Another speaker at ASIS, Albert Tedesco, of WWSG/TV, Philadelphia, examined the U.S. market performance of videotex. He defined videotex as “a class of electronic text services which uses CRT displays and transmission systems— telephone, television, FM radio, etc.— to bring pages of human readable data to a viewer.' Two types of services are usually subsumed under this heading: teletext which is a one-way system, and videotex which is two-way and implies that an interaction or transaction takes place. The definition was later amended by implication as Tedesco disqualified services such as Compuserve and the Source on account of their lack of significant graphics capabilities.
Videotex was developed by BBC engineers trying to find a use for the unused portions of the television signal (the vertical blanking interval) and by British Telecom in an attempt to boost off-peak phone usage. The problem, given the market orientation of the U.S., is to find people who are prepared to pay for services based on these technologies. This is not proving to be easy. It is probable that the development of narrow markets will achieve the desired effect— an approach radically different from that used by the Gateway system in California and Viewtron in Florida where system providers are attempting to activate wide-scale “all things to all people” markets.
In contrast with the situation in Europe, U.S. experience to date has been a matter of promises rather than delivery. A number of projects have been undertaken, but none has dealt successfully with the essential question of who it is that will be prepared to pay for these services. Tedesco's observations of pay TV make him skeptical of many of the claims of commercial viability made for the videotex medium.
In pay TV, all that is required is to attach an antenna and a simple, non— interactive black box to the consumer site. And even this can cause immense problems—service calls for systems which “don't work” because the box has been unplugged from the electric outlet, the difficulty of recovering equipment from defaulting subscribers, and bootlegged black boxes that circumvent the system. In Tedesco ‘s opinion, as the sophistication of the technology increases, the problems compound.
Then there is the cost. Are the services being offered sufficiently attractive to convince enough people to pay the price? The Times-Mirror Gateway experiment that began in California recently is offering service to its first 2000 subscribers for a monthly charge of $29.95 per month plus $99.00 for the decoder. TV monitors of sufficient sophistication to support all of the applications cost $600 to $800. No one knows what the pricing structure for subscribers in excess of the first 2000 is going to be. The Viewtron system in Florida charges subscribers $39.95 per month. Another point of view not often considered is that of the TV broadcaster. This is particularly important in relation to teletext services that use home television receivers. A broadcaster is wary of anything that will give the viewer the opportunity to “turn off” during television commercials since the financial viability of broadcasting is based upon the ability to deliver large audiences for the sponsors commercial messages. Teletext services that offer sports and news headlines as options to commercials are unlikely to be popular with broadcasters. While there are ways around this problem—suppressing the text broadcast during the commercial slots in programming for instance— Tedesco does not think that this would meet with public approval. [This may or may not be an accurate expectation. As consumers with remote control television sets know, broadcasters have shown a remarkable ability to synchronize the timing of commercial breaks on different channels so that they are run at the same time, and thus cannot be avoided by channel flipping.]
Given these two major constraints to selling videotex services to the home market, what is the broadcaster to do? If a station is to offer these services, it wants to be able to make money doing it. With videotex decoders costing $150 each (the price will effectively be $300 a piece once advertising and development costs are added), and the expected difficulties in retrieving such equipment from defaulting home subscribers, prospects for the home market are not good. Thus, broadcasters are beginning to focus their attention on the alternate markets.
Although not using all of the sophistication possible in the various videotex media, “silent radio” is receiving considerable attention. Silent radio uses the vertical blanking interval of the television signal to support teletext-type operations aimed primarily at non-domestic applications. In Europe this approach is used to broadcast public utility information to power suppliers; in Los Angeles it is used to cycle display sign advertising to consumers waiting in line at banks or supermarkets; at the San Jose airport, Hewlett Packard uses the system to advertise for hi-tech personnel on advertising boards; throughout the U.S. a number of systems are using the approach to target display-boards at universities and colleges; and in Philadelphia consideration is being given to installing such a system to advise commuters at train stations of expected train delays and alternate transportation routes.
