StarSight Telecast

~ the goodbye ~

A television set with a monthly bill attached to it, separate from any cable subscription, is not a thing that ever existed where I live. That was the StarSight product. You bought a Zenith or a Mitsubishi, or later a Sony, and the guide was already inside the chassis. Then you called a number and started paying about four dollars a month to switch it on.

The delivery mechanism is the part worth keeping. There was no modem in the television and no return path through the cable. StarSight bought space in the vertical blanking interval, the handful of scan lines above the visible picture that carry no image, on the signal of a local PBS affiliate. Your city's public broadcaster was quietly carrying the week's listings for every channel, as data, all day. The receiver in the set decoded the packets and rebuilt a schedule database locally, so what appeared on screen was drawn from something the television had assembled itself.

On screen it was a grid you moved through with the remote, with pop-up descriptions and the time remaining on anything already in progress. The feature that sold it was one-button recording. You found a program in the grid, pressed a key, and the unit programmed the VCR for you. Anyone who has ever set a VCR by hand understands why a company believed households would pay monthly for that.

There was nothing here to remember. Turkish television in the nineties carried no on-screen guide at all, and the sets on sale were either built without the decoder or shipped with it inert, because the data it needed was going out over a PBS transmitter in a country I had never been to. The whole product was locked to one nation's public broadcasting infrastructure. That is about as un-exportable as a consumer electronics feature can get.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

StarSight was incorporated in May 1986 in Fremont, California, and spent most of the following decade building rather than selling. The commercial launch came in 1994, late enough that the idea had been public for years and early enough that the delivery still had to be improvised out of broadcast spare capacity.

The licensing went well. Magnavox shipped a standalone set-top decoder for people whose televisions were too old to have it built in. Zenith and Mitsubishi put it inside sets, and by the time Sony signed on as the seventh licensee, the companies carrying StarSight accounted for roughly two thirds of American television sales. On paper the distribution problem was solved.

~ what it cost ~

Between about three and a half and four and a third dollars a month, depending on how long a contract you signed. That is a small number and it was still too much, because of what it came to compete against. Within a few years cable operators were running a scrolling guide channel on the system for nothing, and interactive guides started arriving inside the digital set-top box, also for nothing, paid for by the operator and by advertising sold inside the guide.

StarSight's own notice, years later, put it without decoration. The economics to sustain a subscriber based business model had not been realized, and although there was a small core of dedicated subscribers, the continued decline had made the service unfeasible. A product that asks a household to pay separately for schedule information cannot survive the arrival of schedule information that appears to be free.

~ what got buried with it ~

Gemstar and StarSight agreed to merge on 23 December 1996 and closed on 8 May 1997, each StarSight share converting into 0.6062 Gemstar shares. Gemstar was already the VCR Plus+ company, and what it wanted was not the subscriber base. It was the patents.

The two portfolios put together are what turned Gemstar into a licensing operation that spent the next decade suing manufacturers and cable companies over on-screen guides. The engineering StarSight had done to make a schedule arrive over a broadcast signal became legal ammunition. The service itself continued in the background as an obligation rather than a business.

~ the next chapter ~

The last StarSight data went out in July 2003, and the notice circulating at the time said flatly that the subscription model had never worked. The newsgroup thread from that month asking what could replace it has no good answer in it, because by 2003 the answer was that your cable box already did this and had done for a while.

What survives is the shape. Every guide since, on cable or inside a smart television, is the same grid with time across the top and channels down the side, which is the layout StarSight shipped in 1994 and patented on the way past. What did not survive is the business model. Nobody has successfully charged a household for a television listings grid since, because the grid turned out to be the cheapest place in the system to sell advertising, so everyone gives it away.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »