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Mr. Internet TV - Internet TV for the People

Interview with John Bentley, Inventor of Internet on TV
(John Bentley's website: http://www.johnbentley.net or if that website is not available try http://www.j15.com/johnbentley/)

2-6-99 (ruel.net) -- Before there was a WebTV, there was John Bentley and his ideas about new media entertainment and information distribution for the home including "Internet on TV." Bentley calls himself an "international media entrepreneur and investor." His personal website at http://www.johnbentley.net (or http://www.j15.com/johnbentley/) certainly shows that he has the background to call himself that. Bentley has a background in finance, in entertainment, and in building new companies. Bentley was educated at Harrow School in the United Kingdom. He worked in the investment industry in England and Australia as well as running his own investment companies. He was the CEO of several companies including Europe's first and largest video rental chain (Intervision) which he sold to Blockbuster. He was also CEO of British Lions Films which was the U.K.'s largest movie production company (with the U.K.'s biggest studios) before it was bought out by EMI sometime after Bentley left British Lions.

Bentley saw that mass communications was the way to connect people from all walks of life, but he wanted that means of communications to be interactive and inexpensive enough for everyday people to have in their homes. Bentley provides a very informative interview about what he has done to introduce Internet TV to the world before WebTV and everyone else got whiff of the concept. Bentley also talks a little bit about how he sees the current world of Interactive Television and how he thinks it is going to influence the world. This man is the original Mr. Internet TV.

RH: You seem to have always had innovative ideas for mass communications as well as the distribution of entertainment and information -- not just Internet TV.

JB: I have always been interested in the power of visual communications, but I don't like the control that government and a few media owners have over the ones we've got. -- that is, TV, newspapers etc., -- as they use them as their own means to hold power.

RH: You mean the so-called "fourth estate" or the "powers that be." But you were part of that at one time or another?

JB: Yes, I was CEO of the largest movie production studios in Europe -- British Lion. But I still had an idea as to how to provide entertainment in the home. In the early 1970s, I used to swap any movie from any other studio worldwide and watch them on a 16mm projector at home. So I thought that probably everyone would like to do that if they could afford to. On the day that Roger Moore signed for his first Bond movie with Harry Salzman -- in those days Harry was the co-producer of Bond movies with Cubby Broccoli -- I was also there and agreed to work with Harry on his pet project for a low-cost film cartridge -- 9 x 6 x 1 inch cartridge -- movie projector which unhappily cost Harry his fortune and then his life as he died with disappointment that it didn't work out. The lens was too expensive to get magnification onto a wall screen.

RH: So all of this came out of a James Bond movie like out of Q's lab? Sorry, just kidding.... But, seriously, you were looking at or involved in pre-VCR TV entertainment without having to go to the movie theater or having to drive to any central location for entertainment.

JB: Yes. And I continued with Harry's project on my own with a very low cost unit -- under $100 -- which used back-projection onto a mirror in a plastic box unit then onto a 12-inch screen that looked just like a TV. I had a totally new, ultra-thin, unsprocketed film made -- that was a world first -- with a one quarter of 8mm film frame which was electronically operated. Plus it had a cheap plastic lens which had to take a thumbnail frame up to 12 x 10 in a 20 inch distance. We just about got an acceptable picture and the film cartridge size was 4 x 3 x 1/2 inches -- that was not much more than an audio casssette tape!

RH: But this was all on some sort of film. What about videotape?

JB: Well, I worked with EMI and some very major U.K. companies, but just as we got it right, the Japanese came out with a silicon chip based video recorder. The Japanese brought the cost down from the the sole Phillip's $6,000 unit to $2,500. And, of course, they told the world that "it would soon be $500." So we were out of of the movie cartridge business. I called my unit the "Mood Machine" since that's what people really wanted -- to have entertainment made available that they can turn on at any point in time and not what's handed out to them by others.

RH: But you still got into videotape entertainment business before there was a Blockbuster....

JB: Yes. If you can't beat them, then join them. So, I started the world's first public company in video rental in the U.K. -- Intervision -- which was an idea I got from a guy who had started some pre-recorded video shops in San Diego....

RH: San Diego....

JB: Yes, there have been a lot of innovative things coming out of San Diego over the years.... TV was terrible in the U.K. So, I bought video rights for peanuts from Warner and United Artists to hundreds of the best movie titles for use in the U.K. and set up a distribution chain of 12,000 outlets. It took off in a big way and the Japanese should have given me a medal since no one wanted to record crappy U.K. television off the air which was why they couldn't sell any $2,500+ video recorders. So in three to four years, the video recorder's cost came down to $500 and in ten years 80% of all U.K. homes had a video recorder. That's four times faster than TV growth rates. And everyone had told me that no one would want to buy one! Blockbuster bought the company out in 1989 by which time we were the biggest retail chain of video stores in Europe.

RH: Your videotape company was called Intervision, right? Sounds like you had an idea back then to mix Interactivity with Television -- taking "Inter" from Interactivity and "Vision" from Television.

JB: Right. But the problem was that cassettes were not interactive. That was the essential ingredient I was looking for. In the early 1990s, there were several experiments in the U.S. and a lot of money lost with partially Interactive TV. I forget all their names now.

RH: You mean the ventures such as Qube and others.

JB: Yes. There was a super rich investor from Mexico who was involved with a project in Chicago who put in $60 million. A lot of the telcos lost money on ADSL-type ventures. None of them were BOTH economically and technically feasible. Infrastructure was the problem. Wireless seemed like an answer, but I had been working on a facsimile broadcasting project in Canada which put out point-to-multipoint signals to the home via terrestrial TV aerials so you could effectively send a fax to 1 million places simultaneously. This had a number of business uses. I knew that radio signals in cities could frequently get interrupted which was okay on a mobile phone, but that would cut off a PC so you may have to boot up every few minutes!

RH: This mass faxing of documents sounds like the beginning of the "interactive" ingredient for you. This is where the user is sending out information and not just taking in information like in the more passive VCR-type entertainment. Then you have the Internet....

JB: Yes. Over the last 30 years, I have been looking for a low-cost means to circumvent "information controllers" so that ordinary folks can communicate unrestricted data between each other. The Internet helped to solve this. The trouble was PCs were too complex to operate for most people up until Wndows -- perhaps even with Windows -- PCs were also too expensive for mass consumption.

RH: With telephone lines everywhere, you had to be thinking people can really get connected. Telephone copper wire is everywhere. But what about cable TV?

JB: I figured that twisted pair copper wires, PSTN, or good old standard telephone lines had to be the way to beat the cable boys who were making lots of noise, but whose last mile costs were about $3,000 a home to install! Satellite was no good interactively as nobody could afford to put a satellite uplink in their home with a 30-foot dish! The beauty about copper wires and the Internet was that it was pretty much unregulated all over the world compared to cable TV. So there's no getting into line for expensive licenses in competition against some politician's favorite applicant. It was WIDE OPEN! And it was WORLDWIDE too!

RH: That's the beauty of the Internet in making the world a little bit more accessible for a lot of people. But someone still has to pay for it all starting with putting in the infrastructure, to providing the content, all the way down to the consumer who would have to pay for access. I personally would like to see free access or something like the U.S.-version of reduced-cost telephone universal access but for the Internet.

JB: I needed advertisers to make my economic concept viable which was to subsidize the hardware so that it could be given away plus a free ISP connection. But they didn't get it. OR they didn't want to get it! It threatened their big budget TV commercials. Their clients didn't like it. It threatened the monopolies of the big retailers and mail order houses. And it still does.

RH: So you were having real problems in getting people to invest in this idea for mass interactive communications whether it be some sort of Internet-on-TV or some sort of video- or information- on-demand via phone lines or other connection lines.

JB: Yes. I had a real problem raising funds. This was especially so in the U.K. where the investment community was running five years -- if not ten years -- behind the U.S.! We did it bit by bit. We started with a video phone unit in 1993 until we realized we needed an operating system. We built our first set-top box using an Intel 486 chip. Unfortunately, there was too much flicker on the TV screen and the colors were all wrong. The Web sites didn't fit the TV screen.

RH: Then you would try to come up with your own software....

JB: Yes. So we wrote our own correction software from scratch, with our own browser, and looked for a chip that wasn't prohibitively expensive -- remember at the time the Intel 486 was still priced at $280 in 1994! We found the Acorn computer company in the U.K. with an almost forgotten operating system and with a $20 ARM RISC chip that did pretty well compared to the Intel chip! That was a real breakthrough. But we stll needed to bring the overall price down to what I reckoned to be an economic cost of $150. The Acorn system was costing $700 without a monitor. So we needed to scale it down. We commisioned Acorn to make a unit according to our own new design and specs for our EXCLUSIVE use, and wrote our own software for it. By July 11, 1995, we launched the world's first commercial STB to an audience of 400 in the U.K. No one took the slightest interest except the Financial Times who called it the Volkswagen beetle of PCs. The PC people ridiculed it. So I decided to try it in the U.S.A.

RH: Computer people can be so typical. They have to remember that not everyone is going to want to have a computer....

JB: We still had to contend with them since this is still a PC world. In November 1995, I went to Comdex in Las Vegas and got to show our STB to Bob Metcalfe, the guy who invented the Ethernet, who ran it in his trade mag. He called it the world's first "intervision" and he said it worked just fine. We got some funding in the U.S. and started Viewcall America out of Atlanta.

RH: Then the NC and others came along....

JB: .... In January 1996, Larry Ellison announced the NC. I suspect that our plans had at least an indirect influence on Ellison's NC since Acorn was owned by Olivetti and who had dealings with Oracle while Acorn was under contract to us. Then Ellison told Bill Gates that he had a product that would beat the PC. Coincidentally, one week after our one-year exclusive contract expired on December 31, 1995, Ellison told the world he had the blueprints for any manufacturer to produce an STB.

RH: To be fair, they could very well come up with their own solution for how this new black box was going to work. Competition in an innovative marketplace can be fierce. But, then again, what else is new. And you still have to compete with the desktop PCs.

JB: In January 1996, Viewcall entered a competition run by PC World and won a prize for the first sub-$500 "computer." We were well under this figure by then at around $350, but PC World and all their 2,000 or so PC attendees didn't want to know about our cheaper product. For instance, Microsoft's Nathan Myrvold said what we had was a lot of hot air and that no one would want it. By the end of '96 we were down to a sub-$200 magic price range.

RH: That is the price range where most people begin to think seriously about getting a component such as this for their homes... And if you can connect to the TV, then that makes it all the more easier and less expensive for people to have and use.

JB: I have always believed there will be one screen with everything built in one day. There will eventually be some sort of PC/TV/videophone/baby-watcher/home-security-system etc. linked to other home audio/visual units, but that will be a long time coming.

RH: But Sony and others are now talking about home networking systems....

JB: Yes. I chose the TV world because everyone had a TV and linking an STB to it cut out the cost of a PC monitor and dramatically provided a more inexpensive alternative to the PC. We had mastered good non-flicker script on the TV screen from websites and also had a good remote control keyboard. So, you could sit up in bed and operate it. Or could watch with the whole family.

RH: You had Viewcall and a working box. But you only hear about Viewcall in Canada while WebTV took over the U.S. .....

JB: What went wrong? Well first Ellison's Lareco -- sorry, Oracle -- shouted about their NC product from the roof-tops and then screwed it up. So, he alerted Microsoft who got Paul Allen to back the spin-off team from Apple that had started WebTV in a disguised laundry building. And as you know, ten times the money was thrown at WebTV than what Viewcall had. And Phillips, who was about to back Viewcall, instead got behind WebTV along with Sony.

RH: WebTV mowed over you.

JB: --Sigh-- I am an Englishman. Although I was married once to an American wife, I didn't fully appreciate the whole West Coast culture which disdains anything to do with technology from anywhere else -- including from Atlanta where Viewcall America operated from with 100 employees. So about the time we needed some new urgent funding in February 1997, which was shortly after the CES show in Las Vegas, WebTV's launch had already started and WebTV's sales were initially poor.

RH: Then the American version of Viewcall went up for sale?

JB: The WebTV presence affected our funding and Viewcall America had to put itself up for sale. NetChannel, also out of San Jose and associated with the Ellison's Network Computer Inc., bought out Viewcall whose TV browser and service knowledge they did not have. At this point, Viewcall had a new hardware platform, which it had got from paying Teknema to develop a system. But Teknema wanted Viewcall to use their browser software. Trouble is it didn't work. Everyone, including Acorn, NetChannel, and Teknema had thought the software was just a matter of brushing up any old PC browser, but in reality it needed $5 million of work from scratch to make it work well. So even though Viewcall was years ahead of WebTV, it ended up with an STB with no browser to go with it and then a browser with no STB to fit! Crazy! Same thing happened to NetChannel when they took over Viewcall in April 1997.

RH: So at that time, it didn't work out.... It is intriguing how these "early days" of Internet TV were shaking out....

JB: For now, WebTV won the day. Microsoft put $425 million into the hands of the ex-Apple people in May 1997 when they took over WebTV. This showed how important a threat the Internet-on-TV concept must have been to the PC. Or for Gates, it could have been the fear of Ellison getting the better of Gates and Microsoft. Against all that, NetChannel itself bit the dust by the Fall of '97 and WebTV got the kudos. C'est la vie!

RH: Then AOL eventually bought out NetChannel, later partners up with Sun, buys out Netscape etc. -- and you have rumblings about some sort of AOL-TV. But WebTV won the day and will remain a huge presence in the interactive TV world. But there is still the cable TV battle still to be played out.

JB: WebTV got the kudos. But kudos for what? That remains to be seen. Many TV manufacturers came out with their own set-top boxes, but put them away when they saw WebTV's poor sales. But they are all waiting in the wings to make Internet TVs when the time comes.

RH: But when will that time come? That seems to be the magic question that a lot of people have been asking.

JB: When will it be? When a PC is a TV and when a TV is PC also. Although if more older people knew about how to make use of STBs connected to TV sets, then the market could be so much larger. Older people want life made easy and they do not want to have to buy a PC.

RH: But you are going to have what I call "power PC-TV boxes" that computer people may think consumers will want to spend their money on. Don't get me wrong. I like PC-TV systems, but for everyday people who do not want a computer, set-top boxes are the way to go....

JB: Fortunately for "everyday people" who do not necessarily have money to burn, PC costs have come way down. Halved this year alone -- I believe in its own way that Viewcall instigated this. It stopped those PC fanatics who controlled the industry from believing that everyone wanted more and more features regardless of cost and ease of use -- they believed everyone could afford it and that's still the thinking of many of those people in charge of the computer industry. Yes, people do buy home computers for their kids to learn over a period of years and adults see computers almost as a hobby. But who wants to learn a hobby in five minutes? And cost is also important. Computers sold to businesses help the economies of scale in pricing which STBs aren't getting. NCs were not one thing or another and Larry Ellison has gone back to what he knows best in databasing to have his battle at that end with Bill Gates. But I think Bill Gates will win that one also one day.

RH: But what do you see as for the longevity of set-top boxes? I think they will be around for quite a while. However, some people think that set-top boxes are merely a bridge towards the next information appliance....

JB: I think there will be a small STB market for a while until Internet TV-PCs or PC-TVs arrive. The greatest force for sales will be discounted goods and secure e-commerce. But those who can sell products at cheaper prices, without the "Main Street" mall overhead, may not have the brandname products to sell at the cheaper prices. This "Catch 22" will perhaps hold things up a little longer!

RH: How about in general for the future of the Internet?

JB: Nothing will supecede the Internet. MSN nearly got there with a private global telecom network, but they were just too late. The Net beat Gates to it. Fast private fiber optic backbones however will take a big slice of traffic by offering the higher speed. But I don't think they will get away with monopolies as the fiber optic technology's technical attributes offer more and more "lines" which authorities will demand be made available to not just those who laid them down. Anyone with a big audience like an AOL or with widespread software distribution such as Microsoft have a head start in getting a commanding presence on the Internet. Service and presentation are important, but cost and easy access to a wide variety of product offerings are going to be the Internet's "killer app."

RH: So, "shopping access" of one sort or another for information and products will be the Internet's and Internet TV's "killer app." The shopping mall brought to your home via the TV set. This has been talked about as the ultimate purpose of interactive TV since the early experiments. And this goes towards your background and experience in getting some sort of product -- whether that be your early movie film cartridges, videotapes, or some other product -- to the consumer via some sort of advanced mass interactive communications.

JB: There really has been almost no discounting on the Net to date. Where there was discounting in PC sales, they have been successful. Cable modems offer the combination of running extremely fast Internet connection and real video -- that's together with regular TV. This is about to move ahead very fast in the U.K. combined with digital reception and integrating the Web with television programs and advertising. And very fast Web access speeds will finally bring all types of consumers to the table so long as there are good web sites to go with it along with really competitive prices for access.

RH: It's only a matter of time as to how the Internet will be used to interactively connect everyone to everyone else in the world. Internet TV, or some form of interactive TV, will be what will bring everyday people online.

JB: Yes, Internet TV in one form or another is here to stay for good in a very big way. And I thought of it first which gives me some satisfaction, although it would have been nice to get some of those WebTV big bucks!!!

RH: Okay, we've taken the leap and predict that Internet TV or some form of interactive TV will indeed succeed. But how do you think it will affect people and the world.

JB: That's what the Internet will evolve into during the next millenium. Internet on TV will start to have a big influence on politics. It distributes information in a way that authorities cannot stop -- on an instant basis. It transcends boundaries and provides the possibility of a real democracy at last. Not the one we've all been told we have had in various countries such as in the United States for the last two hundred years or so -- the one man one vote every four years. But everyday issues at every moment, people will not only be informed as they are now, but much more they will learn how to express their opinions without fear or favor via the Web.

RH: But cynics will tell you that the "powers that be" will use this new media to further control and manipulate the people who are connected to the Internet. Such as politicos "herding" mass opinion via the Internet to further their particular political agendas and purposes.

JB: Of course that may happen, but the Internet provides for more spontaneity where the average person can instantly provide influence without having much in the way of resources. Information and the distribution of information is power. The Internet provides for a level playing field. Look at how information was injected into countries such as China and elsewhere despite strict government controls. So in the 21st Century, the Internet and television will bring us the ability to control our moods and to direct our destinies far more than any party politician can understand right now.

RH: It is really something to read newsgroups -- for example -- to see an individual and collective public "influence" there. The traditional news shows now talk about what people say in newsgroups and chatrooms. But to play the cynic again, you will see the rise of politicos, Internet-based political interest groups, Internet political consultants, and others harnassing the power of the Internet to steer the mass public response via the Internet....

JB: It's the end of the line for the traditional party politicians with a gradual loss of their power. Similarly, you will see more of the loss of or the dispersion of traditional media influence too. Bureaucrats and the law will not be powers on their own, but will be subject to the public will via the Internet connection. Look at how public opinion for Bill Clinton has the American government's "powers that be" on the run. But the public can transcend the "powers that be." I don't think the public can be totally manipulated as a "herd" of Internet users. They just need a means, an outlet, not just opinion polls, to express themselves. That's the real power of the Net. It won't usurp television. It will just be part of a single information communications unit in the home.

John Bentley invites anyone to write to him about Internet on Television. You can visit his personal website at http://www.johnbentley.net (or if that website is not available try http://www.j15.com/johnbentley/). As John Bentley would say, "Internet TV for the people."

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