Sure, beer drinkers like to play sports trivia, but do they want to surf the Internet, too? The PlayNet entertainment network, which started shipping its terminals this week, is hoping that the answer is yes. By crossing public Internet terminals with networked gaming, PlayNet is planning to blaze into the pay-per-play entertainment market, encroaching on the turf of bar-game leader NTN.
"It's the difference between playing solitaire in a room in your home, or going out to a party." says Nolan Bushnell, director of strategic planning for PlayNet. "It's fun to put together these groups of people across the country just having a good time."
The new PlayNet, founded in part by Bushnell (who developed Pong and founded Atari and Chuck E Cheese), has been developing its hospitality entertainment network for a year and a half - and as a publicly traded company, it is already valued at US$138 million. The table-top PlayNet Web terminals will include more than 10 networked and solo games such as bridge and trivia; prize tournaments; Internet access; classifieds; and chat rooms. They will also be connected to a PlayNet Music jukebox system which enables patrons to purchase the CDs they are playing. In an immense thrust, the terminals should show up in 60,000 bars, restaurants, hotel lounges, and airports across America by the end of the year, with international expansion to follow.
In order to service that network, PlayNet announced Wednesday its alliance with IBM, which will be creating a special high-speed infrastructure to solve the latency problems of real-time gaming over the Internet. The deal is a killer for both: PlayNet gets a specialized network that links to the Internet, and IBM gets to showcase its new Internet connection services with a high-profile project.
"Hospitality" venue entertainment is not a new concept - the immensely successful NTN has been enabling networked game playing in bars and restaurants for more than 15 years, with more than 15 million participants a month in 2,600 locations playing their sports games and trivia competitions. But while its competitive games have proven to be popular in the beer-babes-ball environment of sports bars and franchised restaurants, PlayNet's strategy of adding shopping, Web surfing, and chat is taking a more solitary approach.
"What sports conjures up is competition, and what we do is bring those two together," says Dan Purner, VP of production at NTN. "Having 20 or 30 or 50 people participating in one place is really conducive to a group dynamic. In a social setting you're really trying to relate to people, and we give people starting points for conversation."
PlayNet's consoles, on the other hand, will be primarily a one-to-one system, linking up individuals across the country rather than uniting the people in the venue. "People in bars and restaurants sometimes come in alone and wait for someone to come in - that's the time-killing aspect," explains Bushnell. The terminals will, however, allow two people in the same bar to compete against each other.
While NTN's terminals are based on advertising revenue, the PlayNet terminals will bring in revenue from charges of a quarter and up per use, as well as the additional benefits of selling goods to users once beer has loosened up their wallets.
Meanwhile, as everyone from Apple to Starbucks looks to provide Internet terminals within their restaurants, PlayNet will end up competing with more than just NTN's networked entertainment market. Regardless of the growing competition, the networked public entertainment market is still larger than the home Internet market.
"The number of people with computers is less than a third of the population [of the US], and those with Net access is in the teens," says Bushnell. "My attitude has been, 'let's enable anyone with a quarter.'"
