John and Sheila Dobbie of Gahanna, Ohio, don’t just watch their television. They use it.
A few times each week, one or both of the Dobbies will plunk themselves down on the couch facing their 36-inch Sony and call up a weather report–not from the televised weather channel, but from an interactive version that cuts straight to the forecast for central Ohio. They might also check a restaurant menu, look up movie times, or dive into one of a few dozen electronic guides to what’s happening in their world.
Granted, it’s not gee-whiz, eye-popping stuff. But the service from Insight Communications, the local cable operator, is changing the TV’s place in the Dobbies’ life. Their boob tube is becoming a smart appliance.
That sort of change is coming slowly and fitfully to homes across the country as cable, satellite and broadcast TV companies struggle to develop the next generation of services. Dozens of interactive projects have been launched in the past two decades, many millions of dollars have been spent, and yet most TV sets still offer the same basic experience as when Milton Berle first went on the air.
Insight’s approach shows where the cable companies are now heading: They’re starting with something simple that gives viewers more control over programs and more access to information.
For viewers, the promise is a TV set that provides more than just a rigid schedule of movies, sports and sitcoms. Instead, the TV could become a device that responds to their needs and whims–you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll see what your kid’s school is serving for lunch tomorrow.
The Dobbies live on the suburban fringes of Columbus, Ohio, a city so perfectly average that it often serves as Corporate America’s testing lab. In fact, Columbus was where Warner Amex Cable Communications launched Qube, a pioneering but money-losing experiment in interactive cable, in 1977.
Qube’s two-way programs encouraged people to take part in what they were watching, such as the time in 1980 when viewers called the plays for the Columbus Metros, a minor-league pro football team that John Dobbie coached. But the technology wasn’t quite up to the task, he said. The huddles between plays dragged on and on because it took minutes for the viewers’ votes to be tabulated.
A few of today’s interactive TV services also try to turn viewers into participants, letting them compete with “Jeopardy” contestants or predict what play the Oakland Raiders are going to run next. But Insight has a simpler, more pragmatic goal, said Michael Willner, president and chief executive officer.
“Our approach to this business is to take real, everyday things that mean something to people and put them on a platform that isn’t being used,” he said. Those “everyday things” could also be found on the Internet, Willner said, but wouldn’t it be easier to check a kid’s homework assignment through the TV set than to fire up the computer and log on to the Net?
Columbus is one of three Midwestern cities where Insight has introduced interactive TV, the others being Rockford, Ill., and Evansville, Ind. In addition to a searchable program guide, the $7-per-month interactive package has two main features that are likely to be tried by all the major cable TV operators in the coming year.
The first is video-on-demand, an improved version of pay-per-view that lets a consumer call up a program and control it like a videotape. That means being able to rewind, fast-forward or replay to your heart’s content, with the program evaporating after about a day of viewing.
Using technology from California’s Diva Systems Corp., Insight offers 500 different movies, documentaries and children’s programs. The prices are about what you would find at a video store–$4 for a relatively new release, $1 to $3 for an older one–with the option of buying an unlimited supply of kids’ shows for $10 per month.
The ability to start, pause and replay a program at any time is the main attraction to Dobbie, a film buff with a bookcase full of movies next to his TV. The irritating thing about the old pay-per-view system, he said, was that “if somebody called you, you’d either have to politely hang up or miss part of the movie.”
The other main interactive feature, called LocalSource, is what the cable industry calls a “walled garden.” Instead of an open gateway to the Internet, it offers a limited set of text and graphics produced specially for the local audience. In essence, it’s a small slice of the Internet that LocalSource’s producers in Dallas bottle electronically for Insight’s customers.
A few years ago, cable operators seemed smitten with the idea of providing the Web in all its glory to their customers’ TV sets, using turbocharged converter boxes. But the public’s lukewarm reaction to Internet-on-TV services like Microsoft’s WebTV, which has reached less than 1 percent of U.S. homes, has prompted companies to look for approaches that are more relevant to local customers.
