Oracle Corp, nCube Corp, Apple Computer Inc and Alcatel Alsthom SA are offering the equipment used in the British Telecommunications Plc interactive television trials at Colchester as a complete kit under their DADS programme. The plan, which sounds remarkably similar to Online Media’s service nursery (CI No 2,694) is to get companies involved in developing content for on-demand services without having to re-learn the same lessons already learned in the trial. Businesses must start taking steps to co-operate with each other on the development of content, otherwise there will be no driving force for the technology, said Paul Burrin, manager of strategic marketing at Oracle. The aim is to get firms to develop both business-to-business applications and consumer applications, depending on where their key interests lie. The trials are dependent on them having enough content to keep people interested, said Paul Godfrey, general manager of nCube. Movies-on-demand is a fraction of what consumers spend their income on, and 30% of the content of the trial is material to support home shopping, banking and local life applications. There is scope for development of different types of services – those with a short shelf life such as news and weather, and those such as music with a longer shelf life. Companies involved will be able to swap ideas and problems through private World Wide Web pages. Godfrey added that it is in everyone’s interest to work together to develop the content in the initial stages because it will enable the market to build a skills base faster for when the full scale on-demand services take off. The standard kit is a micro version of what is being used at the British Telecom trials and will include a small nCube server running the Oracle Media Server and MediaNet software, eight Apple set-top boxes and the Oracle Media Objects interface, plus an Alcatel network interface box to simulate the Colchester network. The system will be able to deliver 40 video streams. The package will also include support from Oracle Consulting and involve an investment of around ú400,000. NCube said that it expects the first services to emerge from the scheme next month.
