By F.D. Forbes and C.C. Cooley, The Magnavox Company
The Magnavox Company believes that to a great extent the future growth of the cable industry is tied to CATV's ability to introduce new services beyond the delivery of standard off-the-air T.V. channels. Many ideas for creating additional revenue producing services have been published over the laRt five years. Some examples of these proposed services are listed be low.
- Premium TV
- Restricted TV
- Subscriber Polling
- Specialized Advertising
- TV Games
- Specialty Marketing
- Home Education
A great deal of effort has been expended by a number of manufacturing companies in an attempt to develop devices and systems which would be capable of providing these services. However, we feel that it has become increasingly clear that the problems of bringing additional services into being are much greater than was initially anticipated. These problems not only have been in the definition and design of hardware but have also included development of software and programming sources, as well as in developing the techniques required to establish a profitable business. As you know very well, the CATV industry is extremely capital intensive. It is doubtful that even the largest MSO's can afford to introduce, on a large scale, whole blocks of services prior to gaining revenue from any of them. Further, the marketability of any of the advanced services mentioned previously has yet to be proven. Thus, it is unreasonable to expect a CATV company to risk the large amounts of capital required for full service operation until a sufficient number of experiments have been conducted to establish that money could be made from such a venture. Because of these difficulties, we believe that the development of advanced services will come as an orderly progression, each service being defined and proven individually. The wired nation will come but we do not believe that it will happen all at once.