- Email: [email protected]
Changing channels: the prospects for television in a digital world
Book reviews / Futures 33 (2001) 443–448
445
already exists: those e-mails that arrive from anonymous remailers offering holidays, instant wealth, porn or slimming aids. Intelligent agents gather statistics on your online behaviour. They can be used to tailor-make junk-mailshots for your personal profile. Metabrowsers like Quickbrowse (http://www.quickbrowse.com) already offer to tailor the news to your interests, creating a personalised interface between you and the web’s major news sources. This brings us to tricky domains for future policy and planning. Who owns my data? If, as I believe, the age of privacy is over, nonetheless we live in the age of intellectual property. If someone wants my data, shouldn’t they purchase it from me? Alternatively, if the private individual is under siege, why not private property? And finally, we have always presumed that in the relationships between humans and machines, it should be the humans that dominate. But as our devices achieve greater and greater levels of integration into our ordinary lives, and as communication, which I take to be the fundamental human relation, is now increasingly mediated by technology, should we not prepare for a more equitable dialogue? In the last years of the 20th century, the greatest single new political movement was the emergence of environmental politics. Now we have learned to respect the rights of other organic species, is it not time to begin to recognise and respect the rights as well as the duties of the machinic phylum? Sean Cubitt Department of Screen and Media Studies, The University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand E-mail address: [email protected] References [1] Goldberg K, editor. The robot in the garden: telerobotics and telepistemology in the age of the internet. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, 2000. [2] Shields R, editor. Cultures of internet: virtual spaces, real histories, living bodies. London: Sage, 1996. [3] Berners-Lee T, Fischetti M. Weaving the web. London: Orion, 1999. PII: S 0 0 1 6 - 3 2 8 7 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 8 6 - 0
Changing channels: the prospects for television in a digital world Jeanette Steemers, (Ed.); University of Luton Press, Luton, 1998, pp. 156, Price £29.95 When the Financial Times starts using Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as a spokesman to promote their “revolutionary” new web service you know the word “revolution” doesn’t mean the same thing as it used to. Yet the term has arguably also been robbed of much of its significance by 30 years of predictions from apparently more * Tel.: +353-1-704-8355; fax: 353-1-704-5447.
446
Book reviews / Futures 33 (2001) 443–448
disinterested sources—from Daniel Bell onwards—that the onset of new technologies, especially in the field of information and communication, is revolutionising or will revolutionise the way we live. Despite these assertions, any survey of western society, where such technology has taken the deepest root, would find a civilization largely untouched by upheaval or convulsion. Notwithstanding this, both broadcasters and politicians have, for the past five years, singled out digital television from the complex of new ICTs as promising to finally bring us into a new era, an (wait for it) “information age”. This is perhaps not unreasonable given television’s manifest significance both as a consumer technology and a cultural form over the past half-century. Changing channels, then, despite its modest size—six essays over 140-odd pages—sets itself the ambitious task of critically engaging with and assessing such predictions. The difficulty it faces in doing so is that faced by any attempt to capture new media trends: the speed with which the trends move. Although this book was published in 1998, much of what the authors assumed to be just around the corner has still to really make an impact— for most people there’s little sense that digital television is here (although it is, as ONDigital and Sky digital testify). This perhaps confirms the overwhelming message of the papers in the book—that digital television means more of the same. The essays within the book overwhelmingly focus on the policy issues raised by digital television at national and supranational level: what are the economics of new media? What are the implications for regulation? What’s the future of public service broadcasting? By contrast, the cultural impact of digital television is scarcely considered, reflecting the general view of the contributors that little content innovation is likely to come about as a result of the shift from analogue. Only Rod Allen’s “This is not television . . .” paper addresses this question, suggesting that there will be several layers of content, most of which will be (in some cases literally) identical to current programming. Beyond this he points to the advent of material which wouldn’t traditionally be considered content at all but rather as services—home shopping, banking, etc. In this respect Allen establishes some interesting prerequisites for the success of digiTV services, suggesting that this will be determined by the extent to which they offer customers convenience/time-saving at a premium (i.e. the convenience of seeing a programme on demand or of seeing it before most other viewers). Intriguingly he suggests that consumers are unwilling to pay a premium simply for the improved sound and video quality promised by digiTV, citing as evidence the ongoing success of VHS in the face of laser disks. (This point remains to be proven, however—elsewhere he points to the success of CDs—convincing people to buy their album collection all over again—as being due to their durability, lightness and ease of storage. Only reluctantly does he concede that improved sound quality might be an issue. Yet the success of DVD, marketed primarily on the strength of the clarity of picture and sound, seems to undermine this argument.) Returning to the book’s central political economy focus, the key arguments revolve around several fairly gloomy predictions. First among these is the question of who will dominate the digital television universe. Here the answer is straightforward: the first three papers uniformly assert that the economics of digital television should ensure that only the largest media players will survive in a digital broadcast market.
Book reviews / Futures 33 (2001) 443–448
447
Niall Duffy et al. argue in Chapter 2 that potential digiTV operators are unlikely to get involved in the market unless they have some control or linkage with content to allow them to cover investment costs. Thus “vertical linkages between content providers, publishers and distribution players may be essential for new investment in digital distribution.” Other authors concur with this Schumpeterian logic. Dismissing the “revolutionary” potential of digiTV in terms of making television more accessible to consumers and producers, Rod Allen’s thought-provoking paper anticipates that new media will depend on old media content, citing extant subscription channels like UK Gold. Allen argues that attractive programming is neither cheap to make nor does the skill to do so lie in everyone’s hands. As such, he agrees that power in new media will lie with strong content creators in old media. Thus digiTV seems likely to consolidate existing market positions. This point is reinforced by a discussion of the market for conditional access systems, those settop boxes essential for decoding digital signals. Peter Humphreys and Matthias Lang note that this market is likely to be dominated by whoever gets in first, conferring potential gate-keeping powers (i.e. over what does/doesn’t get shown) on the system owner (who will most likely be, or be linked to, a well-established consumer electronics giant). This conclusion has obvious implications for pluralism in broadcasting which raises the secondary major theme of the book—the regulatory implications of digiTV. This question would have to be examined anyway given that the convergence of the broadcasting and telecommunications industries brought about by digitisation is already a reality. In this context there’s clearly a need to think about the appropriateness of regulatory models for digital television—should it be based on the regulatory model associated with telecoms—promoting universal access to services—or broadcasting’s content regulation-oriented paradigm. In this respect, however, the book’s most interesting discussion on regulation— Thomas Gibbons’ survey of the British experience hitherto—concludes that digiTV regulation has so far failed entirely to ask and answer some of these basic questions. Gibbons suggests that much recent regulatory activity has been based on unexamined assumptions or unstated principles—suggesting for example that the scarcity argument long advanced to justify public ownership of spectrum space may be inappropriate in a context where digiTV creates an abundance of channels. Furthermore, noting the situation in the UK where a proliferation of regulatory/official bodies have overlapping responsibility for the same broadcast industries, he concludes that this overlap is likely to persist, precisely because the opportunity to reflect on the goals of regulation offered by the need to regulate digiTV was not taken. This same point is reflected in the books final paper where David Hancock (honourably) fails to encapsulate EU digital television policy—due mainly to the fact that at present EU digital policy is stretched across too many directorates (five at present) for policy coherence to be very likely. The final major theme of the book is raised by precisely this absence of national and supranational policy coherence. Editor Janette Steemers considers the threat posed to public service broadcasting by the promise of a plethora of specialist subscription channels in a digital age. She rehearses the point about the potential for monopoly power in the digiTV market by those who dominate distribution and con-
448
Book reviews / Futures 33 (2001) 443–448
sumer access through set-top boxes, subscriber management systems and electronic programme guides: “If control of distribution and access is combined with control of significant amounts of programming material . . . the emergence of alternative distribution systems can be restricted, as control of the distribution system underpins the ability to acquire premium programming in the first place and maintain a dominant position.” In this context, she suggests that there is a risk that public service broadcasters may become just one content provider among many battling for access to their audience via other companies distribution system. Steemers develops this point noting that since the introduction of commercial broadcasting on a wide scale in the 1980s (and thus a shift to a multi-channel viewing environment), there has been an implicit tendency to identify the role of public service broadcasting as filling the programming gaps left by the commercial channels. As this, by definition, places public service broadcasters in a niche market, the legitimacy of their state support is undermined. As Steemers makes clear, public service broadcasters thus face an almost impossible balancing act: “to survive they need to be both different and to cater for a wide range of interests including minority interests; yet they must still retain the ability to provide mainstream popular entertainment.” While pointing out that audiences have thus far proved reluctant to take out subscriptions for anything other than movie and sports channels, she acknowledges the legitimacy of questioning the need for public service broadcasting if consumers could potentially find the kind of variety formerly associated with a single state broadcaster from a smorgasbord of specialist channels. In this context, then, she argues that future discussion around public service broadcasting should be recast around an examination of public provision and public service within the audio-visual media as a whole: “In the light of both the changing communications landscape and changes in society there is a need to ascertain what sort of publicly owned organisations and content are best suited to the fulfilment of public communication and cultural goals.” As a primer on the wide range of policy issues raised by the advent of digital television, Changing channels does an admirable job. Yet as most scholars of communications policy in general will doubtless notice, the issues raised by digital television are strikingly familiar, relating to a range of old and new media alike—concentration of ownership, pluralism and gate-keeping. Plus c¸a change . . .. As Rod Allen notes at the close of his paper: “Life in the digital world won’t really be very different from life in the analogue world after all; some things (like setting your VCR and doing the weekly supermarket run) might be a little easier, and some things (like choosing what you want to watch on television tonight) might just be the tiniest bit harder.” Roddy Flynn* Department of Film and Television Studies, School of Communications, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland E-mail address: [email protected] PII: S 0 0 1 6 - 3 2 8 7 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 8 7 - 2
445
already exists: those e-mails that arrive from anonymous remailers offering holidays, instant wealth, porn or slimming aids. Intelligent agents gather statistics on your online behaviour. They can be used to tailor-make junk-mailshots for your personal profile. Metabrowsers like Quickbrowse (http://www.quickbrowse.com) already offer to tailor the news to your interests, creating a personalised interface between you and the web’s major news sources. This brings us to tricky domains for future policy and planning. Who owns my data? If, as I believe, the age of privacy is over, nonetheless we live in the age of intellectual property. If someone wants my data, shouldn’t they purchase it from me? Alternatively, if the private individual is under siege, why not private property? And finally, we have always presumed that in the relationships between humans and machines, it should be the humans that dominate. But as our devices achieve greater and greater levels of integration into our ordinary lives, and as communication, which I take to be the fundamental human relation, is now increasingly mediated by technology, should we not prepare for a more equitable dialogue? In the last years of the 20th century, the greatest single new political movement was the emergence of environmental politics. Now we have learned to respect the rights of other organic species, is it not time to begin to recognise and respect the rights as well as the duties of the machinic phylum? Sean Cubitt Department of Screen and Media Studies, The University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand E-mail address: [email protected] References [1] Goldberg K, editor. The robot in the garden: telerobotics and telepistemology in the age of the internet. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, 2000. [2] Shields R, editor. Cultures of internet: virtual spaces, real histories, living bodies. London: Sage, 1996. [3] Berners-Lee T, Fischetti M. Weaving the web. London: Orion, 1999. PII: S 0 0 1 6 - 3 2 8 7 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 8 6 - 0
Changing channels: the prospects for television in a digital world Jeanette Steemers, (Ed.); University of Luton Press, Luton, 1998, pp. 156, Price £29.95 When the Financial Times starts using Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as a spokesman to promote their “revolutionary” new web service you know the word “revolution” doesn’t mean the same thing as it used to. Yet the term has arguably also been robbed of much of its significance by 30 years of predictions from apparently more * Tel.: +353-1-704-8355; fax: 353-1-704-5447.
446
Book reviews / Futures 33 (2001) 443–448
disinterested sources—from Daniel Bell onwards—that the onset of new technologies, especially in the field of information and communication, is revolutionising or will revolutionise the way we live. Despite these assertions, any survey of western society, where such technology has taken the deepest root, would find a civilization largely untouched by upheaval or convulsion. Notwithstanding this, both broadcasters and politicians have, for the past five years, singled out digital television from the complex of new ICTs as promising to finally bring us into a new era, an (wait for it) “information age”. This is perhaps not unreasonable given television’s manifest significance both as a consumer technology and a cultural form over the past half-century. Changing channels, then, despite its modest size—six essays over 140-odd pages—sets itself the ambitious task of critically engaging with and assessing such predictions. The difficulty it faces in doing so is that faced by any attempt to capture new media trends: the speed with which the trends move. Although this book was published in 1998, much of what the authors assumed to be just around the corner has still to really make an impact— for most people there’s little sense that digital television is here (although it is, as ONDigital and Sky digital testify). This perhaps confirms the overwhelming message of the papers in the book—that digital television means more of the same. The essays within the book overwhelmingly focus on the policy issues raised by digital television at national and supranational level: what are the economics of new media? What are the implications for regulation? What’s the future of public service broadcasting? By contrast, the cultural impact of digital television is scarcely considered, reflecting the general view of the contributors that little content innovation is likely to come about as a result of the shift from analogue. Only Rod Allen’s “This is not television . . .” paper addresses this question, suggesting that there will be several layers of content, most of which will be (in some cases literally) identical to current programming. Beyond this he points to the advent of material which wouldn’t traditionally be considered content at all but rather as services—home shopping, banking, etc. In this respect Allen establishes some interesting prerequisites for the success of digiTV services, suggesting that this will be determined by the extent to which they offer customers convenience/time-saving at a premium (i.e. the convenience of seeing a programme on demand or of seeing it before most other viewers). Intriguingly he suggests that consumers are unwilling to pay a premium simply for the improved sound and video quality promised by digiTV, citing as evidence the ongoing success of VHS in the face of laser disks. (This point remains to be proven, however—elsewhere he points to the success of CDs—convincing people to buy their album collection all over again—as being due to their durability, lightness and ease of storage. Only reluctantly does he concede that improved sound quality might be an issue. Yet the success of DVD, marketed primarily on the strength of the clarity of picture and sound, seems to undermine this argument.) Returning to the book’s central political economy focus, the key arguments revolve around several fairly gloomy predictions. First among these is the question of who will dominate the digital television universe. Here the answer is straightforward: the first three papers uniformly assert that the economics of digital television should ensure that only the largest media players will survive in a digital broadcast market.
Book reviews / Futures 33 (2001) 443–448
447
Niall Duffy et al. argue in Chapter 2 that potential digiTV operators are unlikely to get involved in the market unless they have some control or linkage with content to allow them to cover investment costs. Thus “vertical linkages between content providers, publishers and distribution players may be essential for new investment in digital distribution.” Other authors concur with this Schumpeterian logic. Dismissing the “revolutionary” potential of digiTV in terms of making television more accessible to consumers and producers, Rod Allen’s thought-provoking paper anticipates that new media will depend on old media content, citing extant subscription channels like UK Gold. Allen argues that attractive programming is neither cheap to make nor does the skill to do so lie in everyone’s hands. As such, he agrees that power in new media will lie with strong content creators in old media. Thus digiTV seems likely to consolidate existing market positions. This point is reinforced by a discussion of the market for conditional access systems, those settop boxes essential for decoding digital signals. Peter Humphreys and Matthias Lang note that this market is likely to be dominated by whoever gets in first, conferring potential gate-keeping powers (i.e. over what does/doesn’t get shown) on the system owner (who will most likely be, or be linked to, a well-established consumer electronics giant). This conclusion has obvious implications for pluralism in broadcasting which raises the secondary major theme of the book—the regulatory implications of digiTV. This question would have to be examined anyway given that the convergence of the broadcasting and telecommunications industries brought about by digitisation is already a reality. In this context there’s clearly a need to think about the appropriateness of regulatory models for digital television—should it be based on the regulatory model associated with telecoms—promoting universal access to services—or broadcasting’s content regulation-oriented paradigm. In this respect, however, the book’s most interesting discussion on regulation— Thomas Gibbons’ survey of the British experience hitherto—concludes that digiTV regulation has so far failed entirely to ask and answer some of these basic questions. Gibbons suggests that much recent regulatory activity has been based on unexamined assumptions or unstated principles—suggesting for example that the scarcity argument long advanced to justify public ownership of spectrum space may be inappropriate in a context where digiTV creates an abundance of channels. Furthermore, noting the situation in the UK where a proliferation of regulatory/official bodies have overlapping responsibility for the same broadcast industries, he concludes that this overlap is likely to persist, precisely because the opportunity to reflect on the goals of regulation offered by the need to regulate digiTV was not taken. This same point is reflected in the books final paper where David Hancock (honourably) fails to encapsulate EU digital television policy—due mainly to the fact that at present EU digital policy is stretched across too many directorates (five at present) for policy coherence to be very likely. The final major theme of the book is raised by precisely this absence of national and supranational policy coherence. Editor Janette Steemers considers the threat posed to public service broadcasting by the promise of a plethora of specialist subscription channels in a digital age. She rehearses the point about the potential for monopoly power in the digiTV market by those who dominate distribution and con-
448
Book reviews / Futures 33 (2001) 443–448
sumer access through set-top boxes, subscriber management systems and electronic programme guides: “If control of distribution and access is combined with control of significant amounts of programming material . . . the emergence of alternative distribution systems can be restricted, as control of the distribution system underpins the ability to acquire premium programming in the first place and maintain a dominant position.” In this context, she suggests that there is a risk that public service broadcasters may become just one content provider among many battling for access to their audience via other companies distribution system. Steemers develops this point noting that since the introduction of commercial broadcasting on a wide scale in the 1980s (and thus a shift to a multi-channel viewing environment), there has been an implicit tendency to identify the role of public service broadcasting as filling the programming gaps left by the commercial channels. As this, by definition, places public service broadcasters in a niche market, the legitimacy of their state support is undermined. As Steemers makes clear, public service broadcasters thus face an almost impossible balancing act: “to survive they need to be both different and to cater for a wide range of interests including minority interests; yet they must still retain the ability to provide mainstream popular entertainment.” While pointing out that audiences have thus far proved reluctant to take out subscriptions for anything other than movie and sports channels, she acknowledges the legitimacy of questioning the need for public service broadcasting if consumers could potentially find the kind of variety formerly associated with a single state broadcaster from a smorgasbord of specialist channels. In this context, then, she argues that future discussion around public service broadcasting should be recast around an examination of public provision and public service within the audio-visual media as a whole: “In the light of both the changing communications landscape and changes in society there is a need to ascertain what sort of publicly owned organisations and content are best suited to the fulfilment of public communication and cultural goals.” As a primer on the wide range of policy issues raised by the advent of digital television, Changing channels does an admirable job. Yet as most scholars of communications policy in general will doubtless notice, the issues raised by digital television are strikingly familiar, relating to a range of old and new media alike—concentration of ownership, pluralism and gate-keeping. Plus c¸a change . . .. As Rod Allen notes at the close of his paper: “Life in the digital world won’t really be very different from life in the analogue world after all; some things (like setting your VCR and doing the weekly supermarket run) might be a little easier, and some things (like choosing what you want to watch on television tonight) might just be the tiniest bit harder.” Roddy Flynn* Department of Film and Television Studies, School of Communications, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland E-mail address: [email protected] PII: S 0 0 1 6 - 3 2 8 7 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 8 7 - 2