SAN FRANCISCO _ Oracle Corp., a leading maker of software for
managing large computer data bases, is in discussions with
several telephone, computer and news organizations to create a
nationwide digital video service that would let users of personal
computers customize their own video newscasts or conduct on-line
research from video news archives.
The discussions, which are not complete, have involved the
long-distance carriers AT T and MCI Communications, the chip
maker Intel and the news organizations CNN and Reuters, among
other companies, according to people familiar with the plans.
The Oracle service would seek to give desktop computer users
much greater flexibility than offered by various video broadcast
news services now available from Dow Jones and Bloomberg Business
News, among others.
The Oracle service would offer news clips digitally stored on
a network "server" computer, meaning the clips could be searched
according to subject matter and retrieved in any order, similar
to the way people now use computers to sort through text-based
news wires and data bases.
An NBC news service called NBC Desktop Video, now being
introduced, has similar ambitions. With this service, digital
video news feeds are broadcast throughout the day to corporate
customers, who can distribute the material through their office
computer networks or store it for later retrieval by employees.
NBC also sends its customers the material in a form that can
be archived for custom-made multimedia data bases, which can be
searched by subject. But so far, because of the limited
data-carrying capacity of most office computer networks, the
archives contain only still images, not full-motion video.
And NBC Desktop Video does not yet offer customers remote
access to its own video-server archive, which is capable of
storing full-motion video, though the company plans to offer such
access eventually.
The Oracle concept is similar to the interactive television
programming planned by cable and telephone companies, in which
viewers of evening newscasts and other programs are supposed to
have much greater choice in deciding what they watch and when
they watch it.
Oracle has also been promoting its software for use in these
digital interactive systems, and already has such deals with Bell
Atlantic and US West. Oracle has also discussed the development
of interactive television news data bases with Capital Cities/ABC
Inc. and Washington Post Co.
One analyst, Paul Saffo, said that while many people in the
computing and telecommunications industries were assuming that
movies-on-demand would help finance a range of new interactive
digital services to the home, digital video news that can be
customized might be a more compelling offering.
"This is going to reinvent the news industry," said Saffo, a
director of the Institute for the Future, an industry research
and consulting firm in Menlo Park, Calif. …
