Is the Internet just deja vu Videotex all over again?

For the past several months I've had the strangest feeling -- that I somehow had gotten into H.G. Wells' time machine and been transported back to the early '80s.

Why? Well, all the hoopla and excitement about the Internet gives me the eerie feeling that an aging glamour girl we all thought dead has been gussied up in a new dress and fancy makeup and trotted out for us to ogle.

Remember Videotex? Hooking a keyboard to your television so you could select and call up specific information? Huge amounts of information available to be retrieved down that big cable TV pipe?

And before Videotex, there was Teletext, where text files were displayed page by page, but the viewer had no choice in what was seen.

Back in the early '80s, Videotex was going to revolutionize the information industry and mean the end of newspapers. Prestel in England, Telidon in Canada, Viewtron in Coral Gables, Minitel in France were the pioneers.

I remember being in the Royal York Hotel in Toronto in 1981, along with several thousand others from around the world, all of us dazzled by the wonders of the new technology and looking for ways to take advantage of it. There was a lot of talk about all the wonderful stuff you could put on your Videotex system: News, reference materials, lots of graphics, even ads.

The Brits were way ahead of us then, or so it appeared to those at that conference or one of the other major Videotex expos.

One British paper was the shining light of the industry. The Prestel system had been developed by the British Post Office, and the Birmingham paper had put up "pages" of news, and was about to start publishing classifieds electronically -- and was expecting to just sit back and watch the money roll in.

The Toronto Star and Southam Newspapers were going to take advantage of the Telidon technology on which the Canadian government was showering millions. They would criss-cross Canada with a Videotex system offering all sorts of information and the opportunity to shop from home.

Northern Telecom was a major player in the hardware end of things. For around 25 grand, Northern would sell you a "Page Creation Workstation" that would quickly turn out pages in the alphabet soup standard of the day.

You could store those pages on a computer and, when asked for them, send them down a dedicated line to a terminal, or using the vertical blanking interval in a broadcast TV signal, to viewers at home through their cable box. Pages could be linked, so you could step from one to another by way of graphics.

In a number of Canadian cities -- and a few in the United States -- kiosks were erected in public places with touch-screen television sets that accessed the system's database with city maps, entertainment news, restaurant reviews and ads, etc.

Shopping, of course, was one of the keystones of the Knight-Ridder Viewtron experiment in Coral Gables, Fla. Knight-Ridder created a subsidiary, Viewdata Corp., which had AT&T for its partner.

Several hundred homes were linked to the Viewdata database, and could get news from a number of sources, including AP, Dow Jones and the Miami Herald. One could order books from B. Dalton, get recipes for a variety of cookbooks, and so on.

Viewdata could keep track of what was accessed, both so advertisers could be told of responses, and so the service could be tailored to viewers' desires.

What happened to those systems and others that came later, such as the Cox newspapers' experiment with providing Videotex feeds to personal computers?

First, the technology wasn't quite ready. Computers were slower then. Memory was expensive. Home television sets were OK for viewing, but you couldn't store anything.

For a while, however, Videotex was seen as the greatest thing since sliced bread by those of us in the information business who were dazzled by the promise of the technology.

Then, after a few years and many millions of dollars, one by one the plugs had been pulled and Videotex appeared dead, principally because people didn't want to use it. (The French Minitel system lived on because of one brilliant decision: The telephone directory was available only from a Minitel terminal, so people had to use the system, if only to get phone numbers.)

Don't get me wrong. That burst of activity was not without redeeming social value.

A lot of lessons were learned. One very big lesson many of us, we who were enamored of the technology, learned late in the game was that the only people who made money from Videotex were the suppliers of software, hardware and communication links.

Knight-Ridder, Southam, Torstar and others learned that a lot of money can be expended with little or no return, and from their reticence to jump into the Internet with both feet, one could assume that they learned other lessons as well.

A few of the big players are still around. Warner Communication, for example, joined with American Express to set up a company called Qube, which offered an information retrieval and home banking service called CompuServe. It used Warner's Atari computers for terminals.

CompuServe is still around, of course, but Warner and American Express have moved on to other ventures.

So what? How does this relate to the Internet, to the World-Wide Web?

Well, the Internet and the World-Wide Web and all that other stuff out there on the information superhighway is Videotex if you accept the definition that Videotex is the on-demand display of text and images on a video display screen.

The computers are faster now, memory is a lot cheaper, displays are much better, the software is flashier and data transfer is faster.

However, the basic premise is still the same: People will be willing to sit in front of a terminal and use a keyboard and pointing device to download information from somewhere out there in the ether.

A whole lot of people are betting big bucks that the results of the earlier experiments were wrong because the technology wasn't ready.

I don't want to put a damper on the fun, folks, but let's step back and take a longer view.

Remember the telephone?

Daniel Pearl, in a recent Wall Street Journal article, wrote of the way it was viewed at the turn of the century:

"The telephone would bring peace on Earth, eliminate Southern accents, revolutionize surgery, stamp out 'heathenism' abroad and save the farm by making farmers less lonely.

"The picture-phone was just around the corner, and in 1912, technology watcher S.C. Gilfillan predicted that a 'home theater' would, within two decades, let people dial up symphonies, presidential speeches and three-dimensional Shakespeare plays.

"The cost would be low and the 'moral tone' would be excellent, since only the best material would survive. Novels, orchestras and movie theaters would vanish, and government as we know it might not survive either, he wrote."

Sound familiar? There were those who made the same sort of predictions in the early days of radio, and later when television finally did come on the scene.

And that's what we heard in the early '80s about Videotex -- it would revolutionize the transfer of information. Newspapers would disappear, since people would be able to pick and choose the news they wanted to read.

It was all so seductive, 15 years ago. News was easy with Telidon and Viewtron.

Today, news is easy on the Internet.

Making money is the problem.

Before we leave news, however, I'd like to pose a question for you: How many Web sites with national and international news does the world need?

More to the point, won't CNN, the Associated Press or that newly formed newspaper consortium, New Century Network, swoop in, bend their formidable resources to the task and dominate the field?

Bet on it.

Where does that leave publishers? Well, they still have that local franchise. Local news, local information.

Some folks talk of digital newspapers assembled by software agents programmed to suck in the things the reader says are of interest. But how would you hear of something not on your list?

Roger Fidler, driving force behind the late, lamented Knight-Ridder flat-panel skunkworks, has a view of digital newspapers put together by real editors, but in ways that will allow personalization of the product.

All that's well and good, but how are publishers going to make money from their electronic product?

Historically, newspapers have made money through the sale of advertising. So far, very few people seem to think advertisers are going to rush to support on-line products, and the evidence supports that view.

Even if they do jump in, will the results be the same as with preprints, where ad dollars often just shifted from ROP?

Then there's catalog-style selling on the Internet, which can be linked to news pages. But why should shoppers sit down at a terminal, go through all the rigmarole to connect to a Web site, go from one hypertext link to another and then send an order off into the ether when they can browse through a catalog that came to them at no cost, make a toll-free call and give their order to a live human at the other end of the line?

Since fewer than 20 percent of American households have modems and virtually all have televisions and get mail, which is the better bet?

While growth in use of personal computers has been remarkable, and their utility is clear to those of us who have welcomed them into our lives, the fact remains that there's still not a huge market out there.

Sure, there's a lot of traffic on the Internet. A good deal of it is there because it's free, or virtually so. What happens when Web sites begin charging for access? So far nobody's saying much about either revenues or access numbers for sites charging for information.

ActivMedia, which does on-line marketing research, recently completed a study, "Who's Succeeding on the Internet and How?" Internet World, in its October issue, discusses it briefly and views the results very optimistically, saying, "The Web may turn out to be the new hot investment tip of our times."

The study, which excluded those selling Internet infrastructure, found that 22 percent of respondents were making money now, 40 percent expected to generate revenue within one to two years -- and 14 percent were "totally disappointed" with results so far.

I don't find that terribly encouraging.

If you ask me, the Internet will grow, money will be made in niche markets -- selling hardware and software to the people using the net, for one example -- but it will never become a mass medium with electronic newspapers bringing in major profits.

Despite what the futurists and techno-junkies would have the world believe, those of us who work with the Internet and the commercial on-line services on a daily basis know that the technology is still a major problem for Joe SixPack. This may be a high-tech world, but there are a lot of low-tech people in it.

Where technology was a barrier for earlier Videotex providers -- the software was difficult, the page preparation terminals were expensive -- it's now a barrier for would-be users. Even at $1000, computers are beyond the budgets of many, and the learning curve for most Internet software is still fairly steep.

All you have to do is visit some CompuServe technology forums to see the frustration, and the people who frequent them are not your average newspaper readers.

The displays, especially if you're using Netscape Navigator or looking at Acrobat documents, are dazzling. You can get lost playing the hypertext link game.

For now, though, there are trade-offs. It can take a very long time (given the attention span of today's younger generation) for Netscape to load a complex document with lots of graphics. Are the SixPacks -- Joe and his wife Ethel -- really going to get into that, or will CNN continue to be enough?

And what do young non-readers want? Newspaper editors and publishers have been asking that question for years without finding an answer. One thing is clear: They still aren't looking for traditional newspaper content.

You find them in Usenet groups, in AOL chats, or admiring each other's bizarre home pages.

I believe there are ways for newspapers to make money using the Internet, or others of the improved communication links, but converting conventional newspapers to electronics and selling traditional advertising won't be the way.

If I were a publisher I'd be very chary of pouring money into a Web site project. I'd let things sort themselves out before jumping in.

All those memories of the early '80s -- and that Videotex decoder in the box in the garage -- are enough to make me cautious.

-- Mike Middlesworth

For more information on Videotex, see Mindy McAdams' history:
http://www.well.com/user/mmcadams/videotex.html

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