The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Oracle Plans On-Line Service Featuring Interactive Video

By JULIE PITTA

June 14, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

BURLINGAME, Calif. —

Database software vendor Oracle Corp. said Tuesday that it plans to join the burgeoning on-line services field with a new service boasting interactive video via the personal computer.

Chairman Lawrence Ellison said the company will do a test-run of Oracle Online, as the new service is to be called, over the summer. Using special phone lines and an accessory for their PCs, computer users will be able to call into a computer server in San Francisco and access a wide range of video-based programming and conduct transactions such as shopping and banking.

Oracle has been selling a version of its database software, called the Oracle Media Server, for trials of so-called video-on-demand services that are now being conducted by a number of phone companies. And on Tuesday it announced an alliance to marry the Media Server with Intel Corp.’s Proshare video-conferencing equipment for PCs.

“With today’s on-line services like America Online, what you basically see is text with a few mediocre graphics,” Ellison said. “Ours will look like interactive TV on a PC.”

But the service will require the Intel Proshare equipment, or some equivalent, as well as a telephone line known as an ISDN connection. In California, ISDN costs about $200 to install plus a $20 monthly charge, and it can be far more expensive in other states. While 60% of American households can sign up for ISDN lines, very few have actually done so.

Ellison said that once the test is completed--likely sometime in August--Oracle will announce a “federation” of companies that it will work with to build the service.

It’s a competitive field: The established on-line services such as America Online, Prodigy and CompuServe have been adding subscribers rapidly, and Microsoft is expected to become a major player when it launches its Microsoft Network in August.

But the Justice Department is investigating Microsoft’s plan to bundle the Network with the new Windows 95 operating system.