Introduction
While Video-On-Demand is going to be introduced in mid 1996 in Hong Kong, which
marks the first deployment of
Information Infrastructure
in Hong Kong, in the other part of the world, France, has the development of a
national
videotex
system
Minitel
, for more than 10 years.
Minitel
was initially
used as an electronic telephone directory, but now offewrs more than 20,000
different services, ranging from home banking to specialized research
databases.
Minitel
is currently used by over 40% (about 6.4 million) of
France's population, generates more than $1 billion each year, and has created
10,000 jobs. You may wonder what kind of system
Minitel
is and what made it such a success, in this passage, we are going to discuss
the following areas:
Background