Punching Up Wine and Foie Gras

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

When Suburban Parisians Jean-Francois and Catherine Mayaux ordered a Minitel plugged into their telephone line 18 months ago, they planned to use the toaster-size computer console as an electronic telephone directory. But they soon found the Minitel terminal equally convenient for paying bills, purchasing airline tickets and making theater reservations. Lately they have started shopping a la modem, issuing on-line orders for everything from foie gras to fine wines. "Each wine has a numeric code," explains Mayaux, as if buying a Burgundy electronically were the most natural thing in the world. "We punch it into the Minitel, and ten days later the wine arrives." The Mayauxs are not alone. Today some 4.5 million French men and women are shopping, banking, reading and, yes, flirting via Minitel, the state-run experiment in computer-to-computer communications that has grown into the world's largest home videotext network. Begun with a flourish in 1981 when the French Postes Telephones Telecommunications seeded a village in Brittany with 1,500 free terminals, the operation today boasts a network of 2 million units. Minitel's success has been so astounding that the French government is attempting to export the system to the U.S. "To find oneself at a Minitel screen able to converse freely with four or five people is new -- there is no equivalent," says Francois de Valence, editor of the glossy Minitel magazine. "It's like an electronic cafe."

Minitel is not all digitized gossip. Farmers use it to track weather reports and commodity prices. Pharmacists order drugs, investors check stock portfolios, and real estate agents post listings. Collectors sell antique furniture, rare coins and secondhand fur coats. Jacques Toubon, leader of Premier Jacques Chirac's Rassemblement pour la Republique party, invited voters last August to pose questions to him via Minitel and drew thousands of responses.

But the most popular services by far are the messageries, or message centers, where anonymous, person-to-person conversations can get very personal indeed. Someone tuning in to one of the system's dozens of dating directories earlier this month could have read the following exchange between a man named Denis and a woman calling herself Sensitive:

She: I like to see the wind blowing through a man's hair.

He: Describe yourself. Do you live in Paris?

She: I'm tall and blond with freckles and live in Paris.

He: Give me your phone number.

She: Not yet -- describe yourself.

He: Dark and tall. What do you want from me?

She: Sensitivity and strength.

He: I have both -- meet me at the fountain in the Jardin des Tuileries at 4 p.m. today.

At one franc a minute (roughly $9 an hour), electronic chats like these add up. In the first six months of 1986, Minitel users made 122 million calls, logged 13 million hours and poured $53.7 million into the hands of some 3,000 services, including newspapers, travel agencies and retail shops. One information purveyor, the daily tabloid Le Parisien Libere, fields 50,000 calls a day for its mix of news, features and message centers -- taking in $1 million a month, half of which is profit.

Eager to find new markets for its burgeoning electronics industry, the French government has set up a state agency, Intelmatique, to sell the system overseas. Minitel pilot programs are already under way in Switzerland and the Ivory Coast, while sales efforts have been launched in Belgium and Canada.

But the biggest target is the U.S., where most of the millions of personal- computer owners have yet to use their machines for telecommunications. "The American market is potentially enormous," says Jean-Louis Fourtanier, whose Paris-based CTL Telematique has formed a partnership with Baseline, a New York City data service, to provide a selection of Minitel offerings in the U.S. Earlier this month, Baseline hooked up a 64-channel telephone link to France that for $10 an hour will permit stateside subscribers to tap into news reports from Liberation and feature stories from the magazine L'Evenement du Jeudi. Says Fourtanier: "Once operations begin, they could start rolling like a snowball."

In the U.S., however, Minitel will face problems considerably different from those in France, where a state-owned monopoly set standards, handled billing and gave away thousands of free terminals to get the ball rolling. For one thing, American subscribers will initially see on their screens stories, lists and instructions written only in French (English text will be provided later). Then, too, they will have to pay $650 for a Minitel terminal or rent one for $35 a month. For those subscribers who already own personal computers, Baseline will provide the necessary software for the IBM PC (free) and the Macintosh ($50). But more than a million of the PC owners already subscribe to successful American videotext operations like CompuServe and the Source, which offer a wide variety of services -- and in English.

Several U.S. corporate consortiums, including one jointly owned by AT&T, Chemical Bank, BankAmerica and Time Inc., are also exploring the videotext field. Two other efforts have ended in failure: last spring the Times Mirror and Knight-Ridder newspaper chains shut down a pair of failing videotext projects, for a combined loss of more than $80 million. "The odds are against Minitel," says James Holly, director of Times Mirror's electronic information services. "U.S. consumers are already overwhelmed by choices. Minitel would only add to the clutter." It appears that Americans are not about to join the Mayaux family anytime soon.

With reporting by Thomas McCarroll/New York and Adam Zagorin/Paris