WavePhore Has a Lot Riding on Windows 98

LAS VEGAS —  Other than Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, perhaps no one has more riding on the release of Windows 98 than R. Glenn Williamson, whose software occupies a coveted spot on the Windows 98 desktop and seeks to revolutionize the way computer users surf by melding TV and the Internet.

Williamson’s company, WavePhore Inc. of Phoenix, has developed a free, advertiser-supported service that circumvents transmission bottlenecks that plague most Internet users. WavePhore harnesses television airwaves to send millions of pages of Web content, around the clock, to computer users equipped with a special $100 computer circuit board.

WavePhore has a contract with a Public Broadcasting Service spinoff to transmit its WaveTop service, which was launched nationwide Monday at the National Assn. of Broadcasters convention here.

More than 3,000 people have requested software for the service, which delivers Web pages from such Internet content providers as Time Warner’s New Media unit, USA Today, Weather Channel, Wall Street Journal Interactive, Quote.com and Universal Press Syndicate comics.

But Williamson knows the real boost for his product will come with the release of Windows 98. “That will be the real icing on the cake.”

For now, Williamson said, “we are moving ahead today with our product, which represents a paradigm shift in the way we use the Internet.”

The release date of Windows 98, the upgrade to the Windows 95 operating system, has been up in the air since the U.S. Justice Department intensified its 4-year-old antitrust investigation of Microsoft last fall. Its release, scheduled for June, became further clouded on Monday when reports surfaced that Justice officials believe they may have enough evidence to pursue new antitrust charges against Microsoft.

Any delay in the shipment of Windows 98 will cut into the crucial 18-month to 24-month time frame that analysts say such products have to establish themselves. Telephone, satellite and cable companies are in a furious race to provide higher-speed Net connections. As a result, WaveTop’s maximum 128kb-per-second data speed could soon be eclipsed by speedier alternatives.

But for now, WaveTop occupies a coveted franchise.

Its wireless connection to the Net won’t let users surf interactively the way they can with modems or systems such as Microsoft’s WebTV. But WaveTop will allow consumers to subscribe to certain sites, which will transmit their pages, including updates, through a wireless receiver 24 hours a day.

WavePhore is not the only company trying to take advantage of unused portions of the TV airwaves to transmit computer data and other information.

Microsoft will have its own datacasting service in Windows 98. And chip maker Intel, Datacasting Corp. of Reston, Va., as well as Norpak Corp. of Ontario, Canada, are separately marketing or developing datacasting systems that offer Internet data at up to 15 times faster than the WaveTop system.

But none of these players has the nearly universal access to households that WavePhore enjoys with its PBS link.

“In terms of computer users, this technology will be great,” said Jacqueline Weiss, chief executive of PBS National Datacast Corp., a for-profit spinoff of public TV. “People will be able to go much deeper into the Internet and spend nearly half the time they now spend getting information.”