DESTINATION 2000

Michael Holigan: Earlier today we looked at how a computer can control anything electrical in your home. Now we're going to look at how a computer can actually control your most vital electronic, your television. We've got Stacy Hand here with us today from Gateway 2000, and Stacy, what's the difference between a normal TV set and this Destination unit?

Stacy Hand: What you're looking at is actually a monitor. It's very similar to what you'd have in your office or in your den, only it's about twice as big. We take all the TV tuner and the amplification and a lot of the controls out of the monitor and put it right in the PC.

M.H.: Well, besides watching television, what else can we do with it?

S.H.: Well, because it is a PC and it is running under Windows 95, you can do some interesting things. By simply using a remote that's designed to look just like your TV remote, only it has a couple of weird things. It has a track ball you traditionally would see on a PC device and underneath it has a trigger style remote. So it's very user friendly and it's very easy to control the track ball and control the pointer.

M.H.: Oh, I see the arrow on it.

S.H.: You can see the pointer on the screen there, and by simply clicking the button, you now are what looks to be in a window, a PC window and you can drag it around, drop it, whatever you want to, just like you would with a traditional PC. And the nice thing about this is that you can do other things simultaneously. You can be watching the Disney Channel, at the same time you could be, you know, writing a letter to Grandma. Or you could be surfing the Internet.

M.H.: Okay. Well, I see you have a keyboard there to do that, but it's not attached to the computer. How does it work?

S.H.: The keyboard and the remote have no wires. You don't have to point it, it's non-directional. And the nice thing about this is, if the dog walks in front of you or your wife walks in front of you, it's not going to interrupt what you're doing.

M.H.: Well let's see how we get on the Internet with it?

S.H.: Okay. You can use either the keyboard or the remote. The keyboard has a touch pad on it. As I mentioned, the remote has the track ball. And simply, you use this just like you would on a portable. You go down here, you open up your web service. Now we have Your New House web site up.

M.H.: Been there. Done that.

S.H.: Yeah, somebody looks familiar down there.

M.H.: Well, it looks like it does a lot on the Internet or as a computer, but what can it do in a television world?

S.H.: This system will do everything your television can do, but also you can go one step further and actually pull up the programming data for the next two weeks and see what's on. You can actually have it remind you to watch something while you're watching something else. You can actually sort the data. You can call up Sylvester Stallone and you can see he's on "Rambo 3" and "Over the Top". If you want to know what "Over the Top" is about, you click on it and you can see who's in the cast, and it tells you a little bit about it.

M.H.: I see down there it also says "Ratings". So you can actually check the ratings of movies before your children watch them?

S.H.: Exactly. You can go up here and click on the "G" rated movies and you can see what precisely is on, what you want your kids to watch, and what you don't want them to watch. The feedback that we're getting is that this product is really bringing the family back together. It's bringing those kids back into the living room, interacting, whether it be television, whether it be Internet, whether it be multimedia. One of the applications that we're bundling is a title called "You don't know Jack". It's an MTV like Jeopardy.

M.H.: You really see this as the future? Where you combine television and computer monitors?

S.H.: The living room is going to be a digital living room in the near future. So the bottom line is, on this, you can do anything that you can do on a TV and you can do anything that you can do on a PC.

Episode 46 1996 - 97 Season

| Interactive House - 1 | Interactive House - 2 | Cleaning Your Computer | Destination 2000 | Bi-Weekly Mortgage |

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