Excite brings a friendly face to At Home's cable version of the broadband future.
At Home is fundamentally an Internet service provider, using the existing cable infrastructure to provide top-speed, always-on Internet access service.
Running at megabits-per-second, At Home is well positioned in the race to convey the next generation of services to homes and businesses over broadband delivery channels. The current competitor to cable is digital subscriber line service, distributed over phone lines.
If At Home is going to trailblaze the cable industry's high-speed path into the home, it needs a consumer-friendly face -- a come-one-come-all front door with a magazine-style approach -- that uses celebrities, chat, and information to invite clicks.
Enter Excite, experienced in providing a consumer-friendly front-end for information. Excite's Web face is a splash of generalized consumer headlines: careers, health, horoscopes, news, shopping, sports, and travel.
Tie this to At Home and you've got the broadband online service of tomorrow: less waiting and more opportunity for things like interactive video.
"Five years from now, the At Home network is a high-speed cable version of America Online," said Gerry Kaufhold, multimedia and digital TV analyst for Cahners In-Stat Group. "Only, instead of being owned by America Online, it's owned by AT&T," Kaufhold predicted.
