Looking to ramp up the profile of its Intercast Web broadcasting technology, Intel announced on Monday and Tuesday at NAB '97 a series of alliances with cable stations - including MTV. The goal: an ambitious mix of Web and TV programming.
"We know our audience is online, we know our audience watches TV. This is a convergence solution," says a hopeful Matt Farber, Senior VP at MTV.
If you can spare a quarter of your PC screen, Intel will fill it with an Intercast TV window. Using an add-on board connected to a PC with a Pentium processer, Intercast users can receive TV broadcasts on their computer desktop at the same time they receive related Web-type pages, which transmit through the same vertical blanking interval as closed caption hearing. The Web pages are then stored on the users' hard drive but can hyperlink back out to the Internet.
But the product has a long way to go. "Intercast is interesting but it has one big problem: It's on the wrong screen. People are a lot more interested in watching Oprah on a TV than a PC," says Josh Bernhoff, senior analyst at Jupiter.
Content providers are experimenting with Intercast because they're trying to figure out a way to blend TV with the Internet, Bernhoff says. "The question is whether this new content will sufficiently increase the [Intercast] audience to justify continuing it.... I'm very skeptical."
So far, the only broadcasters using Intercast have been QVC and CNN (which broadcast via Intercast 24 hours a day), and NBC, which is using Intercast for Homicide, Dateline, and NFL, and NBA games. MTV will be added to that mix on Friday, when it begins broadcasting two hours a day while M2, its new "eclectic" channel, will broadcast 24 hours a day. Intercast Web pages will include material such as band news, interactive polls, tour dates and record info - which then hyperlink to MTV's CD Lounge online store. All the music videos broadcast via Intercast will have their own "pages": at 13 to 14 videos an hour, that's a lot of pages for the MTV interactive staff to create.
Intel will add four new content providers to the Intercast list later this year: ESPN, Lifetime TV, Home and Garden, and The Weather Channel. The extent and type of their Intercast content has yet to be determined.
Mariah Scott, marketing manager for Intel estimates that only 100,000 people are using Intercast so far, primarily those who have purchased the PC add-on for US$100 to $150. But Monday's announcements now have Gateway offering Intercast in its desktop computer models, a deal that Intel hopes will help push the Intercast audience up to 2 million by the end of 1997.
Still, don't expect to see Intercast transmissions for your favorite sitcoms anytime soon. Says Scott, "You start with the things that seem most obvious - sports, shopping, news, weather, music videos.... With movies or sitcoms, it's not so obvious what the Intercast extension could be."
