Home Computers May Offer TV Show Enhancements

It looks as if the entertainment industry has decided it may be easier to draw the masses to the Internet by playing off existing TV entertainment than by trying to create completely original interactive entertainment.

Electronic TV-screen overlays and enhancements of TV shows seem to be leading the next wave of interest among technology and online content providers.

Microsoft reportedly is getting close to selling off its disappointing Microsoft Network Internet service and is now focusing on its WebTV investment and a component of the Windows 98 operating system upgrade that will allow users to access TV networks and program-specific interactive data on personal computers.

Using the same vertical blanking interval utilized for closed captioning, Microsoft’s enhanced TV application would “push” graphical and text data that relates directly to a specific program data to users. Microsoft has been spending more than $25,000 per episode of shows such as “Moesha,” “F/X: The Series” and USA Network’s “Pacific Blue” to supply creative staffers to work with producers of those shows to design things such as definitions of slang dialogue in “Moesha” that might pop up in a bubble in an L-shaped area of the computer screen alongside the TV signal.

Meanwhile, just as Alameda, Calif.-based Wink Communications is on the verge of introducing its interactive programming via an electronic on-screen overlay to NBC programs this season, Wink has signed a multiyear partnership with the Weather Channel to do the same thing and is working with TeleCommunications Inc. on other potential applications for the Wink ITV Enhanced Broadcasting technology.

“Linear TV is the star,” said Larry Namer, president and chief executive officers of Santa Monica-based Comspan Communications Inc., who is a consultant for Microsoft on the Windows 98 project expected to launch in December.

“This is designed to enhance that while maintaining the economics of the linear TV show.”

Namer said that until producers and consumers figure out how to use the new interactive medium, there will be a transition period not unlike the early days of television, when producers who had not figured out how to use that new medium simply pointed cameras at actors in what were essentially radio dramas.

“It’s an interim technology,” said Microsoft executive producer Rick Portin. “It’s like TV before tape machines.

“We’re creating TV from ground zero.”

But even if this latest application of interactive technologies is the one that finally proves successful, some networks are wondering why they need Microsoft to do it.

Namer said he is getting close to a deal with the Sinclair Broadcasting Group of TV stations to use the Microsoft VBI network. But no producers or networks have signed on, with USA saying the company has yet to commit to the VBI project beyond the testing phase.

Those that continue to show interest in the concept say it will still work better on TV than the PC.

Some industry insiders say Microsoft, which paid $425 million for the WebTV system this year, will migrate its enhanced TV efforts to WebTV, which offers Internet access through a TV.

Although WebTV plans to announce a litany of upgrades to its WebTV system next Tuesday, those kinds of integration plans with Microsoft most likely will not be coming until next year.