Dear Readers:
Today we begin our long-awaited series: PERSPECTIVE. Our first chapter deals with Full Service Network. Future columns will discuss QUBE, Video Jukebox, Sega Channel and other ground-breaking interactive TV efforts, and the impact those deployments have on interactive television today.
Chapter One: Full Service Network
The industry served up a bazillion video-on-demand sessions last year.
Well, maybe not a FULL bazillion, but certainly a whole lot more than I can count. Time Warner Cable offers something like 10,000 hours of VOD content--free, subscription and transactional. And all the top MSO's have similar catalogs. Telco is right there with cable, and satellite is catching up--with IP delivery to broadband-enabled boxes, along with pre-loading content to subscriber DVR's for playback on-demand.
But did you know it all started with one guy? The very first subscriber on Time Warner Cable's Full Service Network (FSN) in 1994: Karl Willard.
Tammy Snook, FSN's VP of communications (and now CEO of HighTech PR), interviewed Karl for our PERSPECTIVE series. Karl and his wife Sue still live in the same house that was featured around the world in 1994. Of course, that is now part of the Bright House Networks Orlando hub.
The nation's first digital VOD subscriber has viewing patterns that are familiar to many younger viewers, even though Karl's children are grown and out of the house. And in spite of all the FSN buzz about interactive games, catalog shopping, pizza ordering and other precursors of today's interactive television, it was VOD that made the biggest impression on Karl then, and remains the primary value today.
In a future installment of PERSPECTIVE, we'll talk to the folks who made the decision to launch the first VOD system. For a little preview, let's go back to the New York Times, December 12, 1994:
"The task here in Orlando was basically to build a time machine," said James Chiddix, senior vice president for engineering and technology at Time Warner Cable and a principal architect of the Orlando network. "This platform represents where technology can be a couple of years hence, and we are now in a unique position to discover how real people are going to spend real money to buy services."
Karl and his family were, in fact, the real people spending real money to buy services. Here's what Karl has to say now:
"Being the first interactive television customer in 1994 was a great experience for us. We saw the promise of interactive TV and as far as we're concerned, VOD has come of age and we'd like to see a lot more of it!
"VOD is huge, and the ease of the interface--how quickly you can grab either a program or movie--is great. There is a lot more available today. About 95% of what we watch on TV today is either on-demand or pre-recorded on our DVR. We are just as busy as we were before, and set up a lot of pre-recorded shows and sit down at night to watch them. We don't have time to be there when the show airs. Now we speed through the commercials. The world of advertising and marketing seems to be moving away from traditional TV to the Internet--Web ads are where we're headed in the future--the younger generation watches TV, video, etc. on their iPhone.
"There is a lot more content today--we have an HDTV and an HD DVR and watch HD almost exclusively. I have a hard time watching regular TV now, personally.
"The Interactive Program Guide is very intuitive and easy to search for programs--if you hear about a program you haven't seen, you can type in the first 5 or 6 letters and you can decide to watch it. We use this quite a bit--scan forward at least a week. The program guide is well done, easy to use. Friendly.
"Everything is faster now too--the speed of being able to move around and navigate. Same with the VOD--the speed at which you can fast forward and reverse is much quicker and improved.
"If I go to watch a show and hit the record button, it picks up the buffered content to record the entire show. The brain power of our DVR is pretty strong. We just got a new DVR from Samsung--which stores twice as much and the fast-forward is twice as fast.
"What I'd like to be able to do in the future is retrieve content from the Internet using the TV remote. Love to see that. I'm not a gamer, but we would love to see shopping functions, restaurants, etc. available by grabbing your remote. We could navigate with the keypad on the remote, but it would be great to have a smartphone-style remote with a keyboard.
"It's hard to believe the Full Service Network was 15 years ago already. Clearly it was the baby back then. Everything is quite rich right now. We are proud to have been a part of the beginning of interactive television and can't wait to see what's coming next."
===
The iTV Doctor is *Rick Howe*, who provides interactive television consulting services to programmers and advertisers. He is the recipient of a CTAM Tami Award for retention marketing and this year was nominated to Cable Pioneers. He is also the co-author of a patent for the use of multiscreen mosaics in EPG's. Endorsed by top cable and satellite distributors, "Dr" Howe still makes house calls, and the first visit is always free. His services include product development, distribution strategy and the development of low-cost interactive applications for rapid deployment across all platforms. Have a question for the iTV Doctor? Email him at itvdoctor@itvt.com
