AKA Narrowcasting; Conference Master

. . . . . That brief communication from Alexander Graham Bell, who was assistant Mr. Watson, was probably the first example of what is also known as narrow casting. Today we'd like to share with you some Oregon case studies of narrow casting. They represent applications of technology to deliver specialized communication to target audiences. Our first group provides a survey of projects in place and making use of established communication systems.

There are also a number of projects here in Oregon that promise a new generation of narrow casting opportunities. We'll have a look at some of those as well. For our purposes, the narrow casting media on today's agenda all deal with direct service to the general public. It was initially developed to extend broadcast TV to areas where reception was difficult. Now, cable is finding future security in the delivery of specialized cable channels and services. Teleconferencing, an increasingly popular way of bringing business or professional groups together without the loss of time and expensive travel associated with conventions. FM radio subcarriers. This very inexpensive system will deliver timely information to specialized users, not dependent upon an accompanying picture. Television teletext. Utilizing a part of the television signal known as the vertical interval, a number of pages of text material can be transmitted on the main TV channel.

A decoder unit converts the text to appear on the viewer's TV screen. Instructional television fixed service, also known as ITFS for short, is a technology with a second life. This multiple point distribution system has been around for a number of years with limited use. New applications of the specialized television service authorized recently by the FCC have created a rush to file for available ITFS channels. The key to the success of most current narrow casting projects is the inventiveness with which existing technology is used in a cost effective way. The case studies you are about to see do not represent the only examples here in Oregon. Many of you will be reminded of other examples, perhaps even more elaborate. We've selected these because we think they're representative of the concepts to be considered later in the conference. Rogers cable systems operate the television cable franchise for East Portland

and Eastern Multnomah County. At present, cable systems has about 60,000 subscribers to its service, which provides up to 56 channels with a half dozen pay services. Art Alexander is the coordinator of the Black Channel 23, an award winning example of narrow casting to a target audience. The key to the success of most current broad casting projects are

Casino and the C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C The National Cable Television Association fought so too, because on September 6, 1984, that organization awarded its top honor, the ACE Award for Special Audience Programming,

to Cable Systems Black Channel 23. With nearly 30,000 black residents in the Cable Systems Service Area representing more than three quarters of the black population of the state of Oregon, Cable targets this audience in a very effective manner. In the 1970s, Lane Community College was among a small pioneering group of community colleges that were producing some of the country's first telecourses. Admittedly, the numbers were small at first, but the college recognized the significance of Cable Television to their mission. It allows them to reach out and attract new students to Lane Community College. Jim Ellison, Dean of Liberal Arts and Telecommunications at Lane, describes the college's current involvement with Cable. Lane Community College has continued to search for non-traditional learning systems for students, and we view Cable Casting as just another of these learning options. The college is currently programming three Cable Systems, which serve approximately 26,000

homes. We enroll about 1,200 students each quarter in our telecourses. Cable Casting affords us a great deal of flexibility in meeting the needs of students. We Cable Cast over 71 hours each week in the Eugene Springfield area. We offer 19 telecourses, and each of these telecourses is repeated several times each week. Cable Casting is a viable alternative learning system for students. It provides educational access for the distant learner, and at the same time provides learning options for our traditional on-campus students. Now a member of the Oregon Community College Telecommunications Consortium, Lane Community College is a leading advocate of the use of Cable Casting as a supplement to broadcasting in Lane County. In the future, Ellison sees Cable Television playing a crucial role in the delivery of telecourses to students in their homes and at their work sites. As a complement to broadcast television, Cable Television offers a great deal of viewing

flexibility to the off-campus learner. The Chrysler Corporation is an example of a company that experimented with video teleconferencing before deciding to construct a dedicated teleconferencing network at each of their corporate office sites. Another agency using video teleconferencing is the American Society of Chartered Life Underwriters. In Eugene, the local chapter has used Lane Community College as the site for their teleconference meetings. In the Portland area, the teleconferences are received by portable satellite dish at the Thunderbird Inn at Janssen Beach, the regular meeting site for the Portland ASCLU chapter. Some hotel chains have actively stepped into the video conferencing marketplace. Their skills in providing food, lodging, and meeting space in one location make them a logical site for such events. Another provider of video conferencing services is Portland Community College. The college installed a satellite dish at their Sylvania campus in 1983.

While most video conferences at PCC are offered to special interest groups for a fee, some have been made available to the general public at no cost, a public service of the college. Ray Perkel, director of instructional support and educational services at PCC, explains how video conferencing helps Portland Community College meet its educational mandate. Portland Community College became involved in video conferencing because it was an important source of information which is instructional. The mission of the college is delivery of educational services to the community that it serves. And one of the goals of the college was the delivery of services to the community using alternative delivery methods, video conferencing fits both the mission and the goal of the college. Video conferencing has been very important to us. Number one, it's provided direct and specific topics for students who are enrolled in programs that need specific material that would not be available from any other source.

Two, it's provided a wonderful activity for staff development, staff updating, and getting teachers involved in new kinds of activities, and it saved the college considerable money and travel and other kinds of meeting arrangements. Three, it's provided community services to the community at large, in subject areas such as law, medicine, electronics, management, just to name a few. And fourthly, it's become an important source of general public information in areas again, such as medicine, politics, science, the environment, and other topics as well. Video conferencing has become very significant. It's brought new activities to Portland Community College, its staff, students, and the community at large. Video conferencing, we recognize, is not designed to replace seminars, conventions, and other face-to-face kind of activities. It simply offers a low cost alternative to people who otherwise be denied access to these wide variety of materials.

Oracle advises other teleconference service suppliers to emphasize program content over the glamour of space-age technology when marketing their service to potential users. When KOAPFN replaced an obsolete transmitter in 1973, the new unit included an SCA channel capability. Two years later, in 1975, that channel became home for the Golden Hours Service. Related to the blind and to the elderly in nursing homes and institutions, this narrowcast signal is received on these special receivers, pre-tuned to the KOAPFN SCA frequency. Each set costs about $100, and at present, approximately 700 sets are in use in the Portland Metropolitan area. The Golden Hours signal is received and distributed on in-house cable systems and public address systems at a number of hospitals in nursing homes where target audiences are concentrated. At the studio, volunteers provide most of the daily schedule of live and pre-taped reading,

bringing the blind up to the minute information from the daily newspapers, weekly news magazines, and even the current best food buys. Golden Hours is a nonprofit organization with its own board of directors and budget, presenting over 5,000 hours a year on a budget of cash and in-kind support of around $50,000. This FM SCA is a very cost-effective narrowcasting service. With extension of the KOAPFN based origination to other SCA-equipped FM stations in Oregon, the audience of target users could increase even more. Like the FM radio sideband, the television carrier signal has additional capacity beyond that used for the picture and sound delivered to the viewers home. Some of this signal capacity is used for technical purposes by the television station. In the vertical interval portion of the TV signal, a number of pages of text material can be transmitted without effect on the picture.

These text pages are decoded by a unit attached to the TV set. The first widespread use of vertical interval lines was for transmission of closed captioning for the hearing impaired online 21. With more than 20 million hearing impaired, nationally able to benefit from the closed captioning of television programs, this narrowcasting application has a great potential for public service. Oregon hearing impaired have available closed captioning on commercial and public television stations throughout the state. Another use of vertical interval teletext in Oregon is the market line service, now being distributed by Oregon State University through Oregon Public Broadcasting Television stations. Current farm market information is gathered by OSU Extension Service Specialist at the Corvallis campus each day. The data is fed into a computer terminal, which in turn transmits the information by telephone line to the Portland Master Control Center for Oregon Public Broadcasting.

A market line decoder unit, the same as that used for closed captioning, but switched to utilize the entire screen instead of only the lower portion is attached to the user's television set. OSU staff update the information during the day as needed. The cost of the decoder is the only cost involved in receiving the information and is comparable to the closed captioning unit. Originally developed in Nebraska, the Oregon market line is one of a handful of examples now on operation around the country making use of this narrowcast technology. The Humatilla Education Service District in Pendleton was one of the nation's pioneers in the exploration of ITFS technology. In 1966, Humatilla ESD received a $500,000 federal grant to establish this center in Pendleton. An important part of the project was the construction of an ITFS network throughout the two county area.

The ITFS system planned by the ESD was unconventional. Geographically, the size of the district over 5,200 square miles meant that several repeater transmitters would be needed. In all, four repeaters were fed by the main transmitter in Pendleton. When completed in 1968, this system was a remarkable engineering achievement in that every school building but one received a signal from the ESD. So the ESD operated the system from 1968 to 1980. During that time, tremendous technological improvements occurred. Included among these is a low-cost, one-half-inch video-cast set recorder. In 1980, the ESD decided that the tremendous amount of money they were spending each year to maintain this network would be better spent in converting the district to a more flexible system using video-cast set recorders in each school building. These case studies of current narrowcasting in Oregon are only a few representative samples

of the many successful projects in the state. We hope that those of you experienced with other projects will share some of that insight during the small group discussion periods this afternoon. What we prepared next is a collection of narrowcasting projects still on the drawing boards in various stages of development from initial concept to staged implementation. Two projects which offer great promise involve higher education support to Oregon's rapidly growing high technology industries. Sometimes called the New Silicon Forest, Washington County, just West of Portland, is home to a group of high technology firms who have a continuing need for graduate level education in electrical and computer engineering. The Oregon Graduate Center's Dr. Larry Murr has developed plans for an interactive television instruction network to service this need. The project is designed to deliver two-way video and audio interactive instruction via a cable network from the Oregon Graduate Center to students at various participating firms

during normal work hours. Key elements to this project are the importance of the live interaction necessary due to the graduate level course content and the need to have course material current to the latest state of the art in areas such as computer software. In conjunction with the Washington County project, but separate in development is another education delivery system under development by the Oregon State System of Higher Education. Dr. Clifford Smith is the project manager for what the state system is calling their distance education delivery system. This project will initially focus on delivery of similar high technology graduate level education from Oregon State University and PSU via a microwave interconnection to user firms in Washington County. Following an evaluation of the educational needs of its member hospitals, the Greater Portland Area Hospital Council formed a telecommunications consortium in 1982, the Northwest Health Network.

This then, the Northwest Health Network has coordinated a vast array of educational programs for both hospital staff and patients. Steve Berkshire, president of the Greater Portland Area Hospital Council, approached Oregon Public Broadcasting in search of a partner to develop an ITFS system in Portland. Steve explains his rationale. The hospitals in the Portland area were looking for an effective and easy way to broadcast patient education, as well as professional education for the nurses, physicians and other staff in their hospitals. We were looking at both cable television as well as an ITFS network and decided that ITFS was an appropriate and inefficient way to broadcast directly to hospitals on an effective flexible basis. We looked for Oregon Public Broadcasting as a workable partner due to the fact that they have the technical expertise and already have the operations to do such a program. Therefore, we thought that ITFS in cooperation with Oregon Public Broadcasting would be the way to go.

Salem's Schemeckata Community College, serving Oregonians in parts of four counties, is planning a system combining ITFS and cable television. Schemeckata Community College is presently programming an educational access cable channel in five communities in their district. This system requires the college to provide at least 1,200 videocasset tapes at an approximate cost of $18,000. Adding personnel and machine costs for tape duplication, this tape bicycle system is sorely testing the college's resources. The solution to this dilemma, the college fields and ITFS system would enable them to deliver telecourse programs to all five cable head-ends simultaneously. The college is in the process of applying for four ITFS channels through the FCC. The other Oregon applicants for ITFS include Portland Community College in the Portland area, Lane Community College in the Eugene area, and Umpquah Community College in the

Roseburg area, an exciting new venture which may begin as early as 1985 involves public broadcasting television stations nationwide delivering a teletext service for Merrill Lynch. Here in Oregon, the signal would be transmitted on lines 14 through 17 on the four stations of Oregon Public Broadcasting and the Community Licensed KSYSTB in Medford. Some of the questions yet to be answered include, to what extent this service will enhance funding for Oregon PTD stations and if long-range contracts for limited vertical interval carrying capacity could restrict future local use of this technology. A future narrowcast technology, similar in nature to the Merrill Lynch teletext, is the National Paging Service under development and conjunction with the member stations of National Public Radio. The project is conceived to extend the range of conventional paging from the local area

to a nationwide service. Here in Oregon, with extensive NPR station coverage over the most densely populated parts of the state, the system would provide a high degree of dependability. The potential income from such a project to Oregon NPR member stations is still speculative. While the Paging Service could be a competitor for other SCA uses, with more than one NPR FM station important in Eugene, sufficient SCA capacity would be available at least in the short run. Narrowcasting in Oregon will develop rapidly during the 80s. We hope you will be a part of successfully planning that future.