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July 22nd 1994
Vol 3 No 22
Past Stories

NBC Cable Launches PC-Based Video-To-Desktop Products To Financial Industry Users



NATIONAL Broadcasting Company (NBC) Inc.'s so-called NBC Cable unit is launching three video-to-the-desktop products targeted at the financial services industry. The services will draw on programming from CNBC and from NBC's 240 affiliates, as well as proprietary long-format interviews with key executives.

Known collectively as NBC Desktop Video, NBC Cable will offer two PC-based video news services--NBC Professional and PFN/First Call--and a PC-based video retrieval and news management system, called NBC Desktop Video on Demand.

At the moment, PFN/First Call is the only one of the NBC Desktop Video services that is available. The other two services, NBC Professional and Desktop Video on Demand are scheduled for release in September.

NBC has formed relationships with a number of other information providers to support NBC Desktop Video. At the press conference, NBC Desktop Video service was displayed on Shark Information Services Corp. terminals, on Thomson's First Call terminals and on Desktop Data Inc.'s Newsedge terminals. First Call has been a marketing and distribution channel for NBC's PFN service for the last six months.

NBC's foray into desktop multimedia financial information comes as the battle to sell video service via PCs to the financial industry is heating up. NBC Cable has an existing customer base for the new services in the 30,000 subscribers to its existing PFN/First Call television service (which is a service of its Private Financial Network group and the Thomson Financial Services Inc.'s First Call Corp. research distribution service).

However, NBC Cable still faces competition from services planned by vendors much more accustomed to selling in this market--such as Dow Jones & Co., Bloomberg L.P. and Reuters.

NBC Cable will target both the buy-side users of its existing Private Financial Network (PFN) financial television service, as well as retail brokerage houses and investment banks.

NBC Desktop Video will deliver both live and on-demand multimedia and full-motion video services over users' existing local area networks to DOS/Windows-based and NT-based PCs and Unix-based workstations.

Despite the fact that NBC Cable has not yet released the full range of its planned products, NBC may nonetheless have a leg-up on its competitors: NBC Desktop Video on Demand service offers the news retrieval functionality at least one of its competitors currently lack. NBC also touts the breadth of its motion-video news coverage as a further competitive advantage.

NBC Cable plans to charge a site fee of $1,750 per month, which includes the cost of the partial T1 circuit used to deliver up to two live full motion feeds and three on-demand feeds for up to five users. Additional users are charged on a sliding per-terminal basis, with "large installations" charged $50 per terminal per month, Wheeler said.

INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY

PFN/First Call, the only NBC Desktop video service that is currently available, is targeted at portfolio managers, and displays live, long-format broadcasts of analysts meetings, interviews with chief executives and other business news. According to NBC Cable vice president for PFN sales Walter Auch, PFN's customers include T. Rowe Price Associates, Delaware Management Co. and Independence Capital Management. PFN is delivered via satellite or via MFS Datanet's terrestrial fiber-optic ATM-based network.

The planned NBC Professional service will deliver live coverage of breaking news filmed by NBC affiliates 18 hours a day, five days a week. NBC Professional is targeted at traders, rather than portfolio managers, who want to see and hear breaking news ahead of the wire services, without delays or editing. For the last six months, NBC has been piloting NBC Professional at a number of brokerage houses and fund managers.

In addition to financial news from NBC Professional and PFN, NBC's Desktop Video on Demand can be used for internal communications and corporate training.

At a press conference announcing the new services last Thursday, Mike Wheeler, senior vice president and general manager of NBC Newmedia said that NBC Desktop was developed in partnership with four vendors.

VENDORS EVERYWHERE!

Fairport, N.Y.-based software house Lenel Systems International Inc. developed the object-oriented software to display and manage video and audio news stories on the PC. Arroyo Grande, Calif.-based Xing Technology Corp. developed the compression software used for video communications and retrieval. San Jose, Calif.-based MFS Communications Corp.'s MFS Datanet Inc. supplied the asynchronous transfer mode communications network services. General Electric Co.'s Schenectady, N.Y.-based GE Research & Development acted as project manager and developed the interfaces to integrate Xing's and Lenel's software.

According to NBC executive vice president and president of NBC Cable Tom Rogers, the NBC Desktop service is different from competitive offerings in that it is delivered via PC hardware and local area network configurations that are common to financial firms, rather than what he called "hypothetical" equipment, such as proprietary hardware, video jukeboxes and the like. Said Rogers: "This is not a test.... This is a product we are going to introduce immediately."

Well, almost immediately. PFN is currently live on PCs or television sets at 50 sites, 10 of which are supported by the MFS Datanet network which will be used to support NBC Desktop Video. But the NBC Desktop Video on Demand service won't be available until September on DOS/Windows PCs. NT- and Unix-based versions won't be out until early next year, according to NBC Cable.

NBC Desktop Video will run on any 386/25 megahertz or better IBM-compatible PC, with a minimum of four megabytes of RAM. (NBC officials recommend eight for best performance). The software requires 2 megabytes of hard disk space.

WHATS ON THE BOX?

On the local area network, digital full motion television requires at least 512 kilobits/second of bandwidth, and 16-bit network interfaces to each PC. An analog distribution system, similar to cable television, is also available.

NBC's Desktop Video on Demand service is a video and multimedia storage, retrieval and display package which ties video news clips to a keyword-based alert system. It is an integrated software and communications package for delivery of live and previously recorded news.

The system offers full VCR-type functionality, such as pause, fast forward and rewind, as well as an alert function that keys news retrieval to previously programmed or selected key words.

Video on Demand can be supplied over 10BaseT Ethernet networks or 16 megabit/second Token Ring LANs. It delivers video at the full 30 frames per second of broadcast TV. It is NBC Desktop Video on Demand's retrieval capabilities, as well as the ability cross-reference news alerts to areas of interest, that distinguishes it from simple TV-to-the-desktop.

NBC claims that the majority of the current PFN subscriber base will have little difficulty migrating to the NBC Desktop Video services when they become available. Many of PFN's customer base are using PCs, rather than TV sets, to display the financial news service, says Auch. "We try to convince as many of them as possible to use PCs, because there are so many more features available," says Auch.