answer my questions when I was taking what was viewed as a "negative" slant towards IATV, you are refusing to answer my questions now. (Then you accuse people of not addressing your points). I think that, if your statement is true (that AT&T and Liberty have invested in direct competitors of IATV) that this thread should be made aware of the specifics... if you could give me a time frame for the AT&T or Liberty press releases showing they are invested in competitors (the latest Liberty release listed all the services in which Liberty has invested, and I saw no competitors of IATV on the list) and if you could list the competitors (because maybe searching for press releases for that specific competitor would get me to the answer quicker) I would greatly appreciate it. Like I said earlier, the only release I've seen involving AT&T/Liberty and a competitor of IATV's is the release stating that AT&T would use Wink for its interactive advertising. This does not mean AT&T has invested in Wink; it's quite possible that AT&T wanted to reach the entire analog audience rather than holding off until Digital is more widely available. I don't know for certain. The other possibility is the MSFT investment in AT&T which guaranteed Win CE as the OS on more set top boxes (IATV can run on Win CE) and MSFT did allude to the fact that they will have their own interactive client and server, but didn't discuss any of the features (which to me means they haven't been fully scoped and thus the products will not be ready to ship in the 12 months stated by MSFT). Thank you for your reply, and I hope you have the time to provide me with some added details. Right now all I've seen so far is: dailynews.yahoo.com Which is a report from AT&T's annual meeting which neither mentions IATV or any of its competitors or even that AT&T is investing in interactive companies fnews.yahoo.com Which opens up with Gemstar and talks about how profitable it will be, and mentions AT&T's opening up broadband as a big plus, but under list of partners, does not list AT&T (instead lists MSFT et al) Also on Gemstar: cbs.marketwatch.com Which is an article on interactivity... Gemstar is discussed first, then Liberty Music (TUNE) but nowhere is it mentioned that LMG has an investment in Gemstar. biz.yahoo.com Which talks about the TCI/AT&T learning network, which some posters here claimed used HyperTV because of the distance learning component, but I said it did not use IATV technology at all; was put together by the folks at ossinc.net . If you go to the ossinc site (sorry it has frames so I can't give a direct link) and from the front page click on Education and then Technology overview, you'll see that IATV is not involved; this is a computer-only solution as you can see from the screen-shots on the education main page, and the technology overview says nothing about IATV. But at the same time, since TV isn't involved, I wouldn't consider OSS to be a direct competitor of IATV, and on top of it, I saw no investment just that AT&T/TCI used their product. If they had had a tv component would they have used HyperTV? Maybe, but they didn't, so it's moot. Liberty's year end results: biz.yahoo.com Which lists many (not all) of Liberty's investments, lists TWSTY as an investment; that's a company I'd never heard of but it appears to just be a cable provider based on news I read; lists ANTC as an investment, and ANTC has a subunit called "Arris interactive," and here is a press release from them, biz.yahoo.com but you see that the "interactive" means that they are developing cable modems with multiple upstreams for use by interactive content providers, which means that it's not really a competitor to IATV. Anyway, I'm wondering if these are the types of news items you're talking about or if there are others in mind; if you are referring to these announcements then I'm going to disagree with you when you say that Liberty/AT&T are investing in competitors. As you can see, I'm willing to do some work here, but blanket statements such as "Liberty and AT&T are investing in competitors to ACTV" are not helpful at all, any more so than "Mike F is wrong when he says something negative about IATV because I said so" type statements are. -Mike