People were mostly paying lip service to the education, information, and time-saving features. So, the company’s new infomercials and marketing pitches hardly mention those. Instead, they emphasize the fun and entertainment aspects … the ability to play along with game shows, compete in trivia games, predict during football season whether the quarterback will pass or run the ball, and participate in special events, such as voting for your favorite actors on Oscar night. Coming soon: betting fake money on horse races. GTE executives might not admit it now, but it looks like gambling could be their killer application … By the year 2003 … GTE projects that up to 60 percent of U.S. households will have interactive TV.
Predictor: Barlow, Jerry
Prediction, in context:For a 1995 article for Wired magazine, reporter Evan Schwartz traveled across the U.S., checking out the interactive television consumer testing being conducted by entertainment/technology corporations. In the process, he interviewed Jerry Barlow, a consultant to GTE’s mainStreet. Schwartz writes:”As creators of the longest running interactive TV service, GTE is finally finding out what people … really want. When the company first conceived mainStreet in the mid-1980s, the $20-billion telephone giant naturally thought that people yearned for an interactive Yellow Pages to find information and buy things. Market research in affluent suburbs in the late ’80s confirmed that hunch, as well as a crying demand for educational services, such as electronic encyclopedias. ‘We held focus groups to ask people what they wanted,’ recalls GTE’s [Jerry] Barlow. ‘Number One, they said they wanted an interactive shopping center. People saw it as a time- and labor-saving device. You come home, pay your bills, shop, get your chores done, and go on with life. But we created the service based on that, and no one watched it.’ Now GTE knows not to rely on focus groups. ‘All of us are really two people – the person we say we are in focus groups,’ says Barlow, ‘and the real person deep inside.’ With that lesson learned, GTE went back to the drawing boards and repositioned the service based on usage data. GTE saw that people were mostly paying lip service to the education, information, and time-saving features. So, the company’s new infomercials and marketing pitches hardly mention those. Instead, they emphasize the fun and entertainment aspects of mainStreet – the ability to play along with game shows, compete in trivia games, predict during football season whether the quarterback will pass or run the ball, and participate in special events, such as voting for your favorite actors on Oscar night. Coming soon: betting fake money on horse races. GTE executives might not admit it now, but it looks like gambling could be their killer application. Too bad it’s illegal to place bets over phone lines. Without some new revenue source, the system may never be profitable. At the start of 1994, after 10 years of developing and testing the service, GTE set up mainStreet as a wholly owned subsidiary and has spent roughly $5 million each year over the past seven years, says Barlow. That’s OK, say GTE executives. Just as long as it turns a profit sometime by the year 2003, when GTE projects that up to 60 percent of U.S. households will have interactive TV. But that kind of reasoning begs the question: What’s going to be the main draw between now and then? Will interactive games and sports be the ticket? Do people have some kind of deep, dark urge to sit on their couch and buy vowels from Vanna White?”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: TV/Films/Video
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: People Are Supposed to Pay for This Stuff? Crisscrossing the Country, Our Intrepid Correspondent Visits Corporate Labs, Model Living Rooms, and Actual Sofas, to Check Out the Megahyped Interactive Television Prototypes and See Just How Real the 500-Channel, All-Digital, High-Fiber Future Really Is
Quote Type: Paraphrase
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.07/cable_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney