Qube

Qube was the first two-way cable commercial television service. It was a joint venture, developed and operated by Warner Communications and Amex Cable in Columbus, Ohio. It ran from December 1977 until 1985, when costs for the service were determined to be prohibitive and the project was scrubbed. Today, Qube is recalled as perhaps the earliest experiment in genuinely interactive television, and some even consider it as kind of a primitive predecessor to the World Wide Web.

Compared to what is possible now on the Internet, and to what is likely to come when digital television hits its stride, Qube's experimentally interactive offerings were unsophisticated, even quaint. It allowed cable TV subscribers in Columbus to select pay-per-view movies, participate in simple, selective polls, and offer audience feedback. But even those simple viewer-participation functions allowed for an early form of electronic democracy; by punching buttons in a keypad viewers could respond to issues raised during live city-council and school-board meeting broadcasts. Viewers also could win prizes during quiz shows, and occasionally select plays for local football teams during live game telecasts. Despite its archaic nature, Media Visions Journal writer Ken Freed has noted, Qube set the mark for all interactive television to come.

According to Freed, Warner Communications president Steve Ross first dreamed up the idea of Qube after staying in a Tokyo hotel in 1975. The facility's closed-circuit TV system was mildly interactive, and had been built by Pioneer Electronic of Japan. Ross contacted Pioneer and asked the company to develop a similar system for commercial cable TV in the United States. Warner Cable's CEO approved of the idea, and Pioneer's design for Qube was deployed two years later.

On December 1, 1977, with studios located in a remodeled Columbus appliance store, Qube launched to tremendous fanfare. Initially, it offered what then was an unprecedented 30 channels. Ten of these were standard broadcast channels running on cable, ten were either premium or pay-per-view channels, and the remaining ten consisted of original, local, interactive programming. Only one year after the launch of the Apple I personal computer in 1976, Qube's 30,000 subscribers received a set-top box with a computer chip and some computerized memory. Data traffic over the eight-bit system traveled both to and from set-top boxes at 256kbps (kilobits per second), about the effective rate of today's broadband digital subscriber line (DSL) Internet-connection technology.

The service was heavily hyped in the 1970s, and media attention helped Warner Cable land a lot of lucrative local cable franchises at the height of the early cable bidding wars of the time. Strangely, as Roger Fidler notes in his 1997 book Mediamorphosis: Understanding New Media, Qube failed to generate much excitement among viewers. According to Fidler, this may have been partly due to the system's limited interactive capabilities. In most cases, feedback was limited to yes or no answers, or to selecting answers from a list of numbered options; viewers felt like they were taking multiple-choice exams, Fidler writes. Indirectly, that paucity of serious interactivity may actually have contributed to the later boom of commercial Internet services. Future America Online chief Steve Case, then a young college student in Cincinnati, decided to buy a computer and check out the early online services after finding himself disappointed in Qube's interactive offerings.

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