@Home opens more doors

@Home Network today announced partnerships with a new cable network and leading cable programmers at the Western Trade Show cable industry meeting in Southern California.

@Home will team up with InterMedia to create a new service called InterMedia@Home. The service will provide Internet connections in Nashville, Tennesee, beginning in 1997. It also will bring service at an unspecified later date to Greenville and Spartanburg, South Carolina.

@Home also announced other partners that will provide their information services on @Home's networks. Partners announced today are CNN, E Online MSNBC, iQVC, and The Weather Channel.

The multimedia programming will be available to @Home users in the first quarter of 1997. Yesterday, @Home announced 50 new affiliates.

The much-publicized cable modem company promises to bring the kind of speed to Net surfing that will succeed in popularizing the Net for the the public that is still offline.

@Home has been rolling out announcements in bits and pieces about both content, which will provide information services through @Home, and cable partners, which will actually deliver the high-speed connections into people's homes.

Analysts believe that the service is promising but won't have a great impact on the market until it reaches a critical mass.

@Home's announcement of affiliates yesterday included several big Net names, such as AudioNet, Channel A, Discovery Channel Online, Internet Shopping Network, and Quote.com

To date, more than 100 companies have joined the venture, in which companies develop products using @Home's proprietary technology in exchange for being included in the promising network.

@Home is being rolled out by three other cable companies: TCI, Cox, and Comcast. Comcast recently announced the launch of @Home to nearly 500,000 homes in the Baltimore area. Early next year, Comcast will roll out the service in northern New Jersey; suburban Philadelphia; suburban Detroit; Sarasota, Florida; and Orange County, California.