Intel outlines its own Net vision

Tim Byars (tbyars@cris.com)
Sun, 2 Jun 1996 19:20:55 -0800


By Brooke Crothers
May 30, 1996, 7 p.m. PST

NEW YORK--Intel's Internet
strategy will attempt to create a breed of "hybrid" Internet
applications such as new software
now under development with Time Warner, the
Intercast WebTV products, and an
Internet-version of Intel's ProShare video
conferencing technology.

Intel's biggest challenge is to
reconcile the Internet bandwidth bottleneck to the home with
demanding, data-intensive
Internet applications, Intel executives said today at a
conference of financial analysts
in New York. A hybrid Internet approach would split the
data load between the client PC
and the network, placing the bulk of the application data
on local PC storage and relying
on the network to download "temporal" data.

Such an approach is the answer to
the dissonance between lack of bandwidth and the
large amounts of data needed for
applications, said Andy Grove, president and CEO of
Intel.

As an example of what it means,
Intel today demonstrated a highly graphical Internet live
chat application called
"Clubhouse," which the company is developing with Time
Warner. The application combines
video, Internet phone technology, and rich graphics
using graphical representation of
individual users called avatars to yield a highly
interactive chat environment.

Another application that adheres
to the hybrid strategy is Intercast, technology that
combines television programming
with Internet text and graphics. Intercast is already
being used on a trial basis by
CNN. Intel today demonstrated a live connection to the
CNN site with a video window of
the CNN news segment running in the upper half of
the screen, complemented by text
and graphics data on the lower portion.

NBC is also expected to begin
using the Intercast technology in the coming months, Intel
executives said, while the first
PCs bundled with Intercast TV tuner boards and software
will begin to trickle out this
summer. Intel also expects that several vendors will announce
Intercast-compatible browsers.

The company also presented its
much-ballyhooed ProShare video conferencing
technology as another potential
example of its hybrid Internet strategy. The company is
working with Microsoft and
Netscape to lay the groundwork for ProShare on the Internet
using standard phone lines, said
Frank Gill, executive vice president of the Internet and
communications groups at Intel.

Currently, ProShare is based on
proprietary software from Intel, but Gill said Microsoft
would include the necessary
software in upcoming versions of Windows, while Netscape
will provide Pro-Share plug-ins
for its browser. The technologies won't be in place,
however, for at least a year,
Gill added

--

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