Good things come to those who wait, but they come first to those who pay. That's leading a host of new video-information technologies to Wall Street, where knowing something just a second before the other guy can mean a million-dollar profit.
According to market-research firm SIMBA Information Inc., the market for real-time financial data and news topped US$5.6 billion last year and will increase to $7.7 billion by 1998.
Most of that was spent on quotes and news wire services. Walk around any trading room on Wall Street and you'll see traders at their desks, staring at screens and screens of text, while a few strategically placed televisions burble off in a corner - usually with the volume turned down.
The video is shunted aside, but it's not ignored. If something really big happens, like war breaking out in the Persian Gulf, all eyes turn to the TV, says Gary Crofton, a trader at State Street Bank & Trust Company in Boston. "There's something engaging about video that cuts through the clutter," he says.
Unless the video is important to all the traders, though, it's lost in the background. CNN and NBC hope to break out of the corner and onto every desk, courtesy of the latest networking and compression technologies.
CNN has adopted a simple strategy. In partnership with Intel Corporation, the Turner subsidiary will offer its around-the-clock programming, real-time stock-quote updates, and headlines that match the video as a PC network feed, available for a monthly fee of $10 to $12.50 per user. Instead of waiting for the crowd to turn up the volume, anyone can hone in on the broadcast independently.
NBC, which owns the business news network CNBC, has a more ambitious - and expensive - product: NBC Desktop Video. In addition to CNBC's continuous feed, the General Electric subsidiary will offer subscribers access to live, unedited footage of breaking news events, most of which never sees the light of day. It won't come cheap, though. The network plans to charge $1,750 per month for five users and more for additional screens.
NBC has harnessed MFS Communications' Datanet, a 14-city, fiber-optic web built in August 1993, that uses asynchronous transfer mode. Each customer site will connect a server to the MFS network. Each PC will access the server through a simple Windows program that controls a database of footage with VCR-style controls. The program can play full-screen video or reduce footage to the size of an icon, without requiring any special add-in cards. Users can also record the video on their PCs.
The CNN/Intel system features a less demanding setup. The lower bandwidth requirements allow CNN to send its video feed to each site via the usual coaxial cable necessary for receiving CNN on a TV.
At the site, the cable feeds into an Intel dedicated gateway. The server digitizes the video and uses an Ethernet LAN's multicasting ability to conserve bandwidth by sending a single video stream to many PCs.
Intel plans to improve its system so additional information will be available to users as they request it.
"This is only the first stage," says Steven McGeady, vice president general manager of Intel's communications technology lab. The giant chipmaker is on a jihad, he says.
"Once you have the digital signal synchronized with the video, it would be easy to put full text or other background information into the feed," McGeady says. The system could also include searching and indexing tools.
After hearing the latest news, a viewer could pull up more detailed text stories or search out related investment opportunities. A video story about third-quarter earnings at Sears could lead a reader to Sears's online financial statements in the Securities and Exchange Commission database and then to a Wall Street analyst's in-depth report on the state of retail marketing.
Eventually, McGeady says, "you could turn an unstructured medium - television - into something more like Web pages."
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