Two comdexes ago, Intel chairman Andy Grove said that interactive data delivery was "a war for eyeballs," between large-audience broadcast TV and the power of the Internet to give people what they wanted when they wanted it-albeit at less than broadcast quality in most cases.
Two years later, we are finally starting to close the gap between the broadcast and Internet industries. What happened? HTML happened. What has not happened is that engineers in the various industries have not stopped to consider that broadcast TV and the Internet have more in common than first perceived.
One of the problems that keeps the industry from moving ahead with "broadcast" and "narrowcast" enhanced TV content is what appears to be the vast difference in understanding-and perceived ownership-of these standards. Trade groups in the different industries have different definitions of what should be a common goal: to reach as many viewers as possible with the richest, smallest amount of digital content.
To Society of Motion Picture Engineers engineers, responsible for crafting digital studio production gear, it's just data. SMPTE managers think of auxiliary data the same way they treat SMPTE time codes and narrative audio tracks that usually do not reach their audience-and that is the problem.
To consumer-electronics designers, content becomes a minimalist "tuner" design, where the bill-of-materials cost means everything. To artists, it is a way of reaching audiences who earlier could not be reached as easily.
Computer engineers see rich OSes, where tens of megabytes of RAM and hundreds of Mips extract the richest possible personal-media experience. To content owners, all of this richness means little compared with the threat of stealing these bits of data, digitally replicating them, and possibly doing harm to their franchise through the reckless pirated waters of the Internet.
We suggest the first step is understanding that all these audiences need each other-artist, owner, distributor, professional tool makers and viewing-device hardware and software makers.
HTML is deliverable over broadcast networks, cable and satellite along with the LANs and telco dial ups for which it is normally associated. Unless the media mavens acknowledge a consumer's right to choose from many media sources, and the wisdom to recognize that most of us do get content from more than one stream, then we are headed into a new digital era of media access carriage that flies squarely in the face of the Internet's promise of universal, personal-data access extending to artistic works as well.
At a recent digital producers' event in San Francisco, hosted by the Public Broadcasting System and the DTV Express Digital TV road show, producers were eager to tell the whole story-screen, sonic and digital. Interactive elements may let artists share the many paths of creative energy they feel with a larger audience. It would be a shame if this industry lost many millions of digital eyeball audience share from infighting.
— Richard Doherty directs digital technology testing and market research at the Envisioneering Group in Seaford, N.Y. (rdoherty@envisioneering.net).
