General Electric Co’s National Broadcasting Corp, better known as NBC, and IBM Corp reckon that the market for their new multimedia news service, which is about to enter testing with potential customers, is a potentially huge audience of 38m computer users: the pair have teamed with NuMedia Corp for the pilot of NBC Desktop News, which will combine text, graphics, video and sound in an easy-to-use format for corporations and their executives using personal computers, and will feed it to hundreds of people at many companies that have nothing better to do than watch news broadcasts on their personal computers all day; the pilot will cover the New York metropolitan area and northern New Jersey and the participants will be unnamed pharmaceutical companies, financial services firms and some computer companies; news programmes, typically two minutes long, which executives will be able to receive at their selection, will be fed via a satellite and downloaded into an IBM-supplied server then distributed onto its personal computers; potential price of the service may range from $15 a month to a few hundred dollars – comparable with on-line news services currently offered, such as Prodigy viewdata.
