Ms. McKiernan said AOL was committed to equal access for interactive programming services as well.
Mr. Shell, who took over after a shake-up lead by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, said the company, based in Pasadena, Calif., had a strong base of patented technology and a healthy balance sheet to build from, but needed to better run its flagship magazine, TV Guide, and interactive programming services.
For example, TiVo owners who want a second unit TiVo for another TV would have to pay at least $149 for the device plus another $12.95 a month for TiVo's interactive programming service.
A St. Louis-based cable television company, Charter Communications, said it would use Microsoft software to deliver interactive programming and Internet services to up to a million cable customers the next seven years.
The term "interactive television" is used fast and loose to include a wide variety of services such as digital video recorder services like TiVo, interactive programming guides, video-on-demand and Web-over television services like WebTV (renamed MSNTV and owned by Microsoft) and AOL TV.
Before the RCN play, Allen's ostensible strategy was to buy rundown cable systems, upgrade them to carry two-way digital cable signals and use them to provide Internet access, interactive programming and high-speed data services in geographic areas where AT&T, Time Warner, Cox Communications cox and others weren't competing for eyeballs.
TV Guide plans to make this happen by aggressively rolling out its interactive programming guide (IPG) and a suite of other services to carry its dominance of the television listings business from the printed world to the digital world.
Hybrid Internet-television services like AOLTV and MSN TV have experimented with interactive programming, but with fewer than one million users, they have not held much appeal for broadcasters.
They permit radio stations to experiment with niche, experimental and even interactive programming, usually commercial-free.
The company has licensed these "interactive programming guides" to companies like Microsoft and America Online.
Gemstar, which sells an interactive program guide to cable and satellite television services, has said it and its shareholders experienced catastrophic losses of billions of dollars in market value and other costs.
