RH: You seem to have always had innovative ideas for mass communications
as well as the distribution of entertainment and information -- not just
Internet TV.
JB: I have always been interested in the power of visual communications,
but I don't like the control that government and a few media owners have over
the ones we've got. -- that is, TV, newspapers etc., -- as they use them as
their own means to hold power.
RH: You mean the so-called "fourth estate" or the "powers that be." But you
were part of that at one time or another?
JB: Yes, I was CEO of the largest movie production studios in Europe --
British Lion. But I still had an idea as to how to provide entertainment in
the home. In the early 1970s, I used to swap any movie from any other studio
worldwide and watch them on a 16mm projector at home. So I thought that
probably everyone would like to do that if they could afford to. On the day
that Roger Moore signed for his first Bond movie with Harry Salzman -- in
those days Harry was the co-producer of Bond movies with Cubby Broccoli -- I
was also there and agreed to work with Harry on his pet project for a low-cost
film cartridge -- 9 x 6 x 1 inch cartridge -- movie projector which unhappily
cost Harry his fortune and then his life as he died with disappointment that
it didn't work out. The lens was too expensive to get magnification onto a
wall screen.
RH: So all of this came out of a James Bond movie like out of Q's lab?
Sorry, just kidding.... But, seriously, you were looking at or involved in
pre-VCR TV entertainment without having to go to the movie theater or having
to drive to any central location for entertainment.
JB: Yes. And I continued with Harry's project on my own with a very low
cost unit -- under $100 -- which used back-projection onto a mirror in a
plastic box unit then onto a 12-inch screen that looked just like a TV. I had
a totally new, ultra-thin, unsprocketed film made -- that was a world first --
with a one quarter of 8mm film frame which was electronically operated. Plus
it had a cheap plastic lens which had to take a thumbnail frame up to 12 x 10
in a 20 inch distance. We just about got an acceptable picture and the film
cartridge size was 4 x 3 x 1/2 inches -- that was not much more than an audio
casssette tape!
RH: But this was all on some sort of film. What about videotape?
JB: Well, I worked with EMI and some very major U.K. companies, but just as
we got it right, the Japanese came out with a silicon chip based video
recorder. The Japanese brought the cost down from the the sole Phillip's
$6,000 unit to $2,500. And, of course, they told the world that "it would soon
be $500." So we were out of of the movie cartridge business. I called my unit
the "Mood Machine" since that's what people really wanted -- to have
entertainment made available that they can turn on at any point in time and
not what's handed out to them by others.
RH: But you still got into videotape entertainment business before there
was a Blockbuster....
JB: Yes. If you can't beat them, then join them. So, I started the world's
first public company in video rental in the U.K. -- Intervision -- which was
an idea I got from a guy who had started some pre-recorded video shops in San
Diego....
RH: San Diego....
JB: Yes, there have been a lot of innovative things coming out of San Diego
over the years.... TV was terrible in the U.K. So, I bought video rights for
peanuts from Warner and United Artists to hundreds of the best movie titles
for use in the U.K. and set up a distribution chain of 12,000 outlets. It took
off in a big way and the Japanese should have given me a medal since no one
wanted to record crappy U.K. television off the air which was why they
couldn't sell any $2,500+ video recorders. So in three to four years, the
video recorder's cost came down to $500 and in ten years 80% of all U.K. homes
had a video recorder. That's four times faster than TV growth rates. And
everyone had told me that no one would want to buy one! Blockbuster bought the
company out in 1989 by which time we were the biggest retail chain of video
stores in Europe.
RH: Your videotape company was called Intervision, right? Sounds like you
had an idea back then to mix Interactivity with Television -- taking "Inter"
from Interactivity and "Vision" from Television.
JB: Right. But the problem was that cassettes were not interactive. That
was the essential ingredient I was looking for. In the early 1990s, there were
several experiments in the U.S. and a lot of money lost with partially
Interactive TV. I forget all their names now.
RH: You mean the ventures such as Qube and others.
JB: Yes. There was a super rich investor from Mexico who was involved with
a project in Chicago who put in $60 million. A lot of the telcos lost money on
ADSL-type ventures. None of them were BOTH economically and technically
feasible. Infrastructure was the problem. Wireless seemed like an answer, but
I had been working on a facsimile broadcasting project in Canada which put out
point-to-multipoint signals to the home via terrestrial TV aerials so you
could effectively send a fax to 1 million places simultaneously. This had a
number of business uses. I knew that radio signals in cities could frequently
get interrupted which was okay on a mobile phone, but that would cut off a PC
so you may have to boot up every few minutes!
RH: This mass faxing of documents sounds like the beginning of the
"interactive" ingredient for you. This is where the user is sending out
information and not just taking in information like in the more passive
VCR-type entertainment. Then you have the Internet....
JB: Yes. Over the last 30 years, I have been looking for a low-cost means
to circumvent "information controllers" so that ordinary folks can communicate
unrestricted data between each other. The Internet helped to solve this. The
trouble was PCs were too complex to operate for most people up until Wndows --
perhaps even with Windows -- PCs were also too expensive for mass consumption.
RH: With telephone lines everywhere, you had to be thinking people can
really get connected. Telephone copper wire is everywhere. But what about
cable TV?
JB: I figured that twisted pair copper wires, PSTN, or good old standard
telephone lines had to be the way to beat the cable boys who were making lots
of noise, but whose last mile costs were about $3,000 a home to install!
Satellite was no good interactively as nobody could afford to put a satellite
uplink in their home with a 30-foot dish! The beauty about copper wires and
the Internet was that it was pretty much unregulated all over the world
compared to cable TV. So there's no getting into line for expensive licenses
in competition against some politician's favorite applicant. It was WIDE OPEN!
And it was WORLDWIDE too!
RH: That's the beauty of the Internet in making the world a little bit more
accessible for a lot of people. But someone still has to pay for it all
starting with putting in the infrastructure, to providing the content, all the
way down to the consumer who would have to pay for access. I personally would
like to see free access or something like the U.S.-version of reduced-cost
telephone universal access but for the Internet.
JB: I needed advertisers to make my economic concept viable which was to
subsidize the hardware so that it could be given away plus a free ISP
connection. But they didn't get it. OR they didn't want to get it! It
threatened their big budget TV commercials. Their clients didn't like it. It
threatened the monopolies of the big retailers and mail order houses. And it
still does.
RH: So you were having real problems in getting people to invest in this
idea for mass interactive communications whether it be some sort of
Internet-on-TV or some sort of video- or information- on-demand via phone
lines or other connection lines.
JB: Yes. I had a real problem raising funds. This was especially so in the
U.K. where the investment community was running five years -- if not ten years
-- behind the U.S.! We did it bit by bit. We started with a video phone unit
in 1993 until we realized we needed an operating system. We built our first
set-top box using an Intel 486 chip. Unfortunately, there was too much flicker
on the TV screen and the colors were all wrong. The Web sites didn't fit the
TV screen.
RH: Then you would try to come up with your own software....
JB: Yes. So we wrote our own correction software from scratch, with our own
browser, and looked for a chip that wasn't prohibitively expensive -- remember
at the time the Intel 486 was still priced at $280 in 1994! We found the Acorn
computer company in the U.K. with an almost forgotten operating system and
with a $20 ARM RISC chip that did pretty well compared to the Intel chip! That
was a real breakthrough. But we stll needed to bring the overall price down to
what I reckoned to be an economic cost of $150. The Acorn system was costing
$700 without a monitor. So we needed to scale it down. We commisioned Acorn to
make a unit according to our own new design and specs for our EXCLUSIVE use,
and wrote our own software for it. By July 11, 1995, we launched the world's
first commercial STB to an audience of 400 in the U.K. No one took the
slightest interest except the Financial Times who called it the Volkswagen
beetle of PCs. The PC people ridiculed it. So I decided to try it in the
U.S.A.
RH: Computer people can be so typical. They have to remember that not
everyone is going to want to have a computer....
JB: We still had to contend with them since this is still a PC world. In
November 1995, I went to Comdex in Las Vegas and got to show our STB to Bob
Metcalfe, the guy who invented the Ethernet, who ran it in his trade mag. He
called it the world's first "intervision" and he said it worked just fine. We
got some funding in the U.S. and started Viewcall America out of Atlanta.
RH: Then the NC and others came along....
JB: .... In January 1996, Larry Ellison announced the NC. I suspect that
our plans had at least an indirect influence on Ellison's NC since Acorn was
owned by Olivetti and who had dealings with Oracle while Acorn was under
contract to us. Then Ellison told Bill Gates that he had a product that would
beat the PC. Coincidentally, one week after our one-year exclusive contract
expired on December 31, 1995, Ellison told the world he had the blueprints for
any manufacturer to produce an STB.
RH: To be fair, they could very well come up with their own solution for
how this new black box was going to work. Competition in an innovative
marketplace can be fierce. But, then again, what else is new. And you still
have to compete with the desktop PCs.
JB: In January 1996, Viewcall entered a competition run by PC World and won
a prize for the first sub-$500 "computer." We were well under this figure by
then at around $350, but PC World and all their 2,000 or so PC attendees
didn't want to know about our cheaper product. For instance, Microsoft's
Nathan Myrvold said what we had was a lot of hot air and that no one would
want it. By the end of '96 we were down to a sub-$200 magic price range.
RH: That is the price range where most people begin to think seriously
about getting a component such as this for their homes... And if you can
connect to the TV, then that makes it all the more easier and less expensive
for people to have and use.
JB: I have always believed there will be one screen with everything built
in one day. There will eventually be some sort of
PC/TV/videophone/baby-watcher/home-security-system etc. linked to other home
audio/visual units, but that will be a long time coming.
RH: But Sony and others are now talking about home networking systems....
JB: Yes. I chose the TV world because everyone had a TV and linking an STB
to it cut out the cost of a PC monitor and dramatically provided a more
inexpensive alternative to the PC. We had mastered good non-flicker script on
the TV screen from websites and also had a good remote control keyboard. So,
you could sit up in bed and operate it. Or could watch with the whole family.
RH: You had Viewcall and a working box. But you only hear about Viewcall in
Canada while WebTV took over the U.S. .....
JB: What went wrong? Well first Ellison's Lareco -- sorry, Oracle --
shouted about their NC product from the roof-tops and then screwed it up. So,
he alerted Microsoft who got Paul Allen to back the spin-off team from Apple
that had started WebTV in a disguised laundry building. And as you know, ten
times the money was thrown at WebTV than what Viewcall had. And Phillips, who
was about to back Viewcall, instead got behind WebTV along with Sony.
RH: WebTV mowed over you.
JB: --Sigh-- I am an Englishman. Although I was married once to an American
wife, I didn't fully appreciate the whole West Coast culture which disdains
anything to do with technology from anywhere else -- including from Atlanta
where Viewcall America operated from with 100 employees. So about the time we
needed some new urgent funding in February 1997, which was shortly after the
CES show in Las Vegas, WebTV's launch had already started and WebTV's sales
were initially poor.
RH: Then the American version of Viewcall went up for sale?
JB: The WebTV presence affected our funding and Viewcall America had to put
itself up for sale. NetChannel, also out of San Jose and associated with the
Ellison's Network Computer Inc., bought out Viewcall whose TV browser and
service knowledge they did not have. At this point, Viewcall had a new
hardware platform, which it had got from paying Teknema to develop a system.
But Teknema wanted Viewcall to use their browser software. Trouble is it
didn't work. Everyone, including Acorn, NetChannel, and Teknema had thought
the software was just a matter of brushing up any old PC browser, but in
reality it needed $5 million of work from scratch to make it work well. So
even though Viewcall was years ahead of WebTV, it ended up with an STB with no
browser to go with it and then a browser with no STB to fit! Crazy! Same thing
happened to NetChannel when they took over Viewcall in April 1997.
RH: So at that time, it didn't work out.... It is intriguing how these
"early days" of Internet TV were shaking out....
JB: For now, WebTV won the day. Microsoft put $425 million into the hands
of the ex-Apple people in May 1997 when they took over WebTV. This showed how
important a threat the Internet-on-TV concept must have been to the PC. Or for
Gates, it could have been the fear of Ellison getting the better of Gates and
Microsoft. Against all that, NetChannel itself bit the dust by the Fall of '97
and WebTV got the kudos. C'est la vie!
RH: Then AOL eventually bought out NetChannel, later partners up with Sun,
buys out Netscape etc. -- and you have rumblings about some sort of AOL-TV.
But WebTV won the day and will remain a huge presence in the interactive TV
world. But there is still the cable TV battle still to be played out.
JB: WebTV got the kudos. But kudos for what? That remains to be seen. Many
TV manufacturers came out with their own set-top boxes, but put them away when
they saw WebTV's poor sales. But they are all waiting in the wings to make
Internet TVs when the time comes.
RH: But when will that time come? That seems to be the magic question that
a lot of people have been asking.
JB: When will it be? When a PC is a TV and when a TV is PC also. Although
if more older people knew about how to make use of STBs connected to TV sets,
then the market could be so much larger. Older people want life made easy and
they do not want to have to buy a PC.
RH: But you are going to have what I call "power PC-TV boxes" that computer
people may think consumers will want to spend their money on. Don't get me
wrong. I like PC-TV systems, but for everyday people who do not want a
computer, set-top boxes are the way to go....
JB: Fortunately for "everyday people" who do not necessarily have money to
burn, PC costs have come way down. Halved this year alone -- I believe in its
own way that Viewcall instigated this. It stopped those PC fanatics who
controlled the industry from believing that everyone wanted more and more
features regardless of cost and ease of use -- they believed everyone could
afford it and that's still the thinking of many of those people in charge of
the computer industry. Yes, people do buy home computers for their kids to
learn over a period of years and adults see computers almost as a hobby. But
who wants to learn a hobby in five minutes? And cost is also important.
Computers sold to businesses help the economies of scale in pricing which STBs
aren't getting. NCs were not one thing or another and Larry Ellison has gone
back to what he knows best in databasing to have his battle at that end with
Bill Gates. But I think Bill Gates will win that one also one day.
RH: But what do you see as for the longevity of set-top boxes? I think they
will be around for quite a while. However, some people think that set-top
boxes are merely a bridge towards the next information appliance....
JB: I think there will be a small STB market for a while until Internet
TV-PCs or PC-TVs arrive. The greatest force for sales will be discounted goods
and secure e-commerce. But those who can sell products at cheaper prices,
without the "Main Street" mall overhead, may not have the brandname products
to sell at the cheaper prices. This "Catch 22" will perhaps hold things up a
little longer!
RH: How about in general for the future of the Internet?
JB: Nothing will supecede the Internet. MSN nearly got there with a private
global telecom network, but they were just too late. The Net beat Gates to it.
Fast private fiber optic backbones however will take a big slice of traffic by
offering the higher speed. But I don't think they will get away with
monopolies as the fiber optic technology's technical attributes offer more and
more "lines" which authorities will demand be made available to not just those
who laid them down. Anyone with a big audience like an AOL or with widespread
software distribution such as Microsoft have a head start in getting a
commanding presence on the Internet. Service and presentation are important,
but cost and easy access to a wide variety of product offerings are going to
be the Internet's "killer app."
RH: So, "shopping access" of one sort or another for information and
products will be the Internet's and Internet TV's "killer app." The shopping
mall brought to your home via the TV set. This has been talked about as the
ultimate purpose of interactive TV since the early experiments. And this goes
towards your background and experience in getting some sort of product --
whether that be your early movie film cartridges, videotapes, or some other
product -- to the consumer via some sort of advanced mass interactive
communications.
JB: There really has been almost no discounting on the Net to date. Where
there was discounting in PC sales, they have been successful. Cable modems
offer the combination of running extremely fast Internet connection and real
video -- that's together with regular TV. This is about to move ahead very
fast in the U.K. combined with digital reception and integrating the Web with
television programs and advertising. And very fast Web access speeds will
finally bring all types of consumers to the table so long as there are good
web sites to go with it along with really competitive prices for access.
RH: It's only a matter of time as to how the Internet will be used to
interactively connect everyone to everyone else in the world. Internet TV, or
some form of interactive TV, will be what will bring everyday people online.
JB: Yes, Internet TV in one form or another is here to stay for good in a
very big way. And I thought of it first which gives me some satisfaction,
although it would have been nice to get some of those WebTV big bucks!!!
RH: Okay, we've taken the leap and predict that Internet TV or some form of
interactive TV will indeed succeed. But how do you think it will affect people
and the world.
JB: That's what the Internet will evolve into during the next millenium.
Internet on TV will start to have a big influence on politics. It distributes
information in a way that authorities cannot stop -- on an instant basis. It
transcends boundaries and provides the possibility of a real democracy at
last. Not the one we've all been told we have had in various countries such as
in the United States for the last two hundred years or so -- the one man one
vote every four years. But everyday issues at every moment, people will not
only be informed as they are now, but much more they will learn how to express
their opinions without fear or favor via the Web.
RH: But cynics will tell you that the "powers that be" will use this new
media to further control and manipulate the people who are connected to the
Internet. Such as politicos "herding" mass opinion via the Internet to further
their particular political agendas and purposes.
JB: Of course that may happen, but the Internet provides for more
spontaneity where the average person can instantly provide influence without
having much in the way of resources. Information and the distribution of
information is power. The Internet provides for a level playing field. Look at
how information was injected into countries such as China and elsewhere
despite strict government controls. So in the 21st Century, the Internet and
television will bring us the ability to control our moods and to direct our
destinies far more than any party politician can understand right now.
RH: It is really something to read newsgroups -- for example -- to see an
individual and collective public "influence" there. The traditional news shows
now talk about what people say in newsgroups and chatrooms. But to play the
cynic again, you will see the rise of politicos, Internet-based political
interest groups, Internet political consultants, and others harnassing the
power of the Internet to steer the mass public response via the Internet....
JB: It's the end of the line for the traditional party politicians with a
gradual loss of their power. Similarly, you will see more of the loss of or
the dispersion of traditional media influence too. Bureaucrats and the law
will not be powers on their own, but will be subject to the public will via
the Internet connection. Look at how public opinion for Bill Clinton has the
American government's "powers that be" on the run. But the public can
transcend the "powers that be." I don't think the public can be totally
manipulated as a "herd" of Internet users. They just need a means, an outlet,
not just opinion polls, to express themselves. That's the real power of the
Net. It won't usurp television. It will just be part of a single information
communications unit in the home.
