What’s On: Satellite TV Beams Home Interactive TV

by Jim Mikles
Summer/Fall 1999

The television world and the online world are installed in TVs, VCRs, cable boxes and personal satellite receivers continues to increase in sophistication and drop in price. Living-room content that takes advantage of these new platforms, particularly satellite-TV content, is finally ready for prime time.

Wink Nods DirecTV
Wink Interactive is one of the first technologies making its way into a substantial number of homes. On the hardware side, Toshiba is selling new televisions with the Wink technology installed. Wink uses an inexpensive chip installed in a TV that pulls additional information from the TV signal and displays it as an overlay across the bottom of the TV picture. Wink has content partnerships with several leading cable networks, including most of the Turner Broadcasting stations, (TBS, TNT and CNN), Showtime, HBO, ESPN, Lifetime, E! and the Weather Channel. Wink is simple: it's one-way and the amount of content that can be sent is fairly limited by today's standards. But in the TV arena simple is good and Wink technology is designed for ease-of-use in a TV-centric environment. To access a Wink enhancement, a television viewer simply clicks the remote control of a Wink-enabled system when the Wink symbol appears on the screen. The viewer can navigate program enhancement options with the use of arrow keys on the remote control. Typical program enhancements include companion data for sports, documentaries and other programs; contests, polls, interactive activities and upcoming program promotions.

Perhaps the most significant recent development in the Wink arena is the company's partnership with DirecTV, the nation's leading purveyor of satellite TV. New DirecTV subscribers (or existing subscribers who want to upgrade to a Wink-enabled DirecTV box) will have the ability to purchase a new Wink-capable DirecTV satellite receiver. Using the DirecTV telephone "back-channel" viewers can click the remote from regular television commercials to order a brochure, coupon or product. Current providers of Wink E-Commercials include AT&T, Levi-Strauss & Co., and General Electric. DirecTV is also partnered with TiVo and Philips to release a receiver that includes PersonalTV, an additional interactive technology (see feature story on page 31).

Echostar "Opens" Up
When it comes to providing interactive content, satellite TV hardware and content provider Echostar/DISH Network is also taking an aggressive stance through a partnership with global interactive TV provider OpenTV. Echostar officials say that starting sometime this summer, subscribers to DISH Network will have access to several interactive TV channels via their systems. Each channel will beam interactive Web-style content to the TV. Echostar has announced partnerships with content providers Bloomberg and SimplyTV, but several others are in the works, says Doug McGary, manager of broadcast data services at Echostar. The interface for the new system is still in the design and test phase, but in other deployments of OpenTV technology by European satellite operators, such as SkyDigital in Britain and TPS in France, providers offer highly localized weather, entertainment, shopping and sports channels. The channels look similar to Web pages and include hyperlinks users can click on with a remote to navigate through various levels of content. Pages also contain interactive advertising with links users can click for more product information. Echostar officials said this would be the first phase of a multi-phased integration of interactive content into its programming. Other stages are said to include a PC-based Echostar board, a WebTV Internet browser in the Echostar box, and the ability to download and purchase music CDs and CD-ROM software from the satellite to the home.

What's It Mean
That digital broadcast satellite (DBS) is the first platform ready to deliver interactive TV to substantial numbers of viewers in the U.S. is not surprising. Cable is making a strong bid to be an interactive platform, with both @Home and Time Warner RoadRunner promising interactivity to the TV set-top by the end of this year or early next. The adoption of an open cable standard within the cable industry and the imminent unveiling of digital, cable-modem-enabled set-top boxes at the retail level next year will bolster that effort. But retrofitting cable delivery hardware, not to mention changing prevailing consumer attitudes about what "cable TV" consists of, is a substantial challenge.

Also on the horizon will be the ability of digital broadcast television (alternately called HDTV, SDTV, ATV or DTV, depending on which flavor you speak of) to send interactive TV content along with its signal. Traditional broadcasters are already unsure of how consumers will react to the new digital broadcast format, however. Even though HDTV is being broadcast in several major markets, they are unlikely to roll out digital interactive TV before digital TV itself has had a chance to sink in.

Satellite TV providers, like DirecTV and DISH Network, are well positioned to more quickly implement new styles of content from the standpoints of consumer attitudes, business models and technology. From a consumer attitude perspective, people are already used to the fact they need to purchase additional hardware to receive satellite TV. They know the digital satellite signal offers high quality audio and video, on-demand pay-per-view and specialty programming on more than a hundred channels, as opposed to the 40 or 50 that the typical cable company offers.

From a business standpoint, satellite TV companies can more quickly implement interactive TV because they are more streamlined. There's really only two to speak of in the U.S: DirecTV by Hughes and Dish Network by Echostar (PrimeStar was recently acquired by DirecTV and its customers will gradually be ported over during the next few years).

Finally, from a technology standpoint, digital broadcast satellites by definition already take advantage of the incredible bandwidth available using digital technology. Not only is there more bandwidth available, but it's a matter of simple technology to attach additional interactive content to the digital bit stream already being beamed to the approximately 5.5 million DBS-capable homes in the U.S. The only question is what to expand into. It appears clear from what's happening that true interactive TV is something millions of people will have access to by the end of this year.