An ‘Ingenius’ Idea Waiting to Be Discovered : Cable: A free on-line news service has been around since 1986, but few people use it. The Antelope Valley can count nine.

When Antelope Valley residents received a flyer in the mail recently for a national service that sends up-to-the-minute news, financial and sports data direct to their home or office computers via cable TV lines, two conclusions would have been natural.

First, that the service, known as Ingenius, must be the latest breakthrough on the information superhighway, as the cable industry tries to move beyond carrying just pictures. And second, that it is probably costly to use, like some other on-line computer information providers.

But they’d have been wrong on both counts.

Ingenius is not new. It has been carried nationally since 1986 and locally on Jones Intercable systems in the Antelope Valley and Oxnard-Port Hueneme areas since 1989, although it remains virtually unknown and unused by consumers. As for cost, the service is actually free on most cable systems that carry it, including Jones, after subscribers pay a $150 one-time equipment fee.

“It’s an incredibly rich thing. I use it every day and have for almost 10 years,” said analyst Larry Gerbrandt of the media research firm Paul Kagan Associates Inc. in Carmel. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s probably the biggest bargain in the on-line business.”

Ingenius, which functions as a personalized news service, offers general news, stock quotes, sports, entertainment and even state-by-state weather reports.

Yet Gerbrandt is the exception.

In the Antelope Valley, only nine people out of 63,000 cable households subscribe to Ingenius. The number is similarly small in Oxnard and Port Hueneme. Nationally, the service--founded by Tele-Communications Inc., the nation’s largest cable operator--has fewer than 100,000 adult users, despite being available to nearly 30 million households.

“The primary use at home is by news junkies. God, they love us. But there aren’t enough of those guys,” said Jerry Bennington, chief executive of the Denver-based service.

Analyst Gerbrandt said Ingenius’ tiny customer base is a testament to the cable industry’s failure so far to effectively promote non-video services or to appeal to small, specialized audiences.

However, company officials and others in the cable industry say Ingenius has suffered in part because it arrived in the mid-1980s, before the explosive growth in the home computer market, and because of marketing kinks and consumer unfamiliarity with the cable-computer combination.

Formerly known as X-Press Information Services Ltd., the company was founded in 1985 by a partnership of TCI, McGraw-Hill Inc. and a third firm. At first, it relied on TCI systems as its clients. Ingenius’ current owner is Liberty Media Corp., a TCI offshoot based in nearby Englewood, Colo., that TCI has proposed to reacquire.

Liberty Media, a publicly held cable systems concern, does not report separate results for Ingenius. But after long losing money, the information service today is self-supporting, Bennington said, without offering details.

For the $150 start-up price, users buy from the company a small converter box, computer software and connectors. The data feed arrives over the same cable lines that carry television signals. It goes through the converter box and a serial cable into PC-compatible or Macintosh computers.

There, only the categories of information selected by the user (down to levels such as Washington news and college football) appear on the computer, where they are available for viewing and printing.

But there are disadvantages that Bennington and others say have contributed to Ingenius’ relative obscurity. Although the information feed is continuous, consumers can capture it only when their computers are left on, which some people are reluctant to do.

Also, the service is not interactive, meaning users can tap into and save the data that arrives but cannot ask the system to provide specific information. And unlike the on-line services such as Prodigy and America Online, Ingenius has no electronic mail or discussion group capabilities.

Marketing has also been a problem. Bennington said cable systems have not pitched the service to their customers. Because it is often included in the basic cable package, companies get no extra revenue from it. Cable operators, on the other hand, say Ingenius has done little to help them market it.

While Ingenius says it has fewer than 100,000 non-school users, one industry estimate put the number at 60,000. The two biggest dial-up services, CompuServe and Prodigy, have about 2 million and 1.3 million subscribers, respectively, according to Information & Interactive Services Report.