0003209613@MCIMAIL.COM (Sandy Kyrish) (02/19/91)
Barry Shein talks about the promised advantages of fiber to the home via telcos... > The increased bandwidth should allow services we all have been hearing > about for years, two-way television (e.g. Qube), view-on-demand > programming (no more running down to the video store), etc. > > View-on-demand alone should sprout entirely new industries with small > operators providing all sorts of special interest things to watch... > > Such new information resources seem to beg computer intervention, > point and click database interfaces to find out what to demand we > view. Accessing the indices, searching by subject, etc. My first submission to this board is unfortunately a pessimistic one. It's difficult to believe that the home of the future will really be as prointellectual or proactive as all that. You have to make a distinction between the people like us who use our homes as an extension of our work, and who actually enjoy seeking information in our spare time, and the people who use their homes as a place of relaxation and escape from technological demands. First: Cable TV provides an extremely instructional lesson about believing too much in the rhetoric of the normative future. In the 1960s and 1970s, the familiar refrain was that cable would save our cities, educate the masses, etc. The FCC and related parties bought the vision, opened up the market, and then shook their heads years later when cable only turned out to be an extension of current entertainment offerings, and another monopoly/oligopoly business. What happened? A couple of things. First, the companies actually in the cable business had product agendas, not social agendas. (Well, social agendas during the franchising process.) There's no incentive for them to create this blissful futureworld if Bewitched reruns are equally (or more) profitable. Second, the people making the prointellectual predictions were not ultimately the people who had any say in how the systems were administered. Ironically, their rhetoric paved the way for the MSOs, but then they were not listened to. Now we think of the cable prophecies as naive and embarrassing. But what's different about fiber? Please don't say the technology is better. If Qube had really been an in-demand idea, people would have bought it regardless of its inefficiencies. If people want to actively information-seek, they do it, regardless of the obstacles. Why do you think we've been "hearing about these services for years"? Because they still don't have a market! So far, there has never been a clearly articulated demand for more information in the home. Again, that's different from the folks who are seeking information for work but at home. An elitist, down with the proles statement? Noooo. But a recognition that the only people likely to pay for information are those with a clear return on investment (look at how popular Dialog, Lexis, etc. are), or with money to burn (you think the family of four with $30K/yr will be able to blithely afford Johnny's spending $15 on-line to research Copernicus? No. They will send him to the public library.). And for specialized entertainment, video on demand will have to be cheaper than the $2 at the video rental store, or at least not inordinately more expensive; otherwise you're back to the "money to burn" crowd. And so far the numbers show that $2 may not be achievable. Bottom line is, be careful of rhetoric that can actually lead to big disappointment. Todd Gitlin says, "Technology opens doors, and oligopoly marches right behind, slamming them." If we want these prointellectual services, we are going to have to aggressively push for them; by presenting these services as foreordained and inevitable, we will forget to push....and we won't get them.