As the cyberélite woo the cable industry with high tech gadgetry, Hal Krisbergh just shakes his head. "In a fight between a great white and a bobcat," he muses, "the bobcat's going to win if the fight is on land." Krisbergh, head of WorldGate Communications, says that such a fight is on in cable, where the PC guys are fish out of water.
WorldGate is one of the few companies planning to jam data into the vertical blanking interval of television signals and let interactivity – sans the bells and whistles – take its course. Although the vertical blanking interval has been around as long as TV itself, no one has figured out what to do with it. Email and the Web, Krisbergh says, have changed that. He believes most customers will pay US$4.95 a month for email, Net access, and shopping and don't want a complicated PC-like TV apparatus.
So far, however, Krisbergh's confidence might be pre-mature. True, he's snagged deals with 30 cable operators for Channel HyperLinking (which inserts Web links within TV ads) and won firm deployments and trials with several other companies. But the industry is still ga-ga over the big-league cybernauts. Many are betting on TCI, the biggest US cable provider, which cut deals with Microsoft and Sun for millions of high tech converter boxes.
Krisbergh remains defiant. "What does Gates know about television?" he asks. "This bobcat's going to win." Maybe if the fight stays on land.
