PIRELLI Messages from 'video booths’

Press, 8 June 1989, Page 14

PIRELLI

Messages from 'video booths’

By

DAVID HARRIS

NZPA-Reuter New York For the price of a lunch, Americans can buy a new way of keeping in touch — through messages recorded in “video booths.”

The booths, a 1980 s version of 1950 s black-and-white photo booths, allow customers to send personal messages on video tapes, such as proposing marriage, dumping the loved one, sending a birthday greeting, or even supplementing a last testament.

“It isn’t a gimmick, it isn’t a fad,” said Mr Bruce Goldstein, aged 41, a millionaire property developer and president of Minneapolis-based Short Takes, Inc, which has begun to market the booths. “I see it as an application of existing technology that will allow people to communicate in a way they want to communicate.”

He plans to place the booths not only in obvious locations, such as shopping malls and tourist attractions, but also where people are often separated from loved ones — military bases, college campuses, hospital wards and even prisons.

Mr Goldstein doesn’t claim the idea for the booth as his own. He said he saw it described in a magazine article by a Californian inventor last year.

It caught his eye, because he had spent several hours of a Florida vacation scrambling to find a video store which would allow him to make a recorded greeting for a Texas friend’s fortieth birthday party. He sent the cassette by overnight courier.

“We did it off-the-cuff,” Mr Goldstein said at New York’s South Street Seaport, a popular tourist attraction where two of the booths are doing brisk business. “It ended up being the hit of the party.” Mr Goldstein said he contacted the inventor, Harmon Cogert, who was sceptical that a property developer was the right man to market and promote his brainchild. “He kept saying ’You’re a real estate developer. What does that have to do with video?’ ” Now, 14 months later, Cogert is vice-president of research and development at Short Takes, and Mr Goldstein, who said his talent has always been

for marketing, hopes to do between SUS 3 million and SUS 4 million ($5 million to $6.7 million) of business this year. He estimates the company can do SUS2S million ($42 million) annually within five years.

The booths are simple to work. A customer puts SUSB into a slot on the booth’s exterior and receives a standard V.H.S. videotape cassette along with a mailing envelope. To prevent the use of store-bought cassettes, the tapes have a patented electronic fingerprint. The video recorder will

begin to record only after it recognises the special fingerprint. The customer pushes a button and his recording starts. New York versions have a colour photo of the city’s skyline in the background.

Within the next few months, a so-called “chroma-key” background will be installed which works in the same way that electronic weather maps are projected behind weathermen on television. Customers will then be able to choose from a variety of moving backdrops, such as a tour of

the South Street Seaport or a panorama of a particular city. “It’s a very good concept,” said one New Yorker who was recording messages with his wife to give as gifts on Father’s Day, an informal American holiday in June.

The booths, manufactured at the Short Takes plant in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, near Minneapolis, sell for SUSI4,OOO to SUSI6,OOO ($23,000 to $27,000) each. Short Takes supplies the tape cassettes at “less than $3” and the retailer sets his own price. Gold-

stein estimates that a booth selling about 15 tapes a day will pay for itself in less than two years. A Video Letters booth is being marketed for hotels, airports and shopping malls. A technically identical booth known as Short Takes, sporting snazzier images of Hollywood on its black exterior, is aimed at bars, restaurants and amusement parks. About 20 booths are now in place in Minnesota and New York, and about six will be available in the Los Angeles area in the next few weeks.