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British Interactive Broadcasting’s interactive television service is

to be launched from the end of this year under the brand name Open,

although it won’t be fully marketed until Autumn 1999.

However, it already boasts Ford, Unilever and Coca-Cola as

advertisers.

On the shopping side, Great Universal Stores (GUS), Iceland, Woolworths

and BIB shareholder Midland Bank have all committed themselves to using

its tele-commerce facilities. The service will also offer users email

using BT’s Talk 21, and games from Danish firm Visionik.

A Å“375 million investment, Open will run from this month as a promotional

service, but by spring will offer interactive services to Sky Digital

consumers. But it won’t be launched fully until the autumn, by which time

BIB’s chief executive James Ackerman aims to have about 10 shops and seven

information providers on the service.

Promising that the capabilities of the BIB system would go well beyond any

other in the world by that time, he added: ”We will offer digital TV

viewers the chance to play, learn, shop, explore, bank, respond to and

communicate with the world through the most familiar and used medium in

the home: the television set. And it will be profitable - for our

customers, our partners and ourselves.”

As to its retailing scope, Ackerman likened Open to a mall-owner who

leases out real estate. ”In the same way, the cost for retailers will vary

according to the sector,” he said, ”somewhere between five and 20 per cent

commission plus the cost of bandwidth and back-end systems. The saturation

level is not limitless, but we’ll have enough capacity for a whole raft of

shops.”

And defending the delay of BIB’s launch to market, Ackerman said that it

was down to prudence. ”We’ll take it through integration tests and

introduce platforms one by one. And we’ll begin by marketing the services

to those who have access to them. In any case, we’re not in the habit of

talking about the 35 companies we’re negotiating with, but of announcing

the names of those we’ve already done deals with.

”The name Open was chosen, with the help of Wolff Olins, to be a consumer

brand which would become synonymous with interactive television, and which

would encapsulate its exploratory, user-friendly and trustworthy brand

values.”