Echoes of the Past Vibrate with Google's Latest Campaign
Google's latest campaign to get the FCC to approve use of the spectrum between analog broadcast channels for mobile broadband services isn't the first time a major communications company thought of employing unused analog signals to create a business.
Back in 1981, I joined Time Inc.'s video group to help create an electronic news and information service that carried the unofficial moniker of Time Teletext. Teletext, at least in the form Time created, was sort of a precursor to today's commercial Internet portal.
To transmit information to consumers, Time Teletext used the vertical blanking interval, an "empty video signal" that separates one analog video frame from another, to decoders connected to consumers' TVs. Because of technological advancements, the vertical blanking interval was no longer needed to separate video frames. [Most baby boomers will recall the vertical blanking interval as the scrolling black line that would appear on the tube when the image flickered.]
Time in the early '80s was the second largest cable TV operator with 1.5 million subscribers, and felt it could create a profitable business developing a service to provide graphical news and information by sending data through the vertical blanking interval. Back then, before the Internet, online services were proprietary and non-graphical, such as CompuServe, a pioneer in dial-up services in the late '70s and early '80s, a decade before the creation of the graphical Web browser.
Time created a compelling service, maintaining Time's excellent journalistic standards. The service resembled the early graphical version of AOL and Prodigy. What wasn't compelling was the cost. Time could never get the price of the decoder low enough to make the service attractive to potential customers. After 2-1/2 years of development and trials involving about 100 consumers in Orlando and San Diego that cost millions upon millions of dollars, the company axed Time Teletext before ever launching it.
Perhaps Google will have more luck than Time did with its plans to use analog broadcast signals.
