The interactivity professional does market research, but has, however, more unknowns than answers. Although options, interactive products, games, information and systems of great sophistication for the viewer and the Internet user are increasing, so far business investments obtain little return.
Therefore, "we need to stipulate what type of customer we have, their behavior and their demands; and to know if it is really interactive or not, to prepare us for the future," says engineer Juan Carlos Guidobono, manager of Technique and Operations of Artear, an Argentine company of the Clarín Group.
In his opinion, the studies and investments carried out so far reveal unencouraging results:
• For companies that venture into interactivity, disbursements are high and profits are lean. Much of the investment is only considered as a positioning expense and also as an important added value.
• Advertisers need tangible information about the interactive user, which does not yet exist; hence, there is still a long time to go before advertising is fruitful.
• 95% of viewers and also Internet users are not truly interactive. In front of the TV, the public seeks to relax and not read more data and statistics, while "online" the professional knows, in general, what specific and concrete data he needs, looks for them and downloads them.
• Products that are attractive to the mass market have not yet been found.
• A field to be developed, where performance could be considered, is in interactive education.
However, Artear – producer of the satellite signals Volver and TN – is the leader of the Southern Cone in the field of interactive products and audiovisual content on the Internet. Perhaps in the future it will also be in the field of digital TV.
It currently has several sites or sites on the Internet. TN Interactivo and Volver offer the possibility to download audio and video via Dial Up. The TN site presents five notes with reduced videos and a subprogram to see it quickly, in addition to other information about the news. The user can move to the on-demand file.
During 1998, the company will launch the commercial of shows "La Tele", in partnership with Canal 13, with data on its programming. At the same time, it is already in the new Internet browser offered by Microsoft, where several default sites are selected and, while browsing another place, the browser downloads the content, stores it and later it is viewed offline at a lower cost. In this field, Telefé, its competitor, also offers similar services.
Guidobono's team is developing video clips on demand for Internet subscribers through Multicanal, MSO of the same Clarín group. Multicanal receives one hundred dollars a month for access to the Internet for an unlimited time, via cable modem (high speed) and to the Digital City of Clarín. The Digital City, among other services, offers Interactive Media of Artear and Digital Media of the Clarín Newspaper, with its own contents; Artear is one of its developers. A CD-Rom about Patagonia, for example, can already be downloaded with video and audio and other cycles such as La aventura del hombre or the media marketing circuit are projected.
For entertainment there has also been room. With this type of technology, Internet users who have a gaming CD-Rom, such as Quake, can interconnect with another computer and play from home or office with other users, thanks to Artear's new hub program. Other games are already on the way.
The economic performance of all these advances continues to be negligible. It is expected that advertising, for now almost non-existent, will arrive when there are controls and information for the agencies; but at the moment it is practically unthinkable the return for this concept. On rare occasions some advertisers have participated in a site because they consider that being first in the new moments could be interesting, but there have been very few cases.
There are, however, some projects that will be profitable; but Guidobono prefers not to comment yet, so as not to alert the competition. "We are already working on projects to edit CD-Roms and audiovisual material complete with indexing to be able to access different parts of the video with additional information; for this we must have storage and process elements that we are about to acquire. In fact, Artear makes sites for third parties, which are profitable, although the goal of the company, for the moment, is not to provide this type of service."
Interactive teaching
Perhaps teaching is the field of education where the most demand and benefit is expected. Artear is thinking of occasional sites with universities abroad and local. "I think it will be interesting to find educational material on the Web, download it, translate it, edit it and prepare it once again, and have some form of control over the material, for example, by offering it in the Digital City. For universities or colleges, on the other hand, it can also be a good added value," observes Guidobono. By 1998 it will be possible to obtain in Argentina state-of-the-art televisions that will carry Internet on the screen. There are news almost daily. However, studies show that the public is not interactive and that, at most, 10% of the population is, while, of this percentage, only 5% is professional, since the rest are young or young.
"It's hard to think of interactive TV today, when the viewer comes home tired to watch the game and we offer him, at the same time, statistics on how many goals and how many fouls Maradona made; I think he would be puzzled and not interested. In my view, this is not the product," he adds.
Finally, Guidobono explains that there are still two or three years before Argentina provides digital TV; "However, we are well advanced in setting standards with other TV channels and neighboring countries, by the time the time comes when we can all offer a single standard of production or, at least, of transmission." TV&V
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