esz001@cck.cov.ac.uk (Will Overington) (06/27/91)
The Independent Television Commission, 70 Brompton Road, London SW3, has issued an invitation for expressions of interest as to what sort of services should be offered for competitive tender as Additional Services using the vertical blanking interval of Channels 3, 4 and 5 (channel 5 is not yet broadcasting) in the United Kingdom. These services, of which it appears that there may well be several, have been styled Commercial Additional Services, to distinguish them from the Public Teletext Service Licence for Channels 3 and 4, which have certain news etc requirements. However, it appears that the word Commercial may have been used, in part, merely as a way of distinguishing these additional services from the public teletext service licence, as funding by advertising, sponsorship and subscription are mentioned as possibilities. Expressions of interest may involve Closed User Groups, or not, as desired. Is anyone interested in the possibility of trying to put forward the idea of a joint project from interested researchers in broadcasting, computing and virtual reality, so that it could have its own air time, over the ten years of the licence? I have in mind having open system software standards, independent of any equipment manufacturers, not closed user group and free to users. Any industrial company that would be interested in coordinating the scheme and actually applying for the licence in due course is invited to say so. The intention is to put forward a scheme where the licensee runs the system, but gets software free, for tokens, from all interested contributors, ploughing back half of any profit, if any, received from advertising revenue and merchandising to the benefit of the contributors. This would allow academic style research and development within a commercial shell provided by a commercial organization. Of course, it is all going to have to be sorted out by the commercial development liaison people on the campuses of all those interested, but this is just a preliminary, throw the football in the air and see if anybody catches it attempt to see if anyone else is interested in this sort of thing. The licensee company would probably need to be British or possibly European Community, but the idea of the academic work being within a commercial shell will mean that researchers all over the world can be involved if they so wish. Interested parties may reply to the groups or by e-mail direct to me. I will assume that any e-mailed replies are confidential to myself and the management people within this polytechnic that I will need to put them before, unless people specifically state otherwise.