It is becoming clear that Reuters Holdings Plc is going to one of the UK’s major contenders in the brave new world of multimedia and the company has quietly been building up a portfolio of video interests to exploit. It is in the process of installing an NCR 3600 parallel processor – derived from the Teradata database machine built from hundreds or thousands of iAPX-86 processors – from NCR Corp at its headquarters to store text, data and video, although as yet the company cannot say when it will be up and working. Reuter has been expanding its television broadcasting interests, in particular over the past 18 months with the acquisition of the remaining 45% of Visnews, now renamed Reuters Television, which provides raw television news footage and at present has an 8% stake in a consortium bidding for a Polish television network, and is working with Pearson Plc on delivering business television news in Asia and with the British Broadcasting Corp on a similar service for Latin America. Back home, the company is looking at using the new computer in part as a video presentation server whereby dealers can have direct access to videoed presentations to analysts or annual meetings on their Reuters screens by simply keying in a company name. Reuters said the potential for such a service is there, but the product or potential demand for such a product has not as yet been clearly identified. And in the US, it said its new Reuters NewMedia Inc unit has acquired a $3m equity stake in AdValue Media Technologies Inc, which markets interactive transaction services to the advertising industry. AdValue has a system that computerises the advertisement buying and selling process, and markets the service to ad agencies, sales representatives and media outlets. It has processed $200m in ad buys and sells since it began in August.
