Oceanic takes TV one step further

By John Duchemin
Advertiser Staff Writer

Three years after making television history with on-demand movies and over-the-TV pizza ordering, Oceanic Time Warner Cable will soon start offering digital services that promise to further enmesh standard television and capabilities usually associated with the Internet.

The new features, which introduce interactivity to newscasts, sports games and advertising, stand to give consumers more choices — and bring advertisers closer than ever into the individual family's living room.

Oceanic, which provides cable TV services for about 375,000 Hawai'i households, will unveil the services today at the Halekulani in a demonstration for several hundred advertising agents. The new features, available to digital subscribers only, include:

• Interactive polling, letting TV viewers respond to questions by clicking a button. Oceanic wants to offer the tool to news or sports shows, as well as to advertisers who could quiz viewers on their products.
• Camera choices for sports games. Starting with University of Hawai'i football games, viewers will be able to pick from six different camera angles.
• An on-demand advertising channel, on which viewers can sift through informational videos of cars, homes, travel packages and other items. The service, developed by Honolulu company BroadBand iTV, will probably debut in mid-October with ads by car dealers, real estate agents and tourism companies.
• A directed advertising service that lets advertisers package targeted ads for individual cable "hubs" of several hundred homes. For example, McDonald's could run an islandwide ad, "but tell customers in Central O'ahu that Big Macs are on sale for a buck in Mililani," said Nate Smith, Oceanic's president.

Observers say the new services promise to keep the company at the forefront of interactive TV, which has made broad inroads in Europe but advanced only fitfully in America and elsewhere.

"Interactive TV is here and there ... but it's still very new," said Toni Irwin, of California Cable & Telecommunications Association, an industry group that keeps tabs on regional cable developments.

The services are a gamble for Oceanic, which is betting that consumers will actually use the new features — and won't mind being targeted by advertisers, a feature that some view as intrusive in other media like the Internet.

The advertising features are particularly speculative, Smith said.

"We can't be too robust about these products, because who knows what the consumers will like," he said. "There are issues of privacy, so we won't be proceeding on a broad basis until we work out what the consumers want.

"We only want to play with people who want to play with us."

Observers says Hawai'i is an ideal market for testing interactive services, and Oceanic owner AOL Time Warner has used the Islands as a test market in the past.

Oceanic's market penetration is also relatively high, capturing a majority of TV viewers, and its cable system, thanks to the mountainous terrain that interferes with broadcast antennas, is well developed, said Richard Tillotson, founder of BroadBand iTV.

Hawai'i's relative isolation from mainstream America also means products can be tested without too much concern over mistakes, Smith said.

"If you take a product straight to New York City and it gets panned, that's it," he said. "Hawai'i is removed enough that developers feel they can play around without huge ramifications."

Oceanic caused nationwide murmurs when it rolled out its video-on-demand service to digital subscribers in fall 1999, becoming the first cable provider to offer a small library of movies that could be accessed, rewound, forwarded and stopped at the whim of the consumer.

The service has gradually become more popular with the digital users who make up about 25 percent of Oceanic's subscriber base, according to Smith.

Last weekend, on-demand use hit an all-time peak, with 1,200 simultaneous users in a single one-hour period, veteran Oceanic product developer Alan Akamine said.

Also in 1999, the company debuted a project that let Central O'ahu digital subscribers order food and drink from Mililani-area Pizza Hut restaurants with a few clicks of the remote. The service has since spread across O'ahu, with nearly every Pizza Hut on line, Oceanic officials said.

The cable station also has introduced products including bill paying via television. That service gets about 4,000 uses per day, Smith said.