Interesting article. I haven't tried this technology.
Kelly
Published Sunday, April 19, 1998, in the San Jose Mercury News
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WaveTop needs to get fitter if it wants to survive
By Mike Langberg
SOMETIMES I feel like a wolf in columnist's clothing.
Wolves are very important in maintaining the health of deer, bringing down
unhealthy animals that would otherwise weaken the herd. Even the youngest
fawn has to run fast enough to stay ahead of the wolf's snapping jaws.
One of my self-appointed tasks, if you'll pardon a moment of pomposity, is
trying to identify which new technology ideas deserve an untimely death,
and then explain why.
This week, I'm sinking my teeth into the neck of a promising young
information service. It's called
WaveTop -- and it just might survive by picking up some speed.
The intriguing idea behind WaveTop is delivering material such as news
headlines, sports scores, stock quotes and entertainment features to
personal computers through an unseen part of a television station's
broadcast signal, called the Vertical Blanking Interval, rather than
through phone lines and the Internet.
WaveTop, officially launched on April 6 by WavePhore Inc. of Phoenix,
provides its advertiser-supported programming that's free to viewers. The
only major requirement for viewing WaveTop is that your PC contain a TV
tuner card for receiving the transmissions.
You can find more information about WaveTop, which only works on Windows 95
PCs, at the service's World Wide Web site (http://www.wavetop.net), or you
can call WavePhore at (602) 952-5500.
In theory, WaveTop sounds great -- you get all kinds of useful and amusing
material delivered silently to your PC, and you can view the collection
instantly without having to tie up a phone line and put up with Web traffic
jams. The data is being transmitted nationally by the Public Broadcasting
System, including KQED (Channel 9) in the Bay Area.
The good news is that WavePhore should be able to provide solutions -- if
it has the staying power to keep WaveTop alive while improving it.
The bad news is that WaveTop is hobbled by at least three big weaknesses.
The first is installation. Only a tiny handful of home PCs already have a
TV tuner card, which typically sells for about $100. I don't think WaveTop
is yet compelling enough, as I'll describe below, to motivate many
consumers to put up with the expense and effort of buying and installing a
tuner card.
Even if you have a tuner card, setting up the WaveTop software can be
daunting. You have to install the most current version of Microsoft's
Internet Explorer Web browser -- labeled 4.01 -- as well as two related
applications, Microsoft's NetShow and Macromedia Shockwave. For many models
of tuner card, you'll also need to download new software drivers from the
card manufacturer's Web site.
Then you have to get the WaveTop software itself, an eight megabyte file
that can take several hours to download from WavePhore's overworked
computers.
The company apparently recognizes that obtaining all this software by modem
is too much and is offering to mail a free CD-ROM containing Internet
Explorer, the plug-ins and the WaveTop program.
A solution is just around the corner. Microsoft has agreed to include
WaveTop's software with the upcoming Windows 98 operating system, currently
expected to ship in late June. It's part of a broader initiative by
Microsoft to meld home PCs with television, and PC makers are expected to
offer built-in TV tuner cards with a good number of their Windows 98
models. Many future PC buyers, as a result, will be able to receive WaveTop
without doing anything more than connecting their machine to a cable TV
line or even a simple "rabbit ears" antenna.
The second weakness is the great "off vs. on" debate. Because WaveTop
transmits a relatively slow trickle of data around the clock, you have to
leave your PC running all the time to take full advantage of the service.
That runs counter to the instincts of most home PC users, who don't want to
waste electricity by letting their PCs operate non-stop -- not to mention
the annoying noise you probably don't want to hear when not using the
machine. A minority of users sits in the "on" camp, believing that PCs last
longer if spared the wear and tear imposed by re-starting.
Microsoft is preparing an important resolution to this debate by including
"power management" features in Windows 98. With power management, many new
PCs will fall into a deep sleep when not in use -- greatly reducing
electricity consumption but making it possible for them to spring back to
life in a few seconds.
WaveTop, for now, is incompatible with these power management features;
your PC can't receive WaveTop data while asleep.
This is a classic example of how Microsoft has gotten so big that, like a
lumbering dinosaur, its front brain isn't always communicating with its
rear brain: One part of the company is working furiously on power
management in Windows 98, while another part of the company touts a program
that requires disabling power management.
Here again, there is a solution on the horizon. A WavePhore executive told
me the company is working with Microsoft on a fix that will enable WaveTop
to co-exist with Windows 98 power management.
The third weakness is what WaveTop delivers. The current package is mostly
highlights from Web sites operated by big media companies. There are a few
news stories from the Wall Street Journal, articles from Time magazine,
comic strips from the Universal syndicate, forecasts from the Weather
Channel and computing articles from Ziff-Davis magazines.
WaveTop presents this information through a customized Internet Explorer
interface. You point and click to navigate, just like when surfing the Web,
only the pages pop up instantly because the data is stored on your PC's
hard disk.
I found the selection of information providers too narrow, and the amount
of material presented by each insufficiently deep. What's more, many links
on WaveTop pages are for Web pages -- forcing you to connect with the
Internet, and thereby defeating the value of archiving material on the hard
disk.
This shortcoming, too, could be fixed. WavePhore says it may soon be able
to double the relatively limited 140 megabytes per day of data sent by
WaveTop -- increasing the likelihood your PC will be able to pluck out
something that's compelling to you.
If WaveTop pulls off all these corrections, while simultaneously building
enough of an audience to maintain advertiser support, the stumbling young
service could mature into a substantial and valuable operation that could
easily face down yammering critics such as myself.
Write Mike Langberg at 750 Ridder Park Drive, San Jose, Calif. 95190; call
(408) 920-5084; fax (408) 920-5917; or e-mail to [log in to unmask] .
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