Tydeman, et al

CHAPTER 5


FUTURE APPLICATIONS FOR TELETEXT AND VIDEOTEX

It has become conventional wisdom that "applications, not technology" will determine the success or failure of videotex. However, it is possible to forecast the evolution of technological components with greater confidence than to forecast future developments in applications. At this early stage there is relatively little data on which to base conclusions about which particular services, or combination of services, will prove most popular or on how much people will be willing to pay for them. The purpose of this chapter is to identify the fullest range of potential videotex and teletext applications and to provide an indication of the magnitude of the markets for these applications.


INSIGHTS ABOUT FUTURE APPLICATIONS FROM CURRENT TRIALS

Experience with videotex and teletext trials and services to date may at least offer some clues as to the pattern of future uses. Table 5.1 lists applications in terms of the number of U.S. trials in which they have been included.

This census shows that news, weather, and sports information has been included in virtually every trial; personal files and electronic messaging have been included in fewer trials. These statistics may simply reflect the fact that a news, weather, and sports service is relatively easy to provide, while videotex-based personal files and messaging not only are more difficult to provide but also can raise more complicated policy issues.

Table 5.2 lists the categories of information that have been accessed most frequently on Prestel in its first year of operation. This listing suggests that videotex may turn out to be as much a source of entertainment (e.g., games, quizzes, sports, jokes, horoscopes) as a channel for obtaining "serious" information. On the other hand, these rankings are based on

initial use of the system and may reflect the limitation imposed by Prestel's tree-search database structure, which tends to make accessing large-scale databases slow and cumbersome. It is also important to note that Prestel was designed as an information-retrieval service and did not initially include more sophisticated services such as teleshopping or messaging.

Analysis of usage of The Source, which offers an array of data processing, transactional, and messaging options in addition to information retrieval, provides yet a different picture. As Table 5.3 indicates, services involving messaging were most popular, followed by news-oriented information retrieval. However, subscribers to The Source, who are mostly computer hobbyists, are not necessarily representative of the broader public, who are the intended audience for videotex.

A much more diverse population was included in a survey of consumer interest in various interactive services conducted by the Benton & Bowles advertising agency (Table 5.4). The results indicate that the services that evoked the greatest interest

Source: Winsbury, 1981

TABLE 5.3 MOST POPULAR SERVICES ON THE SOURCE, JANUARY 1980

1 . Electronic mail

2. Bulletin board (classified advertising)

3. Chatting (terminal-to-terminal communication)

4. User directory associated with items 1-3

5. UPI (news and sports)

6. New York Times Consumer Data Base

7. Unistox (financial data)

Source: Plummer, 1980.

were those that offer clear financial benefits. However, the survey did not include entertairunent-oriented interactive services such as games and quizzes. The survey also made no mention of costs and therefore provided no information on how much (or how little) consumers would be willing to pay for these services.

While these results are interesting, none of them is conclusive. Taken as a whole, they suggest that the success of any videotex service will depend not only on its content but on such factors as convenience, ease of use, reliability, and cost. How a service is packaged and priced may be as significant as what the service is, especially in an environment in which an ever-increasing array of information and entertainment media are competing for a share of the consumer's time and money. As Table 5.5 demonstrates, there is a variety of alternative media--some old, some new--available to perform each of the categories of videotex functions.

TABLE 5.4 INTEREST IN INTERACTIVE SERVICES

% Responding

TABLE 5.5 COMPETITIVE MEDIA/TECHNOLOGIES

Timing will also be important. Certain more specialized videotex applications may not become available commercially until relatively widespread penetration is achieved on the basis of more general interest services. An example of this pattern can be seen in the cable field, where the development of cultural pay progranu-ning services was made possible by the prior success of general appeal pay channels such as Home Box Office.

Finally, technology plays a role in determining applications. The services a system can provide are limited by the technical characteristics of the system. Such factors as transmission speed (upstream and downstream), error rate, graphic capabilities, and terminal characteristics play a part in how a service is implemented. The severe restriction in the number of pages that can easily be accessed in a VBI-based broadcast teletext system is an obvious example. Another limitation on the potential of videotex is imposed by the resolution of the 525-line standard for U.S. televisions standard that was established with no reference to the capabilities needed for displaying pages of text. The development of a new high-resolution (1,125-line) TV standard would greatly increase the range of potential videotex services, but movement toward such a standard will be influenced by many factors other than videotex (e.g., the development of wall-size flat TV screens or the introduction of digital techniques for the storage and transmission of television programming). As the technological components of videotex systems evolve, so will the range of services these systems carry.

What these considerations mean is that experience with videotex systems to date does not provide an adequate basis for predicting which specific videotex applications will be successful in the future and which will not. However, it is possible to identify a much larger number of potential applications than have been included in videotex service or trials to date.

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