One Minute Magazine

According to a recent Newsbytes article that a friend found floating around at Apple, KOFY-TV, channel 20 in the San Francisco area, will be broadcasting a one-minute-long "magazine" early in the morning of 1 October. The magazine won’t be a typical TV magazine show, but will be a minute-long montage of still frames of text and pictures, generated on a Macintosh.

The still images of the Future Media StillFrame Edition will go by on the screen far too quickly to be viewed at full speed, but viewers who videotape the broadcast (which will be some time between 1:56 and 2:00 am) can view the magazine frame by frame later on (or the next morning, for those who like to be asleep at 2 am). You’ll need a good TV and a four-head VCR to get a high enough image quality to read the text.

The magazine is being generated by scanning images from H-8 video cameras into the Macintosh, and then laying them into screen-sized pages of text and pictures using page layout software. The text will be no smaller than 24 point, so it can be read from the television image.

I doubt that this will become a popular publishing medium, because it requires some effort from the reader/viewer/user beyond sitting and absorbing. No doubt this initial broadcast will get lots of viewers… but once the novelty wears off, people aren’t likely to bother.

KOFY-TV — 415/821-2020
Future Media — 415/548-0341

Information from:
Newsbytes article 19-Jul-91