lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (03/15/85)
The classic example of cable-based interactive TV is the QUBE system, the first of which was created in Columbus. I toured this system about 5 or 6 years ago. Since then, the big excitement about interactive TV has fallen way off, as even QUBE learned that people were more interested in music videos and movies. QUBE billed for each movie individually, and that caused even more difficulty as people realized that the viewers on most other systems only paid a flat rate for each program service. Pay per view systems (except for special events like boxing) have generally fallen into disfavor. One interesting aspect of QUBE is that they could completely track the exact people watching each channel. Every 30 seconds or so, a lineprinter in the corner of the main computer room would spit out a listing of absolute numbers and percentages of people watching each channel. It was also possible to ask the computer for a listing of every movie a particular subscriber had watched, when they had watched it, etc. They showed me this for one random subscriber, who had watched a few "dirty" movies over the course of the billing period. At the time, I commented that there were some rather obvious invasion of privacy considerations in such statistics. --Lauren--