Gilberte Houbart	Television has been since its inception a combination of technology, culture, content and eventually politics. Online television redefines each of these components. Viewpoints on Demand shows how the main components may evolve.

 

Presented at Imagina in 1997, international conference on animation and media technology. Technology: the Digital Iceberg Television is switching from a purely analog broadcast medium to a digital medium through the ground and through the air. A great misconsception about "new" media is the amalgam between digital media, multimedia and interactive media. The previous great misconsception was that the future would be high resolution TV. Digital media embraces not only multimedia and interactive media but a wide range of applications like picking a resolution on the fly. What made the headlines is the tip of the digital iceberg. The 90's have seen a focus on interaction and multimedia (combining text, audio, graphics, video). However the first "killer app" of the Internet was email, a text only application with little interactivity. Large communities have developed around "newsgroups" and America Online chat rooms, all mostly text based. Smart voice mail systems or digital radio will focus only on audio. There will be a large range of applications, some of them requiring a combination of media and high interactivity, others will imply little bandwidth and little intervention from users but intensive computation. What about paying attention to low interactivity high computation applications? Viewpoints on Demand is one answer among others: the viewer only needs to set a few parameters to tailor the content and generate a video. Content Technology presents traditional content in new ways and distributes it more efficiently, eventually creating new genres and new formats: the Renaissance didn't have the equivalent of today's mail order catalogs, Television and Radio created the notion of "programs": you watch a certain show at a certain time. With content on demand this is not true anymore: time shifting is the first obvious service online TV can provide but there is more to come with original content using purely video (not multimedia). Viewpoints on Demand is one incarnation of such new genres, a genre where the author stores the video interviews s/he produces in a database the viewer dials in using "content knobs" (modern additions to the old volume knobs). Culture The Internet and the Web are to the 90's what Rock'n Roll was to the previous decades. Individuals create home pages, collect information and publish their message to the world the same way bands started to play in their garage and obscure clubs. This is why creativity and invention is most likely to take place there and not over a centralized one-way broadcast medium. What the old broadcast system - combined with the phone networks - might provide is an infrastructure to for instance access higher bandwidth. This is where the distinction between technology and culture is crucial. Culture and content are intimately linked. Technology is only there to make it happen. Politics The rapid development of the Web raises new issues from privacy to copyright to giving children access to unfiltered information. They will clearly play an important role in shaping the future of "Internet television". The auctionning of frequency by the FCC is a clear example of government policies trying to shape the medium.   Home | Online TV | Content | Media Lab | Startups | Design | ------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1997 - Gilberte Houbart