bob@islenet.UUCP (Bob Cunningham) (01/19/86)
[just to show that it can be done...]
The local major TV cable service here will start a new service for personal
computer owners on Tuesday called X*Press, which provides an RS232
one-way broadcast data feed of news and financial information.
X*Press Information Services (a partnership between McGraw-Hill Inc.,
Telecommunications Inc. and Telecrafter Corp.) is headquartered in Boulder
Colorado and is said to have begun X*Press operations last September,
currently having about 500 subscribers in Colorado, Sunnyvale, and Buffalo.
Honolulu was apparently chosen to be the first major city in the country
(Honolulu is the 11th most populous city in the US) because Paul Maxwell,
president of X*Press has a "close business association" with the owners of
Oceanic Cablevision.
Maxwell aims to entice about 1% of Oceanic's 250,000 subscribers to sign up
for X*Press. Installation fee is $50, which includes a decoder and wiring
to a personal computer, and a $19.95/month service charge. Maxwell was
quoted in a local newspaper article today comparing X*Press to various
computer information utilities (specifically The Source, Compuserve and Dow
Jones News Retrieval) which charge fees based upon an hourly (vs. monthly
for X*Press) computer time charge which can exceed $20/hour during daytime
hours in Hawaii.
--
Bob Cunningham {dual|vortex|ihnp4}!islenet!bob
Hawaii Institute of Geophysics, University of Hawaii