Telerate Readies Launch Of 'Matrix'; New Broadcast Service Features Composite Paging

Telerate Systems, Inc. is about to launch its second-generation PC- based satellite product. Called "Matrix," the service is the first to be designed from scratch for Telerate by the company's New Orleans- based Compu Trac unit, which it acquired almost three years ago (MTR, October 1985).

The most striking difference between Matrix and its predecessor Broadcast Service is its new support of composite paging. Matrix allows the user to define as many as ten composite pages, each with up to 32 windows derived from other pages. The user can specify background, foreground, and highlight colors for each window on each page, and can assign the ten most frequently viewed pages to function keys.

Telerate officials bristle at the suggestion that Matrix is their response to the Reuter SDS2 service, which also supports composite paging (although on a dedicated terminal rather than a PC). Nonetheless, Matrix could accomplish many of the same market segmentation goals by allowing Telerate to serve smaller and more specialized customers while retaining per-screen profits comparable to its flagship service. Up to 16 terminals can be driven by a single broadcast feed.

Lighting the path for the Matrix roll-out will be Telerate's highly-touted mortgage-backed securities broker page from MKI Securities. The recently-introduced MKI page is modeled after Cantor Fitzgerald's page eight for Treasury prices, and Telerate says it's already getting 4-5 hits per day.

Composite paging aside, Matrix still represents an upgrade to the existing Broadcast Service. The number of pages available for local caching has almost doubled to 198. The number of pages in the broadcast loop has increased from about 500 to about 850. But because the service's bandwidth has jumped from 4800 to 9600 bits/ second, the refresh loop cycle has dropped from 25 to 15 minutes.

Outside New York, the Matrix feed will be delivered via small-dish Contel ASC (Equatorial) satellite. In New York it will be delivered chiefly via FM sideband, becoming the third Telerate service to be so distributed. Where necessary, it will be delivered over local loops. Pricing hasn't been announced.

Until Matrix, Compu Trac had stayed largely outside the mainstream of Telerate's business, contenting itself with marketing its own futures analytic products and providing enhancements to Telerate's Teletrac service, which was built around Compu Trac's pre-existing Tradeplan software. With Matrix, however, Compu Trac's team had to build from the ground up.

For the most part, the yankees stayed up north. "We have a pretty free hand in designing the products in terms of technically how they're implemented," says Archie Grefer, the six-year Compu Trac veteran who managed Matrix product development for the past year. "The page-oriented nature of the data is probably a little bit easier to handle than some of the numeric data we've handled in the past."

The principal technical achievement of Matrix, Grefer says, is the creation of composite paging capability within the standard PC architecture. "All the information you put up on the screen is done through our own video routines, and those are pretty speedy in terms of how they can do things," he says, "It's standard EGA stuff, too."