Bell Atlantic Corp’s of Philadelphia’s Directory Services unit and The Fourth Communications Network Inc in San Jose now have an agreement to provide an interactive multimedia yellow pages directory service for travellers, including shopping, information services and entertainment, scheduled for deployment by the year end. With exclusive rights to Multimedia Systems’ advanced video compression, cable and telecommunications patent technology, Fourth Network says it will be among the first companies to introduce such a service for travellers US-wide. Fourth Network and Multimedia Systems have 28 patent applications in progress which span several key networks, including cable and telephone. The US Patent Office has approved key technology claims in the first set of patents. Multimedia Systems says it has incorporated this new technology into a series of advanced devices called Interactive Multimedia Decoders and a large-scale architecture that has been tested for over a year on a confidential basis by US and international partners. The Fourth Network technology enables the development of interactive programs thatare both algorithm- and network-independent, and which, with the use of Multimedia Systems decoders, can be deployed now to build a large interactive program base and later expanded into major cable and telecommunications networks. Bell Atlantic Directory Services, a business of the Bell Atlantic Corp, publishes over 240 telephone directories in the mid-Atlantic region.
