Interactive TV at the Montreaux TV Symposium/Exhibition

[Frederick Roeber <roeber () vxcrna cern ch>]

Last Monday I went to the 18th International Television Symposium and
Technical Exhibition, in Montreux, Switzerland.  (Montreux and Geneva
are on opposite ends of Lake Geneva.)  Most of the stuff there wasn't
too related to comp.dcom.telecom, but there were some things that may
be interesting to cdt readers.

One of the hot big subjects today is interactive TV.  AT&T/Bell Labs
was showing a system they're working on.  The most visible part of it
is a "video rental store": by using a hand-held IR mouse, one could
select movies from various menus.  As you decided, you could see the
movie "teasers" in the corner of the screen.  When you selected one,
and confirmed the order, it would play the movie for you.  Though the
movie was being played over the net from their database system, it was
being played for only you: you had complete VCR-like control.  There
were some other game-like services, nothing earth-shaking, just slow
video games with movie-quality pictures.  There was also a quiet
demonstration of picture-phone capability.  I asked about multi-person
video games.  They said this system would have the capability to do
it, if anybody wrote one.

They and Viacom are going to run a test of this system in Castro
Valley, California.  They had a press release (contact me for a copy,
or for the contacts at Bell), but they weren't saying much else.

Microsoft and somebody I forget were also showing an interactive TV
capability.  They seemed to be focusing more on the "home shopping
club" audience.  They had a demonstration showing a clip from HSC, and
by using a mouse you could call up overlays with large buttons marked
"More Information" and "Order Now."  They also had a "virtual mall"
where you could click your away around the stores, click on things
drawn on the shelves, and click on "Order Now."

Both of these systems are intended to be used on a cable-tv network,
but one running a different protocol: something closer to a packet-
switching network.  The reverse communication channel would require
that all the CATV amplifiers be replaced with switches.  The
Microsoft/ whoever system could also work over satellite TV, with a
phone-line return channel.  Microsoft's partner company is already
involved (though VideoCipher) with pay-tv-via-satellite, so they might
also do a video-rental system.

There wasn't much else that was new.  There was only one other thing
that caught my attention: Thompson-CSF has come up with a way of
reading magnetic tapes optically.  The readout crystal is fixed and
the tape moves past it; this has a lot less wear than the current
spinning-head systems.  The working demonstration model they showed
had an optics package about the same size as the tape, though there
was a second version that was much smaller.  They plan to put the
optics into a small single package, like a CD player head.


Frederick G. M. Roeber | CERN -- European Center for Nuclear Research
e-mail: roeber () cern ch or roeber () caltech edu | work: +41 22 767 31 80
r-mail: CERN/PPE, 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland | home: +33 50 20 82 99

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