How to price interactive logs

For some newspapers, TV books are loss leaders -- they cost more to produce than their advertising revenue brings in but they generate single-copy sales.

So having an on-line alternative to the familiar weekly guide could open the door to saving money while making readers happier with comprehensive, customized listings.

It's also a way to launch a brand-name presence in cyberspace.

"The reader's got to believe that this is the result of what their newspaper is doing, not TMS," said Tom Beatty, sales manager of Tribune Media Services, whose TV Week Interactive can be "branded for the newspaper."

Neither TV Data Technologies nor Tribune Media Services has suggested how to price their interactive on-line listings products. Newspapers will have to gauge their markets, then decide whether to offer on-line access as a supplement to a TV book, as a giveaway on a bulletin board system or as a fee-based dial-up service that could be delivered by way of a service such as America Online or over the World-Wide Web.

The Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette is taking its TV Vision print title and posting it on FYIowa, its year-old bulletin board service, drawing on-line listings from Tribune.

Billing for FYIowa was to have begun Aug. 1, according to Online Coordinator Lisa Wilson, who works for Gazette subsidiary Interactive Media Inc. TV Vision will be part of the content available to subscribers, who may pay $5.95 for 10 hours a month, $7.95 for 20 and $10.95 for 30 (Gazette subscribers pay $1 less on all tiers).

"It's an excellent product," Wilson said of her iteration of TWI. "I've had rave reviews."

She looks forward to adding advertising on-line, which both TWI and Tvdo can support through ad reservations on-screen. TWI offers fully customizable ad locations, which were not demoed at NEXPO but which can be seen on Tribune's Web home page.

TV Data included ad space in its software from the start. Across the bottom of the Tvdo screen is a one-inch bar set aside for advertising. And the bar can be tailored to each of the week's seven days, permitting a distributor to sell the space in many ways, from one day to several days at a time.

Being interactive, the advertiser soon may opt (this feature is in the works) to have a quick click on the bar bring up a window with details about the ad -- perfect, say, for home-delivery restaurants who want to entice couch potatoes to call and order.

Being digital, sound and video may be options as well. And being Tvdo, whose listings are updated daily, the opportunity for updating ads will come along every day.

In addition, TV Data is working on a way to stash store coupons in the database, so that users can print out ones they need. This could be another money-maker during the TV networks' annual fall promotional tie-ins with major retailers, such as Kmart and Sears.

A community hungry for on-line listings may find them coming from something other than the local paper. With these two hot competitors, it's possible that some areas may be given the choice of on-line listings, as neither TV Data nor Tribune Media Services has ruled out selling to clients who are not already subscribers to their print services.

In fact, Tribune says TV Week Interactive will cost less for newspapers already buying TMS listings.

"Our strategy is, you have to pay for the data," Beatty said. "If you want to use it strictly for this, that's OK with us."

Thus, a publisher with deep pockets who wanted to use TV Data print listings and TMS on-line data could do so -- and an entrepreneurial sort could compete with the local paper, too, by offering the on-line service the newspaper didn't buy.

-- PW

From THE COLE PAPERS, August 1995, Copyright © 1995, All Rights Reserved.