Occasionally, it arrives damp (or not at all), but it's cheap (as little as 35 cents, if the book is distributed any day but Sunday), it doesn't have to be downloaded or dialed into (no phone charges), and it doesn't require a tribute to Bill Gates to own one.

Click on the application and, if you've done this before and have set up your own customized view of TV land, you have tailored listings for on-screen review or output to a printer.

And that may be the telling issue with digitized listings: No matter how easy they are to access, will viewers want to take the time to go to one video screen to see what's on another? Or, even worse for broadcasters, will they become so enchanted with surfing the listings that they forget why they went there in the first place?

Perhaps there won't be a fair test until the 500-channel age dawns. For now, we'll quit questioning the value of these packages and take a look at what they do.

To get a sense of how non-print listings work, we screen tested the off-line application TV Data Online (which is to be joined by a 'Net version shortly) and visited three sites using Tribune's TV Week Interactive.

TV Data provided a phone number and password in order to download a demo of TV Data Online. The Windows-based program (there are no plans for a Mac version from either TV Data or Tribune) was a hefty 2.2 megabytes big, which took a while to bring in at 9600 bps.

Listings downloads are much smaller, 250 kilobytes and up, depending on the number of channels and cable systems in the subscriber's area.

When the app was kicked into gear, it first announced that new data were available, and given permission, it brought in new material for movies, features and grids a day at a time. Updating each day, on a Compaq '486 without any special goodies, took about 30 seconds.

With TVDO, the user can set depths and widths for grid entries. Keep clicking on a down arrow and soon five lines of text are displayed for each channel -- and "ABC" in a half-hour box becomes ABC World News This Morning. Similarly, the width per box can be expanded and "ABC" again grows to its full title.

To see details about a program, just click on its box and a text window opens, showing a synopsis of the show, who stars in it and other air times. (This last bit of info is certainly a step ahead of the printed guide, aside from movie logs.)

By going into a channel lineup dialog box, Mr. or Ms. Viewer can create a user-specific lineup. Channels can be chosen from the master list for the cable system being referenced, then sorted by channel, call letters or random (to add an element of surprise, we presume).

When the setup is done, the user tells the app to store the new order, and a data sort is performed -- taking another few seconds.

TVDO's grid is white with colored lettering, giving a visual cue as to the nature of the program's content. Some time segments get pretty bright and cheery, and perhaps too dazzling to be meaningful. But the visually intuitive may find the idea practical.

One welcome feature in TVDO is keyboard commands. Menu choices can be keyboard driven; at the right side of the screen are buttons with the same choices for the mouse-and-click crowd. Among the buttons are days of the week, for quick access to daily grids.

Two other screens give access to program details. One, Best Bets, opens a screen with four buttons -- Best Bets, Soap Talk, TV Q/A and TV Trivia. A click on Best Bets brings up text, with paragraphs alternating black and blue. The text is identical to features copy provided to print clients of TV Data Technologies.

Fortunately, we had a good look at TVDO before calamity struck -- the application bombed. On restart, it asked whether to process new data again. We declined, not wishing to spend the time, and found that our channel lineup preferences had been saved.

When TVDO bombed a second time, it came back devoid of grid info, just a garden-variety spreadsheet grid (from BaseCode) -- and no evident way through a menu to tell it to go find the data it had refreshed before.

Upon reflection, we concluded that the curse we cast on suppliers at NEXPO booths, where we're renowned for causing demos to explode, had visited yet another supplier. Sorry about that.

(To get a static gander at TVDO, you can surf over to TV Data's web site, http://www.tvdata.com/.)

Tribune's truly on-line product can be seen at three web sites -- Tribune's demo home page (http://www.tmstv.com), Continental Cablevision of New England (http://www.continental.com/) and Arizona Central (http://www.azcentral.com/), the recently started web service of Phoenix Newspapers that also has a presence on America Online.

On a first visit, the viewer is asked to designate which state and city in which he or she lives. A multi-digit code is assigned to the user for future use, or more simply, the viewer can bookmark a page past the initial sign-up to provide rapid access the next time around.

A tour of these three sites shows the advantage to having 'Net access: no lengthy download (we were running on a Mac Quadra 650 through a 28.8 kbps modem to a local Internet provider), no strange interface (we are partial to Macs, we admit) and fairly good response time.

Totally mouse-driven, Tribune's interface varies from site to site except for its grids, which are color-coded click-maps.

On Arizona Central, movie titles appear in green, sports in yellow, news/talk/special affairs in magenta, gray for everything else. Continental uses a wider range: red movies, green children, blue drama (although talk appears to be the same color), magenta comedy, green-on-gray news, a darker green for documentaries and cyan for sports.

It makes for quite a display -- probably useful for some programming executives plotting their next season, but near overkill for the common Joe, who has to read the program block title to know just what's what anyway.

While Continental goes with grids and program searches right off, Arizona Central features a color pic of the week's cover story, with a link to the text. As with TVDO, the content is drawn from the print-oriented product. (One drawback: The picture remains even after the program has aired.)

The Tribune search screen is simple but comprehensive, with fields for program and/or episode title, and description. Click on the category field and a pop-up menu provides so many choices, they stop at the letter "H."

The search can be narrowed by date, including those gone by, to the last day in the data cycle (from Saturday through the second Friday hence). One of four time blocks can be selected to further narrow the search.

Once done, the search returns a list of programs, with name, date, time, channel number and service, program category and a few words about its content (movies get stars). After one search on Arizona Central, we printed out 12 pages -- 45 items -- of "educational" programs airing for a one-week period.

And there you have it -- literally. Go take a look at the Tribune sites, and drop by TV Data in a few weeks to see its 'Net offering when it becomes available.

How does all this play in Peoria? Dunno, but several score miles west, a few folks in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, have found it to their liking.

One of the first Tribune customers to go live was the company that publishes the Cedar Rapids Gazette, which put the bulletin board version up for subscribers early in the fall on FYIowa, a collection of electronic services run by Interactive Media.

"Interactive Media basically is coordinating the efforts of all of the Gazette companies," said Administrator Jim Debth. "When you go to FYIowa, FYIowa is the umbrella for the Gazette, Iowa Farmer Today and Kcrg-TV."

FYIowa is overseen by Interactive Media, with two full-time people and a half-time graphics person. One full-time person from the Gazette works on it as well, Debth said, while one person at Iowa Farmer Today spends part of his time at it, as do two people at Kcrg.

FYIowa also has a home page (http://www.infi.net/fyiowa/) through Internet provider InfiNet of Norfolk, Va. In January, it will offer TV Vision, named after the Gazette's weekly TV book. Now, subscribers to FYIowa's BBS can download TV Vision for off-line use.

It's one of the first -- perhaps only -- instance where TV listings have generated a revenue trickle. About one BBS user in 10 downloads the listings, Debth said. Rates are $5.95 a month for 10 hours, $7.95 for 20 hours and $10.95 for 30 hours. Subscribers to the Gazette get $1 off.

"We actually have some reasonable response," Debth said about subscribers' use of the BBS listings. "It'll be much more easy to get on our web site because you won't have to download files."

While FYIowa will use the print name TV Vision, on-line "it'll be a much more 'Net-looking graphic," Debth said. Working with Tribune to prepare a web version has been a snap, he said.

"Fortunately, we haven't had to do any of it ourselves, other than the graphic we've provided them," Debth said. "We just kind of tell them this is how we'd like the page to look."

That's the idea, according to Barbara Needleman, a marketing executive at Tribune Media Services.

"We put up a site for them and design some wallpaper for it," said Needleman, then wait for the client to ask for modifications. "If you put something on it, they know what they want to change."

While Interactive Media may gain a smidgen of income from TV Vision off-line, most publishers continue to feed the 'Net while not taking money back from the content bottom-feeders.

"I don't think anyone is pricing it," Needleman said -- except, of course, Tribune. While declining to provide a dollar figure for its fees, Needleman indicated that TV Week Interactive was priced attractively, especially since four tiers of service were available.

"There's different functionality in each of the tiers," she said, so costs and benefits can be correlated well. "We've made it so that it's affordable for papers who want to put something out but don't want to spend a lot of money now, all the way to papers who want to do very cable-specific products."

At TV Data, pricing is not the immediate concern -- getting the product ready for prime time is. Going back to the digital workbench was a marketing and design decision, according to Mike Laddin, vice president for marketing and product development.

"Frankly," Laddin said, "we felt there was some additional work we needed to do on the product. We took some more time to make sure we did it right."

So he turned to Kevin Joyce, who had to look at his business card to find his latest title: interactive and on-line services product manager. ("Maybe it should be 'whatever is hot' product manager," he joked.)

Describing the NEXPO iteration of TV Data Online as "a very young product," Joyce said TV Data wanted to improve search times and screens.

"We cleaned up the user interface to the point that we threw out some things that were confusing -- too many buttons, too many layers, too many menu items," he said of the CodeBasic-driven product. The result: "We reduced the amount of steps for an action to take place, and made it easy to navigate."

Joyce said that last summer, TV Data also realized it had to contend with several ways of delivering the data, not just through a BBS. "The Web, I think, caught everybody by surprise," Joyce said. "It proves people are thirsty for information and visual information."

As Prodigy was the first to show an interest in digital listings from TV Data, it was natural to prepare for distribution through an on-line service -- but also a proprietary bulletin board service, in this case Worldgroup from Galacticomm of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for localized dial-up delivery, and eventually on the Internet.

"There are a lot of flavors and ways that newspapers are setting up their on-line services," Joyce said. "We didn't want to be tied directly or intimately to any one style."

Hence, TV Data had to back up a bit from its ties to Galacticomm to make sure that preparing for distribution via that route did not shut off other avenues, such as a BBS already running at a newspaper that simply wanted to add TVDO to its menu.

"We needed this product to work on a variety of delivery platforms," Joyce said, although it is "totally a Windows-based product" in terms of the end-user, unless you're running Win95. Cranking up for Win95 is undecided, as "we're going to look and see what kind of a lifespan these off-line applications have in general."

Is Laddin worried that Tribune has the jump on TV Data? Not hardly.

"In terms of the market overall and where we stand," Laddin said, "it's a new media and it's an emerging marketplace for everyone -- Tribune, ourselves, the newspapers."

"Everybody is very interested," he said. "There's a lot of activity, but the papers are moving at a very deliberate way because everybody in the market is still trying to figure out how they're going to make money. Short term, nobody's making any money at this, at least up to now."

Compared to Tribune Media Services, TV Data has an enormous client base: more than 2500 print clients, and a burgeoning role in providing data to on-screen providers, such as cable companies and a new enterprise called VideoGuide Inc. (http://www.vgi.com).

With backing from the Japanese trading firm Marubeni and consumer electronics giant Sanyo, VideoGuide has set up a delivery system that uses the radio frequencies of wireless pagers and presents listings on-screen (freshly downloaded overnight). The viewer can click -- using VideoGuide's remote -- to view or tape a program.

The product is being marketed through Tandy Radio Shack stores and other major retailers in selected areas.

And so, as they say in TV land, stay tuned. How and when -- not whether -- digital listings end up in your home is the question.

More importantly, whether your newspaper will make any money off them is an even more open question than it was last summer, when TV Week Interactive and TV Data Online were rolled out.

The challenge lies ahead for publishers, while the suppliers have their part of it well under way. For all, it's a big time learning experience.

What's it like, developing an on-line product? Kevin Joyce can tell you:

"Sometimes you end up reinventing the wheel. Sometimes you do it the right way or a better way. At the very least, you do it the way you wanted it to be done."

Tribune Media Services,
(312) 222-4444, e-mail: tmc@tribune.com;
TV Data Technologies,
(518) 792-9914, e-mail: tvdata@tvdata.com.

-- Pete Wetmore

From THE COLE PAPERS, January 1996, Copyright © 1996, All Rights Reserved.