Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 7, 1995 TAG: 9505080078
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: RESTON LENGTH: Medium
Within days, viewers hooked up to Bell Atlantic's Stargazer project can select at any time from hundreds of shows, movies and how-to videos, fast-forwarding and rewinding any program at will.
An episode of ``Gilligan's Island'' or a Bugs Bunny cartoon will cost 49 cents, while recent Hollywood releases, such as ``The River Wild'' or ``The Firm,'' will be $4.49. Also among the 700 offerings: shows on gourmet cooking, drag-racing highlights and footage of the Challenger space shuttle disaster.
The idea, executives say, is to save viewers trips to the video store and the frustration of finding their choice already rented.
``It's the ability to choose what you want when you want it, to schedule your own entertainment,'' said Frank Pereira, president of Bell Atlantic Video Services. If the test proves successful, it will speed the delivery of interactive television across the United States.
The Stargazer experiment is the latest evidence that Bell Atlantic and other regional phone companies plan to get into the television business in a big way.
Just this year, regional phone companies have formed alliances with Hollywood studios.
Bell Atlantic Corp. is the most aggressive of the once stodgy Baby Bells. Its chairman, Raymond Smith, sounds evangelical when he discusses television's future.
``The next generation of commercial television is upon us,'' Smith said in a recent speech to advertisers. ``It will be fundamentally different from today's one-way linear TV experience. And it will be here faster than any of us can imagine.''
Bell Atlantic is betting a small fortune that he's right. The Stargazer operation is headquartered in a sleek, silvery office building in Reston, near Washington, D.C. In this $200 million digital factory, television programmers, computer experts and old hands from the phone business work on the industry's future.
The problems facing them are immense.
They must create technology that can, at an affordable price, deliver a vast array of programs to the home in a format that allows viewers to pause, rewind and fast-forward. They must acquire programs from studios and networks. They must convert existing shows into a digital format so they can be stored in computers and transmitted over phone lines. They must help viewers navigate their way through a confusing array of choices. And they must create marketing plans, billing systems and customer-service operations.
Essentially, they're inventing a new industry.
Their eventual targets are big: the cable TV industry, which takes in $14 billion a year; local video stores, which generate $20 billion; and the $65 billion catalog-shopping business.
``I would say that by 2000, we'll have 50 percent of the cable TV business - no doubt about it, which is why some cable companies are in a panic,'' Smith recently told Wired magazine.
The immediate goal of the Stargazer project is more modest. Bell wants to test a video-on-demand product with real customers. Until now, Stargazer has been available only to about 300 employees for technical tests.
Among Stargazer's choices:
Reruns of the TV shows ``Murphy Brown,'' ``Saturday Night Live,'' ``Beverly Hills 90210,'' ``Baywatch'' and ``Little House on the Prairie,'' plus oddities such as guest appearances by Jay Leno on ``Alice'' and Walter Cronkite on ``The Mary Tyler Moore Show.''
News footage of the Kennedy-Nixon debates, the Challenger disaster, the Menendez brothers trial, as well as repeats of local newscasts and the best of talk shows hosted by Phil Donahue and Geraldo Rivera.
Children's programs such as ``Peter and the Wolf,'' ``Grimm's Fairy Tales,'' ``Clarissa Explains It All'' and ``Introduction to Puppetmaking.''
Special-interest offerings about car repair, travel, personal finance, exercise and gourmet food, with titles ranging from ``Buns and Thighs'' to ``Plan Your Retirement.''
Soon Stargazer will offer interactive home shopping programs from retailers J.C. Penney, Land's End and Nordstrom. The viewer will be able to fetch footage of products and order by phone.
Eventually, the phone companies want to combine the video-on-demand and home shopping products with a full array of cable networks. They say they also will offer such talked-about features as interactive games, medical diagnoses and televised classrooms.
For now, viewers will be able to order shows using a remote control and a TV set-top unit. Programs are stored in vast computers, called video servers; the technology that allows viewers to retrieve and play programs is similar to the technology that permits people to fetch voice-mail or e-mail messages from computers.
by CNB