Year’s Secret Work at Tiny Irvine Firm Produces Videophone Breakthrough: Full Motion, Color
It’s been 23 years since AT&T; first demonstrated a “picture phone” at the World’s Fair in New York, and engineers ever since have been trying to devise an economical way for telephone callers to see the people they’re talking with.
Now, a tiny Irvine company working in secret for more than a year has made a technological breakthrough that will allow it to produce video telephones showing full-motion color pictures--the combination of sight and sound previously available only to Dick Tracy, Captain Video, the Star Trek crew and other figures of fantasy.
Universal Video Communications Corp. actually has made two breakthroughs.
The first is a technological triumph. Universal’s videophones are the first to transmit full visual motion over ordinary telephone lines.
The second is a financial breakthrough. The cost of using ordinary telephone lines to transmit video is about half the cost of the cheapest alternative method now available for combining video and audio communications.
“The whole world is wired, and you can plug this machine in anywhere there are normal phone jacks,” said John E. Looney, chairman and president of Universal Video. “It’s a tremendously exciting kind of technology. And this is the first step in universal video communications.”
AT&T; executives who have reviewed Universal Video’s technology in three visits to the company are anxious to see the finished product, which is due by November.
“Their technology is unique,” said John W. Zellweger, venture manager for AT&T.; “The ability to send a freeze-frame (snapshot) over ordinary telephone lines has been there, but the ability to send motion has not been.”
With advancing technology and falling prices over the years, he said, consumers will soon “expect it” in their homes.
“It is unique indeed,” Elliot Gold, an industry commentator, said about the new technology. “It sure will make a difference. There’s a helluva business market that will emerge.”
But Gold, who publishes an industry newsletter through his TeleSpan Publishing Corp. in Altadena, warned that while average consumers often believe they need a videophone, “they haven’t figured out what to use if for.”
Until now, transmitting full motion and sound could only be done over special wide-width cables, with or without satellite assistance, and could cost thousands of dollars an hour.
For instance, AT&T; and Hilton Hotels have set up a joint venture offering businesses in certain cities a meeting room and top-of-the-line teleconferencing services. Total cost for a call from Los Angeles to New York is about $1,170 for a typical 1 1/2-hour meeting, and two rooms--one at each end--would cost an additional $1,050, said James Posko, an AT&T; video-conferencing staff manager.
Even the cheapest video communication--a hazy motion picture over narrower special lines--currently costs $80 to $100 an hour, Gold said, and customers would need to buy a decoder box that costs about $68,000 to get that picture, he said.
Plugs Into Phone Jack
The UV Communicator, Universal Video’s new product, plugs into a regular telephone jack. A second line is needed for the telephone.
With both lines working on a call from Los Angeles to New York, the cost would be about $40 an hour, not including the cost of the machine, Gold said.
The UV Communicator will go on tour around the country in November and will be ready for sale to businesses before March at a price of about $12,500 apiece, Chairman Looney said. A simplified videophone will hit the consumer market for $3,500 by the fall of 1988, he said.
Announcement of UV Communicator comes at a time when other companies are starting to market devices that do much less--and also cost much less.
Last Thursday, for instance, FiberNet Communications Corp. in Portland, Ore., introduced a video telephone that sends black-and-white snapshots over telephone lines and rents for $25 a month.
About eight or 10 companies, from giants like Mitsubishi and Canon to small shops with unfamiliar names, have come up with devices that transmit color snapshots over regular telephone lines or moving pictures that must be transmitted over special lines.
Small Towns Out of Reach
“Video teleconferencing is not new. AT&T; is doing it at higher band widths,” Zellweger said. “In most cases, those higher quality lines usually run more money to use per minute--from a couple of times to five or 10 times the cost of ordinary lines.”
Even more important, Gold noted, those special lines may not reach small towns or remote areas--like Amarillo, Tex.; Tonopah, Nev.; or Pigeon, Mich.--places where grandma and grandpa might live and would be willing to pay a little extra to “watch” their grandchildren grow.
Those lines also don’t reach most major foreign cities, though AT&T; has some joint operations with Hilton in Tokyo and some European cities.
Gold wonders if the UV Communicator is going to be able to transmit its color motion effectively over thousands of miles and numerous AT&T; switching stations. “It might be different because you pick up noise,” he said.
But Looney is confident his product will work just fine for most people, though he acknowledges that the transmission might slow down in remote parts of the country where telephone companies still have old-fashioned switches in place.
Universal Video’s 17 employees have been working confidently ever since John Music, the company’s executive vice president and director of research, figured out in April, 1986, that it was possible to transmit color video over ordinary telephone lines.
‘Impossible, Absurd’
“When John (Looney) came to me with the product idea, I immediately pooh-poohed it,” Music said. “I was too polite to laugh at him, but I told him it was impossible, absurd. He asked me to study it. I did.”
Music and other engineers first came up with a way to use existing technology to take a moving picture and convert it to a form that can be transmitted over telephone lines--in much the way that a computer sends information to another computer.
The biggest challenge was compressing the 100 million bits of information per second contained in a typical video picture to the equivalent of 15,000 bits of information per second--the amount an ordinary telephone line can handle.
The solution was to compress the information to 30,000 bits per second, Music said, and then record only the information in a picture frame that changes, such as head and hand movements.
Static objects such as a wall or couch become a backdrop that once painted--in less than three seconds--leaves the machine and the telephone line free to record only the movements.
After the first two seconds, the UV Communicator compresses only changes in the picture so that new information--movement in the picture--can be sent at six frames a second over an ordinary telephone line. A unique enhancer developed by Music and his crew doubles the apparent speed at the receiving end, he said.
Storage on Floppy Disk
Music said that while television or motion pictures operate at 30 frames a second, the average person perceives normal movement at 12 frames a second.
Because the information is converted to computer language, the picture can be stored on a standard floppy disk, allowing the UV Communicator to send color snapshots as well as motion pictures.
That capability also means that the camera can record motion pictures elsewhere, and the pictures can then be sent overnight to an automatic answering UV Communicator, which can replay the videos later at a normal speed of 30 frames a second.
Such versatility could be important to business such as real estate sales, Looney said. Agents could photograph a number of newly listed homes and send the pictures--either moving or still--overnight to the local Multiple Listing Services office so the new homes could appear in the next day’s bulletin.
Many companies already are using various forms of teleconferencing services. Besides the two-way connection that AT&T; provides, companies such as Private Satellite Network Inc. in New York offer one-way video and two-way audio hookups, “sort of like a Phil Donahue call-in show,” said Don Kremer, PSN’s vice president for sales and marketing.
Satellite Dishes Used
J.C. Penney Co., for instance, has equipped various offices with satellite dishes so that buyers can view clothes under consideration by headquarters in New York. Besides the capital expenditures, Penney’s pays PSN $650 to $700 an hour for satellite time and $1,500 to $3,000 an hour for hookups, Kremer said.
Looney figures the uses for his product are nearly limitless.
Anyone from advertisers to busy physicians needed for consultation on surgeries are potential customers. Oil companies already are talking with Looney, he said, because they hope to prevent their engineers from taking long trips just to spend 10 or 15 minutes looking at a damaged drill bit.
Looney, whose background is in marketing and sales, plans to have 1,000 exclusive dealers signed up by March to push the UV Communicator. He already has arrangements pending with Canadian and West German agents.
The dealers, he said, will set aside two rooms that businesses or even consumers could rent for $10 to $20 each for a 15-minute call.
“When we first started, it was tough to get suppliers because they laughed at us,” Looney said. “We got a moving picture on the screen about a month ago, and now we have the executives of major companies coming by to see if they can help us with supplies.”
