NII, Competing Visions

Although the cable industry is sponsoring tests involving connecting the Internet to local cable systems (according to a white paper published by CableLabs, the industry research laboratory), their primary interest is in providing commercial content like "video on demand"

All the tests show that the one interactive service that the public has a lot of interest in right now is movies-on-demand.

[Malone] insists that market studies indicate most customers want more channels and first-run movies--not the ephemeral interactive services promised by Ray Smith. [CEO of Bell Atlantic] 'So much of the other stuff is just bull....,'

The cable industry talks about the NII in terms of "interactive television" and considers it to be a so called "broadband" service (see NII, Competing Visions : Cable/Standards) controlled primarily by a "set top box" which may have many of the features of a computer.

The cable operators therefore have two main concerns regarding content for these broadband networks: that they take advantage of the broadband capabilities (i.e. Nintendo games not email) and that they be sufficiently profitable to warrant the vast investment required to install the necessary infrastructure. This means, as evidenced above, primarily high return services like video on demand and home shopping.

It must be noted however that the cable industry has made significant efforts to provide educational and public affairs content via it's existing infrastructure and can be expected to continue this type of service with new services. The funding for both C-SPAN and C-SPAN2, an amount of 16.2 million annually in 1994, comes entirely from cable companies and through

'Cable in the Classroom' the cable industry has delivered more than 500 hours of commercial-free educational programs, at no charge, to 27 million students in 48,033 schools, at a cost to the cable industry of $81 million. year. In 1993, the program announced that the cable industry provides connections to 61% of all schools in the United States.

TCI Cable alone has wired over 16,000 K-12 schools located throughout the United States, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia

The industry has made public it's commitments to continue this type of support into the future with emerging new technologies, providing educational and research opportunities for educators through projects such as TCI's J.C. Sparkman Center for Educational Technology in Littleton, Colorado and services such as Ingenius X*Change (TCI Education Project) in which schools are provided the necessary equipment and software to connect their computers to a cable-delivered news feed.