London-based ViewCall Europe Plc, the latest vehicle of 1970s investment whizz-kid John Bentley and the company that reckons it has the simple answer to the problems posed by on-line shopping (cut out the video and use stills – CI No 2,728), realises that its television set-top box is just the $500 Internet access device everyone has been talking about – except that it costs only $250. Accordingly, it has launched it as such in the US via a new ViewCall America. ViewCall America is a new Norcross, Georgia-based subsidiary of Colorocs Information Technology Inc and has announced the device as WEBster, describing it as a television set-top box that gives consumers direct access to the Internet and on-line services through their television sets. ViewCall expects to price the box below $300 and promises a low monthly subscription fee to make the Internet affordable and accessible to all consumers. ViewCall America will go on trial next month with Northern Telecom Ltd. ViewCall has a Short-Cut interface for navigation guided by four buttons on the remote control. An infra-red keyboard is optional. ViewCall America says it is negotiating partnerships with content providers, on-line publishers and merchants concentrating in educational services, news, home shopping, home banking and on-line entertainment. In the UK, ViewCall Europe now plans to offer World Wide Web access alongside its own on-line shopping service, which will use a proprietary fractal-based image compression scheme. The set-top box, based on Advanced RISC Machines Ltd’s ARM RISC and made by Acorn Computer Group Plc’s Online Media Ltd, is designed for simplicity – one lead into the phone jack, another into the television. There’s no keyboard – the user is given a infra-red remote instead. ViewCall has gone to Netscape Communications Corp for the Internet browser used in the box. The back-end interactive shopping service in the UK is being driven by technology from Sun Microsystems Inc. The shopping service is set to go here next month and ViewCall says it aims to bring the Internet to everyone, irrespective of technical inclination or of income.
