TV of Tomorrow

* Re “Tuning Out the TV of Tomorrow,” Aug. 31: To set the record straight, GTE began planning the Cerritos Project in the mid-1980s to conduct technology and marketing tests of telecommunications techniques and interactive-video services.

By conducting about 20 different tests with fiber-optic cables, coaxial cables and traditional telephone wiring, we have studied the best ways to deliver a wide variety of services, and we have gathered extensive marketing data about demand and pricing of video services.

That alone makes the Cerritos Project an unqualified success and provides invaluable experience that is preparing GTE for the day when telephone companies can provide video services without restrictions.

Your criticism that many of the Cerritos video services are not widely used or well known is misleading and irrelevant. If a particular test required only a few customers, only a few customers were recruited to participate.

In addition, GTE is providing many of these services under a waiver from the FCC which ends in 1994. To mass-market the services, only to have to cut them off at the end of this period, would not be good business sense or good customer relations.

Your implication that GTE’s Main Street service has no mass appeal in Cerritos failed to note that participation was deliberately limited as part of a marketing test. Main Street is an interactive TV service that lets customers play interactive games, access educational programs, check business news and stock quotes, and enjoy a wide variety of other services. Main Street only recently began its commercial rollout, and has signed up more than 2,000 customers in just a few short months.

Other services in Cerritos also have met with widespread approval and acceptance. More than 4,200 customers in Cerritos subscribe to GTE’s pay-per-view service.

Perhaps the most disturbing misconception in your story is that there is no market demand for these services. While current demand for interactive entertainment is open to differing assessments, the intense demand for interactive video from educators and health care providers is well-documented. A Roper Organization survey completed for GTE in 1992 showed that 95% of top education officials, and 82% of health care executives, believe such services will be fairly or very important.

LARRY J. SPARROW

Area President-West, GTE