Dallas-based Belo Corp. is abandoning the technology that links newspapers and broadcasts to the Internet because too few people used it, the company said last week.
The technology included bar codes that ran with stories in The Dallas Morning News, several national magazines and two other Belo newspapers, and special optical readers that could be plugged into a personal computer.
The reader, known as a CueCat, scans the codes and sends a user’s computer to a specific Internet address with additional information. At least 200,000 CueCats were sent to Morning News readers for free last year, and others were distributed at Radio Shack outlets nationwide.
Belo declined to say how many people were using the technology, which was promoted in its newspapers. But the number of users did not “meet internal benchmarks,” said Belo senior vice president Skip Cass.
Belo invested about $37.5 million in Dallas-based Digital Convergence Corp., which developed the technology. Belo finished writing off that investment this year.
“Belo has been a great partner with us,” said Peter A. Eschbach, vice president for corporate communications at Digital Convergence. “I’m confident–ultimately, down the road–you’ll still see cues in newspapers. I think the convergence between online media and traditional print is inevitable. It’s going to happen.”
The Digital Convergence technology gave readers and viewers access to supplementary online material, as well as to enhanced ads.
Cass said that instead of using the cues, readers and viewers preferred to go to the newspapers’ and other Web sites to search for what they wanted.
The cues debuted in the Morning News on Oct. 1, 2000. The Providence Journal, in Providence, R.I., and The Press-Enterprise, in Riverside, Calif., added the cues later.
Belo initially had been optimistic about the technology’s prospects and said consumer focus groups displayed eagerness to use the cues.
However, the cues received generally negative reviews.
“Just because technology makes something possible, that doesn’t automatically mean it’s beneficial or convenient for people to use,” wrote Walter S. Mossberg, an influential technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal.
Analysts contacted Wednesday said the CueCat was conceptually flawed. Most people don’t read a newspaper next to their computers, they said.
The CueCat “implied a set of behaviors that in sum total were unreasonable for the consumer,” said one of the analysts, Rob Enderle of Giga Information Group in Santa Clara, Calif.
Cass said, “While we go into any project like this with the expectation of success, there is a realization that risk is involved and not every project has a 100 percent success rate.”
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Like many companies born in the recent Internet euphoria, privately held Digital Convergence has struggled to stay afloat. Other partners have stopped using the technology as well. NBC-TV experimented with broadcast cues during the summer.