The European Community’s R&D Project, “Application Pilot for People with Special Needs” was started in 1989. The project was the first experiment of two-way video-commnications on Cable Television (CATV) networks with signaling and voice also carried in-band on downstream and upstream channels. The results from the four sites (one in Germany and three in Finland) showed that residential users could use and wanted video-communication. The evaluation, after operating in Frankfurt am Main for more than two years, showed that two-way video-communication based services for eldery people are well accepted and have made a postive major impact on the lives of the 15 people that participated in that trial. The interface to conrtol cable TV network had worked satisfactorily and the redesigned remote control unit was very acceptable to users. A videophone within a TV set was acceptable both from lighting, camera and microphone settings point of view as well as from an economic concept of a “set-top”. The service provider organization is now using video-communication based support services to reduce costs and to increase the efficiency of the services currently provided. The partners in APPSN were: SEL Alcatel AG, Nassauische Heimst tte, Bosch, empirica, PTT Nederlands, CSELT, VTT (Technical Research Centre of Finland), Swedish Telecom, CET/CTT (Portugal Telecom), FMH (Technical University of Lisbon), London HCI Centre.