Hollywired start-up daVinci Time & Space is creating the first interactive television environment for kids.
DaVinci Time & Space, a start-up now in its second year, plans to become the first provider of an interactive television (ITV) station for children. "Our goal," says Jeff Apple, daVinci's CEO and co-founder (along with Carol Peters), "is to make an environment where kids love to be and parents love having them spend time."
DaVinci has created prototypes of the shows, games, and ads the company plans to sell, running the pilots on an Ethernet network of Apple Macintosh and Silicon Graphics Indy machines. The next step is to convince the cable TV and telecommunications companies beginning trials of interactive-television delivery systems - including Time Warner Cable, AT&T, Pacific Telesis Video Services, GTE Corp., and U S West - to add daVinci Time & Space to their programming lineup in tests that will start later this year.
If Apple and Peters are successful, they'll convince one or more of these ITV providers to make daVinci part of the basic lineup of programming offered to subscribers who will pay a base rate for interactive TV services, just as they pay a base rate today for their cable TV. To understand ITV, think of it as an extension of today's cable TV model: when you hook up to cable today as a basic subscriber, chances are you'll get the major broadcast networks - ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox - as well as a few cable channels like CNN or TBS. DaVinci wants to be among the basic channels you get when you pay U S West, Pacific Telesis, GT&E, or another provider the monthly fee for ITV service.
Before developing a prototype, daVinci had already lined up strong funding and impressed analysts. For starters, Peters and Apple had convinced Venrock Associates - the venture capitalist arm of the Rockefeller family and an early investor in Apple Computer and Intel Corp. - to support their project. The two other major investors in daVinci are Oak Investment Partners, which funded videoconferencing developer PictureTel Corporation and Seagate Technologies, and Greylock Management Corp., which has successfully invested in Continental Cablevision and Avid Technology. Together, the three investors have poured nearly US$5 million into daVinci.
While analysts and even ITV service providers acknowledge that it will be anywhere from three to five years before the technology infrastructure is in place to deliver ITV content to a mass audience, daVinci is jumping the gun by developing a content-delivery environment before the details of technical delivery systems are hammered out. Clearly, the company believes the way to set the standard for an ITV channel is to become the first one with a concrete example of how ITV content should be delivered to consumers. Tom Melcher, in charge of strategy and development for daVinci, calls this "the first mover advantage," citing the way CNN set the model for what a 24-hour, all-news network should provide - chiefly by being the first ones to do it.
"CNN established a brand awareness and market presence that was very difficult for the follower-ons to knock out," said Melcher, who was most recently a start-up consultant for Q2, a subsidiary of electronic retailer QVC Inc. "It also has a real skill advantage. To create news 24 hours a day, you had to define a new way of doing business. They made it up as they went along. Much of what we're doing is similar."
So far, industry analysts think daVinci's strategy may be the right one. "Given that basically no one has any products out there, because the infrastructure hasn't been settled, their approach and the thoroughness that they seem to be putting into planning and tracking the market seems very appropriate," says Steve Reynolds, who has been closely following ITV developments as director of interactive multimedia research at Link Resources Corp. in New York. "They're doing something that is distinctive, that has a focus. It's refreshing that they're doing their homework first."
Peters and Apple bring an ideal partnership of technology and entertainment know-how to daVinci, which takes its name from the Italian inventor whose hallmark was merging concepts from art and science. "He's art" says Peters, gesturing toward Apple. "I'm science."
Peters, 47, is an experienced Silicon Valley technologist. Reynolds describes her as being "very on top of things." While director of engineering at SGI, she led the project team that created the Iris Indigo workstation. Before that, she spent 16 years at Digital Equipment Corporation as the engineering manager of DEC's first RISC-based workstation. Apple, 45, is the entertainment- and content-savvy director/producer. His credits include founding Apple Production, a Los Angeles-based company. He has also produced four feature films, including the recent In the Line of Fire with Castle Rock Entertainment and Columbia Pictures.
To make sure the company retains its technology-entertainment heritage, daVinci has two offices: a base of operations in San Mateo, California, near the Silicon Valley, and a Hollywood office in Los Angeles. In keeping with the interactive nature of the company, the two offices are linked via a live desktop videoconferencing system that is on 24 hours a day and allows the company's seven-member staff - which was culled from Disney Software, 3DO, SGI, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, among others - to see each other.
With the Los Angeles office visible in a small window on screen a few feet away, Peters, sitting in daVinci's sparsely populated San Mateo high-rise, launches into a nuts-and-bolts description of the company's plan. "We're creating a programming service that will be made available in an interactive home. That is a home that has been wired by some carrier such that the television has connected to it a set-top box. Through the wiring and network, it will link up to a server that is capable of delivering digital programming into that home."
In computer terms, Peters describes the relationship between the TV viewer and daVinci as a large-scale, distributed client-server network. "When a kid sits in a house, holding a remote, and says, 'DaVinci Time & Space, please,' a certain piece of software is downloaded through the network into the set-top box. That client-side software starts running the set-top box in cooperation with its other half, the server-side software. Which software is doing what when all depends on what the offered programming is and what the kid decides to do," says Peters. "The kid looks through some kind of sourcing mechanism, a navigator or some kind of browser, and says 'Take me there.' The selection causes a virtual circuit to be created between the house with this kid in it and the daVinci Time & Space server."
While some of the major technological elements of the system have yet to be determined - like which of the still-developing set-top boxes for ITV will become the standard platform - determining that kids should be their audience was an easy decision. "Kids are the perfect market for any kind of new interactive media because they are interactive," says Apple. "They want to touch, they want to move, they want to explore. They're not afraid of any new technology, and this to them would be as simple as picking up a pencil or crayon."
Peters jumps in: "We have a lot more confidence that kids will be able to figure this thing out than their parents will. Not because it's difficult, but because kids don't have any kind of mental barrier that says, 'I don't know how to do this. I don't know what this interactive stuff is.' They're not going to feel embarrassed or threatened."
Analysts like Reynolds believe that the focus on kids is a good choice. "Our research shows that children's-oriented programming will be a huge driver, generally speaking, for media and for the ITV industry in particular," said Reynolds, citing both demographic forces and the success of other children's TV ventures, including Children's Television Workshop (creators of Sesame Street) in the broadcast television world and Viacom's Nickelodeon network on cable TV.
"There's a sizable portion of the adult population with kids or getting started on having kids. The need or a feeling of need for support materials that reinforce your kids' educational process is very strong. We've found that there is a palpable need for electronic activities that are contributing something to a child's education beyond staring at a screen. It's that need that's selling a lot of multimedia computers right now in the mainstream market, and that's affecting the mix of CD-ROM titles, educational titles, being bundled with those machines."
DaVinci's supporters agree. "The focus on children was something that was not a capricious conclusion," says Venrock's David Hathaway, who now sits on daVinci's board of directors. "Children, with their proficiency with computer games and electronics, will be able to accept this world more than middle-aged folks. The underlying philosophy is that education doesn't have to be dull and boring. It can be enjoyable, and it doesn't have to be constrained to the classroom."
When kids tune into daVinci, they can expect to find an electronic theme park, a virtual Disneyland where they can visit the same attractions over and over again, says Peters. In addition, they'll find new attractions added overnight, lots of interesting characters wandering around, and also other visitors to daVinci Time & Space, namely other kids who have tuned in at the same time. "When you tune in and get your first screen, you find yourself in what we call a place. The general way to describe a place is to look out the window," says Peters, gesturing toward the busy highway interchange and business park visible from the company's windows. "That's a perfectly reasonable image of a place that you might see. DaVinci has a lot of different, highly realized places, and each place has a set of different characteristics that makes it this place as opposed to that place. It looks like television, and it looks like film. We're using both rendered environments, with computer graphics, as well as filmed environments."
And once you're in a place? "You are there, and characters are there, very specific interactive characters," adds Peters. "Those are fully realized characters, like fully realized characters in Sesame Street or in a movie or television show."
For Apple, it's the story-telling possibilities and the audio communication among daVinci kids - kids will be able to talk to other kids using microphones - that most excite him about the service. "Because there's two-way communication, it becomes more of a community experience. Kids will not just be closed in some confined cyberspace," Apple says. "It also becomes more of a complete kind of story environment, which you wouldn't get in traditional television today.
If you watch a weekly series and miss an episode, you've missed it because you weren't around to watch it or you forgot to tape it or you didn't know how to turn on the video machine. But with this service, if you're not there tomorrow, you're not going to miss something, because it will be there the next time you tune in."
That story-telling continuity is possible, explains Peters, because of the client-server nature of the system. "We know who the kid is and we know what that kid does. So if we're talking about drama and telling a story, a kid is not going to miss a piece of the story because he or she doesn't have to be there at a particular time. If the kid is in this place and at a certain point in a story, and then goes away, our system remembers where they left off."
Unlike prepackaged CD-ROM titles and games or linear television shows, daVinci's places will be constantly revised. The entertainment content will be created by daVinci itself, third-party providers, and, most importantly, advertisers, who will fund the service. "In cable terms, we hope to be a basic service," says Peters, explaining the plans to convince ITV providers to carry daVinci. "When homeowners or bill payers pay for interactive cable service at whatever the basic rate charged by the carriers, we plan to be a part of the basic service. We'll be able to make it available to such a wide audience because advertisers, not the viewers or the ITV service providers, will be footing the bill for the service."
With initial help from daVinci, advertisers will create places or interactive advertising components that can be incorporated into places. Like other content, advertising will have to be as compelling and entertaining as other interactive elements, or kids simply won't choose it. That, says Apple, means that advertisers will have to rethink the way they promote their products.
"Advertising will have to entice kids and convince them to interact. If they do interact, then you're taking advertising to a new level where everyone wins. Children will win because they're empowered to decide for themselves what they want to do and when. Advertisers win because they will get a sense of who's reacting to their ads and if there's any interest. It's not just mass marketing hitting 9 billion people at the same time.
In this case, it becomes more like vertical marketing, in which you really zero in on individuals." The ethics of including advertising disguised as "content" is something that daVinci says it's spent considerable time thinking about. It has already set a few guidelines, such as a rule that kids won't be able to buy things on the air. Peters says kids won't have any way to order something in an ad. He's heard too many horror stories of kids who log on to their parents America Online or CompuServe accounts and rack up $500 or more in a week. "For adults, there will be plenty of interactive stations where you can choose to buy right away. But that won't be part of daVinci's programming."
Ultimately, daVinci's founders recognize their success will depend on how well they live up to their mission: to create a place that kids love to be, a place parents love having them spend time, and to convince ITV providers to carry daVinci. As this article went to press, daVinci claimed that it was on the verge of signing major deals with several national advertisers and several of the ITV projects around the country.
Peters and Apple hope their philosophy about kids, education, and entertainment, coupled, of course, with their technical expertise, will carry them through. Apple sums it up: "You have so many great tools in the interactive media to make it really compelling and to draw kids in. But it doesn't mean that every educational experience has to be this incredible entertainment thing. If it's highly interactive and well done, kids will learn but won't realize they're learning, because it's fun. And that's what great education is about: it should be exciting to learn, it should not be punishment."
Tomorrow's potential couch potatoes, take heart: daVinci is doing everything it can to make sure that it's in the right place at the right time to convince ITV providers to tune into their vision. n
