Master of multimedia

William Lo is showing three visitors around his comfortable new office space in Hong Kong's burgeoning Shatin district. "You're the first international media visitors," says the managing director of Hongkong Telecom IMS, the interactive multimedia services unit of Hong Kong's largest telephone company. Like a proud owner who has just moved into a first new home, Lo enthusiastically takes his guest through the partially completed complex.

"This is where the video studio will be," he says, opening one door. Then it's onto the next room, where he explains how workers are making room for a video special effects generator.

Although there's still equipment to be delivered, that's not to say that IMS isn't running at full steam. Already, an entire section of the floor is devoted to about 20 Java programmers who are busy updating Hongkong Telecom's dynamic World Wide Web site (www.netvigator.com).

In touring the IMS office, it's hard to believe that this is part of a telephone company. It's even harder when one remembers that less than 18 months ago Lo was working virtually alone out of a cramped office piled high with video players, gaming systems, remote control devices and assorted cable boxes.

The video players and cable boxes, along with a staff of 250, can still be found at the new office, although they are now arrayed more neatly in a comfortable showroom that doubles as a meeting area.

What makes Lo's work all the more remarkable is that he persuaded Hongkong Telecom to switch gears in the midst of the video-on-demand project. After pilot testing a number of technology platforms between September 1994 and September 1995, Hongkong Telecom had originally planned to launch commercial VOD service by the middle of this year.

In between, however, Internet usage exploded. And Hong Kong-where perhaps more than anywhere the value of information is understood-was no exception to the trend.

"We revisited the system," says Lo. "We realized what we had was not the most desirable architecture for long-term investment.

By long-term investment, Lo means the provisioning of Internet services. Although sound for VOD, the platform did not allow for enough of an upstream channel capacity to make on-line interactivity workable. Nor was the system flexible enough to upgrade. Services like home shopping, which Lo now thought would work best off an Internet-based platform rather than VOD, would be too clunky.

Lo's new platform uses a DAVIC architecture combined with Sun Microsystems' Java object-oriented programming language. Since Java can use the TCP/IP standard, switching and transmission are simplified, even when asynchronous transfer mode is used.

Middleware is being provided by Iona, a small Cambridge, Mass.-based manufacturer of object-oriented software. The company is sticking to its plans for a fiber-to-the-building hardware design, using copper wire and DSL technology to carry signals the short remaining distances over copper.

But to Lo, there's more to the multimedia business than just providing carriage. By becoming a content provider, Lo hopes to drive the growth of the business. He also sees a crucial difference between on-line interactive multimedia services and VOD, one that, if not grasped properly, can be the difference between success and failure in new media, especially for carriers that are staking everything on a TV interface.

Lo sees a major opportunity for Hongkong Telecom in pioneering on-line media. Along with posting NBA scores and other news and information, Lo's people design ads using the latest multimedia tools.

Hence, advertisers and other content providers that are still feeling their way through multimedia's pre-dawn fog can find a ready guide in Hongkong Telecom-happy to help, but happy to bill as well.

The results literally can be seen worldwide. If you visit the Netvigator home page, you'll see notices flashing alternately in English and Chinese characters, you'll see whirling clocks and changing colors. Lo's unit is on the frontier of new media. There are many questions about the multimedia business. We need more companies like Hongkong Telecom IMS willing to answer. There's no law that says other carriers can't be among them.