Under the umbrella of Telefonica I+D, the research and development arm of Telefonica de Espana SA, the Interactive Television division has been working for some 18 months now on a number of projects including video-on-demand, home banking and home shopping. This division, which originally sprouted from the Broadband Services division, is now preparing a series of pilot projects to test its video-on-demand server, prior to its possible commercialization. Head of Telefonica I+D Carlos Blanco told Computerworld Espana that the division first turned to Sun Microsystems Inc for the server’s hardware, but then felt obliged to change tack in the search for greater performance qualities, whereupon it recruited Silicon Graphics Inc’s Challenger family, since it was impressed by the North American’s commitment to supercomputing applications. The system chosen for the server’s software was Borland International Inc’s Interbase database, basically because we needed a database that gave us a high degree of flexibility to access all the multimedia information, Blanco observed. With respect to the terminals, Telefonica has nurtured contacts with a number of suppliers with a view to making it possible to incorporate any kind of personal computer system. The Interactive Television division has had to overcome a number of difficulties to develop many of its own software tools for the server and the terminal that were not available commercially. Blanco explained that most of the project’s problems had stemmed from the fact that interactive television had still been very much at the development phase when the project was begun, which had meant an initial shortage of tools. When we started out, the sector was ill-served in the sense that many suppliers in Spain were still mainly oriented towards traditional computing, and as a result we had to adapt a number of the tools that they provided, Blanco said. There are currently seven specialists in the Interactive Television division working to develop the server and terminals, but the project has also drawn on the assistance of other Telefonica departments including broadband services, network equipment, hardware development and the department responsible for content ac quisition. Telefonica’s funding of the project is clearly motivated by the carrier’s determination to vie for a leading role in the new cable industry; Blanco commented that the users’ reactions to the new services in the pilot tests were going to be all-important, adding that for the time being the cost of setting up a video-on-demand server for about 100 users was somewhere in the region of $180,000, including hardware infrastructure, commercial software, but not Telefonica’s own developments. He suggested that for the new services to really get going, the cost of terminals to the user would have to fall into the $320 to $400 price bracket, and he predicted that 1997 would see an explosive demand for these interactive services in Spain
