Top 10 Potholes on the Video Superhighway

After years of hype and alliances, a few traffic stoppers are developing along the video superhighway. Here are 10 reasons not to hold your breath for a 500-channel future:

1. Bell Atlantic's $11 billion advanced video network, promised for up to 8.5 million homes by the year 2000, has been delayed by technical problems and cost overruns. "These products are a little more difficult to develop than people thought," said Bell Atlantic chief Lawrence T. Babbio.

2. US West is running into technical snags for an interactive TV system for 9,000 homes in Omaha, NE.

3. A 4,000-home trial in Orlando, FL of Time-Warner's Full Service Network, has been scaled back. The system started with five paying customers!

4. Viacom is still waiting for set-top converters from AT&T for an interactive system that was to have begun last summer in Castro Valley, CA.

5. General Instrument's digital cable boxes, scheduled to roll out last summer, may not appear until early 1996. TCI, the USA's largest cable operator, is waiting for a million of them.

6. Northwest Airlines is stripping its planes of an interactive video system that let passengers watch TV, shop or play videogames at their seats. Too many technical problems.

7. Top Microsoft scientist Nathan Myhrvold compared belief in the information superhighway to belief in Santa Claus. "It's unbelievable for something that doesn't exist," he said at a recent conference for high-tech executives.

8. Corporate feuding, chiefly among US regional phone companies, did in a Congressional effort to rewrite the USA's telecommunications laws for the first time in 60 years.

9. Video-on-demand, the leading candidate for a "killer application" among new technology services, rated only tenth among 26 possible uses of a national information network in the USA.

10. Despite years of work, prospects for HDTV (High Definition TV) remain iffy. While a standard will soon emerge, broadcasters are lukewarm about it's potential.

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