When asked, as he often is, how computer giant Microsoft Corp. plans to continue the winning streak that has made it one of the most lucrative companies in America, Steve Ballmer, corporate president and second in command to Bill Gates, invokes what already has become an old saw on the high-technology frontier: PC-TV convergence.
Ballmer and Gates call it the “Web lifestyle.”
Like a “Star Trek” Vulcan mind meld, the prophets of convergence tout a sudden integration by way of high-speed Internet links of the television set and the home computer into a single, high-powered information appliance.
In ways few anticipated, however, the emerging realities already transcend the basic idea of simply playing television programs on one’s computer or building computer functionality into television sets that double as telephones and fax machines.
Instead of waiting for a new generation of one-box wonders known as high-speed convergence appliances, the revolution has begun without them.
In reality, the “Web lifestyle” is more about creating a variety of approaches to use the existing Internet and ordinary PCs to alter the way people use such media as music CDs, books, magazines, radio stations and even family snapshots.
And it’s here now, not in the form of ultra-high-speed fiber-optic information appliances, but as breakthrough technologies already playing out in full bloom on an ordinary PC near you:
– Media analysts point to sweeping changes in the business of popular music as consumers begin to use their home PCs in lieu of stand-alone high-fidelity music players because CD-ROM-capable computers using Microsoft Windows 98 have dramatically enhanced the music listening and music buying experience.
Microsoft’s CD Player Deluxe, sold in conjunction with Windows 98, automatically logs on to Web sites controlled by Chicago-based JamTV Corp., which uses a huge database of existing CDs to instantly upload the name of the performer, album and the title of each track to convert the home PC into an ultra-sophisticated high-fidelity music player.
– Although only a tiny fraction of Americans have yet to see the now long-promised cable-TV/Internet connection service that convergence advocates tout, companies like Seattle-based RealNetworks Inc. have become Wall Street lions with huge success selling PC owners on so-called streaming video, a technology that sends moving pictures over ordinary telephone lines in a small-picture, jerky-frame manner that, nevertheless, is winning widespread acceptance.
An estimated 6 million Americans at home and in offices tuned in via computers to view Real Video broadcasts of President Clinton’s grand jury testimony.
– Increasing numbers of PC users are plugging video cards into the machines’ expansion slots that allow them not only to view cable TV or over-the-air broadcasts on a window in their monitors, but allows broadcasters to include a wealth of computer-type data such as program schedules or supplemental material relating to what’s being broadcast using that part of the TV signal called the vertical blanking interval.
Intel Corp.’s Intercast software already uses the VBI to do things like move the full text of news stories to a Web browser as a TV reporter reads it. This, among many other features, allows a user to record television programs and then seek specific parts of them by using the same sort of text searching done with traditional computer files.
– Microsoft has incorporated these VBI capabilities into WebTV for Windows, which works in conjunction with Microsoft’s recently acquired WebTV Networks Inc. and lets people hook a box like a video game to their TVs and surf Web pages and use e-mail.
Using VBI, WGN-TV, owned by Tribune Co., parent of this newspaper, now augments broadcasts of some shows with recipes and news blurbs and others with sports trivia, all moved as Internet text content rather than traditional video.
– Long blindsided by the rush to digital media, photography giant Kodak has come roaring back by moving away from traditional paper prints of family snapshots to posting the photos it develops on the Internet for retrieval via PCs or those WebTV game-type boxes.
Last month, Kodak joined chipmaking giant Intel in a plan to move family photos onto computer CD-ROMs that also hold software to easily allow a user to send copies of each print to family and friends via the Internet.
– Even traditional sources of books, recorded music and videotapes have moved to the Internet, where potential customers can listen to samples of music via PC, read the first chapter of best-selling books and even buy or rent videos for next-day delivery using such Web sites as www.tunes.com, www.reels.com and www.amazon.com.
The common ground is creating and selling the sorts of products and services envisioned by the prophets of convergence right now, instead of waiting for the long-promised day when the homes and offices of America will be connected by high-speed, fiber-optic telephone lines or coaxial cable TV Internet links.
“Our feeling is `Why wait?’ ” said Peter DiMaria, vice president at Tunes Network Inc., owner of www.tunes.com, which became one of the most visible of the new breed of convergence players by winning control of the Internet links used by the Windows 98 operating system to dramatically enhance the experience of playing music CDs in a multimedia personal computer’s CD-ROM drive.
Tunes Network, acquired in June by JamTV, a project of longtime Chicago multimedia innovator Howard Tullman and Rolling Stone magazine, lets any computer user running the Microsoft CD music player quickly reach a Web site and download a complete track list for each piece on the CD along with a wealth of Internet links about whatever artist is performing. The tunes.com site then uses the huge audience of home music listeners to pitch its inventory of CDs for sale even as it collects revenues for banner advertising and for posting hot links to other music-related sites.
It is only a matter of time, DiMaria said, before the company starts to sell music in the form of Internet downloads, in which highly compressed files holding each track are saved onto the customer’s hard drive.
Already, a Connecticut-based company, SuperPlanet Inc., is selling a program called CD Streamer that can store 30 hours of digital-quality recorded music on a 1 gigabyte hard drive using technologies developed by RealNetworks.
Because of copyright issues, SuperPlanet doesn’t include Internet features in its already popular product, but because the music is stored using formats created by RealNetworks’ Real Audio technologies, only minor alterations would be needed to allow one to record CDs onto a Web site and then play them through browser software, DiMaria noted.
“There is a lot that can be done today through clever use of existing technology even as we dream of a time in the future when convergence really happens,” he said.
As computers converge on the rest of the technologies by which Americans entertain, inform and educate themselves, these and other dramatic changes are blitzing the familiar landscape where one gets movies on cable TV, music on the radio or store-bought CDs and news in whatever form the owners of newspapers, magazines and broadcast stations choose to use.
“We use the expression `Web lifestyle’ to describe the way people are going to live,” said Microsoft’s Ballmer. “Whether they are in their family room, … in their car or strolling around at business meetings, they are going to want to be integrated into the world of information, and consumers will insist on that not only at work–they will also demand it for themselves as individual people with their own lives.”
With that goal in mind the world’s media elite launched a frenzy of mergers and acquisitions, hammering together behemoth alliances like Time-Warner-Turner or Microsoft-NBC-UUNet or Disney-ABC or AT&T-TCI or SBC-Ameritech.
Each of these pending or completed mergers and strategic alliances attempts to meld what are called content providers, such as newspapers or magazines, and providers of the electronic signals to carry the resulting blend of words, sounds and pictures such as phone companies and television networks.
Each megadeal reflects a different vision of a similar goal to prosper by the convergence of telephones and radios and faxes and televisions and Web pages and word processors and mailboxes into a single box connected to the whole wide world by wires or wireless devices sold by the dealmakers.
But even as these players bide their time and scramble furiously to lay their wires and tout their hypothetical deals, something strange is happening where the rubber meets the road to nanosecond Nirvana.
