Medical News Network

~ the last words ~

The Medical News Network was a television channel with an audience of physicians and no way for anyone else to watch it. Whittle Communications launched it in 1993, installing television and VCR units it owned and operated into doctors' offices, then feeding them by satellite. Programming sat on the box and could be played on demand, which mattered because the viewer was a working doctor with fifteen minutes between appointments. The centerpiece was a daily ten minute news bulletin.

It was also interactive, in the way 1993 meant that word. Trade press of the day described computer and modem units attached to the installation, so the network could collect responses from the other end instead of only broadcasting at it. This was a year before most American households had heard of the web, and the delivery chain ran from a satellite dish to a videotape machine to a modem.

The money was supposed to come from pharmaceutical sponsors, and the pitch was the cleanest one in advertising: a screen positioned in the room where prescribing decisions get made, showing content the prescriber has a professional reason to watch. Whittle tested it in 5,000 offices and booked the national rollout for october 1994. The drug companies did not commit. The service was shut down in august, 205 employees lost their jobs, and the rollout never happened.

There is no personal distance to measure here, because this was never a consumer product in any country. Nobody outside an American medical practice ever saw a frame of it, and it was not meant for them. That is the unusual thing about this grave. Most of what is buried on this site died because the public stopped showing up, and this one died because the pharmaceutical marketing departments looked at the numbers and passed.

~ the record ~

~ the whittle machine ~

Chris Whittle built his company on one repeated idea. Find a room where a specific audience is stuck, put a screen in it, then sell that audience to advertisers who could not otherwise reach them. Channel One did it in American classrooms, with a daily news program carrying commercials into 12,000 schools at a renewal rate around ninety-nine percent. Special Report did it with television and print in something like 30,000 medical waiting rooms. MNN was the same move aimed one door further in, at the doctor rather than the patient.

By 1994 the machine was seizing up. Whittle Communications had grown from $82 million in revenue in 1987 to $213 million in 1992 and then posted its first decline, down 5.8 percent. Thirty media titles had been closed across three years. Special Report was shut earlier the same year. The Edison Project, Whittle's attempt at running schools for profit, had absorbed $40 million in development without earning anything back. Time Warner owned a third of the company, with Philips and Associated Newspapers also holding stakes, and the founder was quietly selling half his equity in Channel One to Goldman Sachs along with his share of a $55 million headquarters in Knoxville.

Read against that, MNN was not judged and found wanting. It was thrown overboard. A service still eight weeks from launch is the easiest line item in the building to cut when the parent company needs to show a number, and the drug industry's hesitation gave management the justification it needed.

~ what the screen became ~

The idea was not wrong. Walk into a clinic corridor almost anywhere today and there is a panel on the wall playing health segments with a sponsor's name in the corner. Pharmacies do it. Hospital waiting areas do it. The captive-audience screen won completely, and it won in places Whittle never sold into.

What killed MNN was the cost of doing it in 1993. Every installation meant hardware the network owned, a technician to put it in, satellite time to fill it, and a production operation making a bulletin every single day. That is an enormous fixed cost against a small advertiser base, all of whom could simply wait to see whether it worked. Twenty years later the same screen is a cheap display and a media player, the content arrives over an internet connection nobody has to book, and the economics that made this impossible had quietly disappeared.

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