GTE mainStreet

~ the goodbye ~

1998 is the year i got a modem. It is also the last year anyone has GTE mainStreet running, which means the two of us missed each other by months in one direction and by an ocean in the other. This is a grave for a thing that was already answered by the time i arrived.

The idea is old and it kept coming back. Before the web, several large companies were sure the screen people already owned was the television, and that the way to deliver information to a household was through it. GTE started planning what became the Cerritos Project in the mid-1980s, wiring a California town as a live test of interactive video. mainStreet was the consumer service that came out of it. A set-top box sat on the television and sent your button presses back up the telephone line, and GTE's computers returned pages over the cable plant, which was faster than any modem of the period could manage.

Commercial rollout began around 1993. By that october it had signed a couple of thousand customers across three cities, two in California and one in Massachusetts. By 1995 it was near four thousand. By 1998 it had roughly sixteen thousand homes and had moved its center of gravity to Clearwater, Florida and Thousand Oaks, California, offering about ninety five services you drove with a dedicated remote control.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

What mainStreet actually sold was errands. Stock quotes and business news, an encyclopedia, travel guides, homework material, games, shopping. The Cerritos trial had a few hundred households out of the town's several thousand cable subscribers, and GTE called it an unqualified success while outside observers were already calling interactive television a flop.

Both were true in their way. The technology worked. The problem was that a television is a device you sit back from and a catalog is a device you lean into, and no amount of fiber in the neighborhood fixes that. The remote control was the real bottleneck. Every service had to be designed for a person holding a plastic wand eight feet from the screen.

~ the funny part ~

In april 1998 GTE tested internet access on mainStreet across fifteen hundred California homes, and a fifth of them used it within the first day. Clearwater customers got it on 3 may. It ran at 125 kbit/s and brought Bloomberg, Grolier's encyclopedia, weather.com, e*Trade, chat rooms and email onto the television.

Read that again, because it is the whole obituary. A service built so that households would not need the internet had spent a decade assembling private versions of everything the internet was about to hand out for free. In its final year it gave up and added the web, and people went straight for it. By september the sixteen thousand remaining customers were migrated onto General Instrument's standard digital cable boxes, which quietly ended the proprietary hardware that had always been the reason nobody else could deploy this thing.

There is no shutdown announcement to point at, which is why the date here is a year and not a day. GTE stopped being GTE soon afterward, merging into Verizon in 2000. What killed mainStreet is not really in dispute. Netscape shipped and ordinary computers got online, and the television went back to being a television for another decade.

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