Digital Media CyberTrends
Professor
John M. McCann
Fuqua School of Business
Duke University
Additions to this document since March 25, 1997 are preceded with the 
icon.
This document contains a list of trends I have
identified based upon quotes from managers, professionals, consultants,
journalists, futurists, and educators who study media, particularly mass
media, and how it's new nature in the digital age. Click on a topic to
jump to the corresponding section of the document.
- "In May, 1994 ... I said: From where we stand
today, we can't be sure that ad-supported programming will have a future in
the world being created. ... Our research has given us a clearer picture of
what we're up against, as we work to ensure the future of
-advertising-supported programming. For example, one study ... paints a
disturbing picture for advertisers and the networks about the extent to
which new media are penetrating American households. ... Nearly a third have
home computers, 7% subscribe to on-line services. In fact, the average
household with a PC spends almost nine hours a week on the computer for
non-business purposes. ... 'all of this means less time for television. ...
the advertising business may be heading for trouble -- or it may be heading
for a new age of glory. Believe it or not, the direction, up or down, is in
our hands. Our efforts so far indicate that the future of advertising is on
its way up."
Source: Edwin L. Artzt (CEO of Procter & Gamble), "Artzt
Enthusiastic About CASIE Gains," Advertising Age, March 13, 1995, p.
S-24
- "Our most important ad medium, television, is about
to change big-time, and from where we stand today, we can't be sure that
advertising supported TV programming will have a future in the world being
created".
Source: Edwin L. Artzt (CEO of Procter & Gamble), "Digitizing
Desire," Forbes ASAP, April 10, 1995, pp 66-90.
- In a year from now "we will be talking about the
consequences of being digital and the Internet, because many things will be
turned upside down. ... I believe more people will be on the 'net in the
year 2000 than looking at network TV."
Source: Nicholas Negroponte (Director of MIT's Media Lab), quoted in
Advertising Age, March 13, 1995, p. S-22.
- "Digital life will include very little real-time
broadcast. ... On-demand information will dominate digital life. We will ask
explicitly or implicitly for what we want, when we want it. This will recall
a radical rethinking of advertiser-supported programming."
Source: Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, Alfred Knopf, 1995, p.
176
- "People have little in common except their prurient
interests and morbid fears and anxieties. Necessarily aiming its fare at
this lowest common denominator target, television gets worse and worse year
after year. TV will die because it affronts human nature: the drive to
self-improvement and autonomy that lifted the race from the muck and offers
the only promise for triumph in our current adversities."
Source: George Gilder, Life After Television, W.W.
Norton & Co., 1994
- "'Communications is king, and content is only a
prince,' Reed Hundt says. In business, in Wall Street—certainly in
Hollywood—they've had the opposite view: that the medium doesn't matter,
just the message. 'They are making a big mistake,' says Hundt. ... The whole
idea of network TV, he says, 'is not that you are a couch potato, but that
you're as dumb as a potato.' It reduces entertainment to a common
denominator. Hundt says the future of TV is in taking 1,000 channels and
giving them an organizing agent to reduce them to the 7 or 8 channels a
given individual wants. 'Broadcasting is finished,' he says with relish.
After all, he spent a lot of his time at the FCC fighting the broadcast
lobby's effort to protect the status quo: 'Broadcasting is the dumbest
product from a consumer perspective and the smartest product from the
seller's ever created.'"
Source: Dyan Machan, "Broadcasting
is Finished," Forbes, October 6, 1997, p. 43-45.
- "Five hundred cable channels. Scheduled pay-per-vew
events. Interactive TV on demand. Who cares? Try an unlimited number
of channels. Whatever you want, whenever you want it. From anywhere on the
planet. For free. Internet broadcasting will bring real-time audio and video
-- radio and TV -- to modest desktop machines over ordinary telephone lines.
Not download-for-20-minutes-and-play-later clips, but audio and video
streaming through the wires in real time. Internet broadcasting is
overcoming technical obstacles like the narrow bandwidth of phone lines, the
limits of compressing multimedia data, and the vagaries of Internet packet
switching. ... You may have missed out on Samuel Morse tapping out, 'What
hath God wrought?' and Alexander Graham Bell yelling, 'Mr Watson. Come here.
I need you.' But you are present at the dawn of the Internet Broadcasting
Age. Keep your browsers tuned."
Source: Edmund X. Dejesus, "Toss Your TV: How the Internet Will Replace
Broadcasting," Byte,
February 1996, p. 51
- "Over the past year, heavy hitters in the
entertainment and computer industries have announced various new
technologies that could one day make the Web look and act more like TV, so
couch potatoes would start ''watching'' cyberspace -- and ordering products
from it, the way pundits once predicted they would be using interactive
television. The goal of these diverse efforts is to make consumers view the
Web ''as a different kind of TV,'' says Jim Phillips, head of Motorola
Inc.'s multimedia division. ''It's TV with a million channels.'' The
companies backing this new ''Web TV'' model include Tele-Communications
Inc., Time Warner Inc., Motorola, Sun Microsystems Inc., Intel Corp. and
Netscape Communications Corp. ... Once the new servers, modems and content
are in place, customers could have a version of TV-on-demand. Instead of
sitting through a 30-minute broadcast, news junkies could pull up, whenever
they wanted, short video clips on only those things that grab their interest
-- whether it's the war in Bosnia or an interview with a star player the
night before a football game."
Source: Joan E. Rigdon, "Entertainment
+ Technology (A Special Report): TV vs. PC," Wall Street
Journal, March 28, 1996
- "I think what is going to transform the Internet is
the introduction of video. You've already seen major introductions of audio,
and you've already begun to see rudimentary forms of full-motion video
develop on the Internet. The video quality will improve dramatically over
the next two to three years. While there is a fair amount of choice on TV
today--you can get television news when you want to see it now; it's not
limited to just a few time periods--it really hasn't become personalized.
There isn't a way to get a television newscast that is suited to just what
you want to see. The ability to personalize your TV news viewing will
certainly come."
Source: Tom Rogers, president of NBC Cable, quoted in
"Building
NBC's Future," Broadcasting & Cable, May 5, 1997
- "Today, as the 20th century draws to a close, ...
your television is hooked up to cable, and you recently added a satellite
dish. Thanks to these technological marvels, you can tune in to 200
television stations. Congratulations. That's really great. The problem is
that 200 will soon seem like a ridiculously small number of channels. ...
You see, before the millennium is over, you'll add another 9,999,800
television channels, surfing into your home from all parts of the world. The
revolution is happening now. The driving force behind it is the Internet ...
hundreds of millions of people are logged onto the Internet today, and
within a few years there will literally be billions of users. ... That
creates a massive communications channel, and changes all the rules of how
information is created and distributed. ... With a billion users logged onto
the Internet, it isn't unreasonable to assume that 10 million of them will
begin broadcasting television signals. ... Individuals could start their own
television stations, as could governments, corporations, schools, political
parties, churches, hate groups, businesses, retirement homes, magazines,
record labels, grocery stores, radio stations, volleyball teams, barbershop
quartets, prisoners on death row, and anyone else who feels like it. ...
Remember: There are televisions in 99 percent of U.S. households. When the
PC/TV takes over, there will similarly be computers in 99 percent of homes,
and each PC/TV will have the capability of acting as a Web server Bottom
line: Almost everyone can start webcasting."
Source: Ken C. Pohlmann, "Channel Envy," Video Magazine,
September, 1996, p. 23
- "'That's where everyone is heading; every desktop
is going to have a Web server on it,' said Rob Enderle, an industry analyst
at Giga Information Group,'"
Source: Joe Balderston, "Microsoft
Faces Fast Track On Every Desk," Infoworld, August 19,
1996, p. 39
- "The newspaper will not be around in 25 years. It
won't be printed in multimillion-dollar printing plants, tossed onto fleets
of trucks and delivered to your doorstep in the middle of the night. Your
future news is more likely to be delivered over the information
infrastructure to an electronic news table, a device the size and weight of
a legal pad. ... The newspaper is so bound up with the notion of paper that
it's incorporated in the very name. Yet we're almost inevitable going to see
a decoupling of news from paper in the future as organizations try to
deliver these enhanced features and respond to increasing financial
pressures. Today close to 60 percent of the cost of newspaper production
goes into printing and distribution. The cost of newsprint alone account for
15 to 25 percent of operating costs -- not to mention the environmental
costs of cutting down trees. In the future, producing a "paper"
newspaper will be very expensive -- perhaps a specialized collectors'
edition for those willing to pay."
Source: Peter Leyden, "Written
Words Won't Disappear," in "On
the Edge of the Digital Age," Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune,
1995
- "Imagine what the blacksmiths of 1896 felt when
they looked up and saw their first automobile. I know. I am a newspaper
columnist in 1996, and for the last six months I've been trying out the Net.
My colleague Richard Harwood is convinced that 'whatever success the
electronic faction achieves in the millennium to come, the newspaper will
remain an important part of our lives and our culture.' I hope he is right.
I think he is wrong. I have been into the future, and it works. The future
is not print. ... paper will not survive the computer. At the turn of the
century text will forever leave paper and take up residence on-line. No need
for mourning. Clay tablets gave way to papyrus, sheepskin scrolls to bound
books, illuminated manuscripts to Gutenberg type. In the end, each
revolution was for the better. For the typical news magazine, only 20
percent of the costs are editorial (paying the writers and editors to put
the stuff together). Eighty percent goes into the physical transformation of
thoughts into ink and paper and lugging them around until they get into your
hands. Print will die of this waste and expense. ... Here is my prediction:
Internet publishing conquers the world as soon as the nerds come up with the
perfect computer simulation of book reading."
Source: Charles Krauthammer, "But the Paper Won't Be
on Paper," International Herald Tribune, June 24, 1996, p. 8.
- “Powerful economic forces are pushing newspapers to
take the plunge into cyberspace. Dramatic hikes in newsprint prices and
increases in postage prices are forcing paper publications into considering
ways to leverage their content electronically, with many publications
sampling multiple methods. ... an estimated 57 newspapers launched some form
of on-line service last year. ... The Raleigh News
& Observer is on-line and the number of ‘hits’ -- requests for
screens of information -- per week broke the one million mark.”
Source: Sean Butterbaugh, “"Stop
the Presses! Newspapers Go On-line"", Inter@ctive
Week, March 27, 1995, p. 41.
- "U.S. newspapers have been investing heavily to
upgrade their printing facilities, having spent some $1.2 billion on such
activities in 1995, the Newspaper Association of America said Monday. ``We
are making tremendous advances in the ink-on-paper process, computer to
plate, and targeting technologies,'' said John Sturm, president of the
association, which represents more than 1,500 U.S. and Canadian newspapers,
in remarks to the association's Newspaper Operations Superconference here.
But Sturm said newspapers are also working to make themselves deliverers of
information beyond their traditional hard copy product. A recent study by
the assoication found that the number of newspapers available online tripled
to 175 in 1995, and predicted that number will double in 1996. ``There are
those who believe that electrons will obsolete newspapers,'' Sturm said in
his speech. ``But, from my view, more and more newspapers are seeing less
threat and more opportunities.''
Source: "Newspapers Spending Heavily on Technology," Reuters
article, March 4, 1996
- "For traditional print publishers, moving to an
electronic format eliminates paper, printing presses, and postage -- three
of the industry's biggest budget items. Paper cost rose 44 percent in 1995,
with another 20 percent hike expected this year. Second-class postage has
risen 66 percent since 1988. Rich, detailed Web sites now cost an average of
$1 million, according to International Data Corporation/Link, but that's a
tiny fraction of what it costs to produce, print, and deliver print
magazines and newspapers. 'At the San Jose Mercury News, we spend
$60 million per year for newsprint,' says Robert Ingle, vice president of
new media at Knight-Ridder. 'Nothing on the Internet costs $60
million.' Electronic publishing is thus perhaps the largest exercise in cost
shifting in the industry's history. While publishers are freed from high
fixed costs, readers spend $2,000 to $4,000 to buy an Internet- or
multimedia-capable computers, plus additional fees for online access; if
they print out something they download, that, too, is on their nickel."
Source: Rob French, "Where is Publishing
Heading," Adobe Magazine, June 1995, p. 36
- "But just as we seldom carve words in rocks these
days, we will probably not print many of them on paper for binding tomorrow.
In fact, the cost of paper (which has risen 50 percent in the past year),
the amount of human energy required to move it, and the volume of space
needed to store it make books as we know them less than the optimum method
for delivering bits. In fact, the art of bookmaking is not only less than
perfect but will probably be as relevant in 2020 as blacksmithing is
today."
Source: Nicholas Negroponte, "The Future of the Book," Wired,
February 1996, p. 188
- "General Media International (GMI) magazines Omni
and Longevity are going out of print and moving to cyberspace, company
officials said. Citing increasing paper and postal costs, GMI said it has
laid off 31 staff members in connection with the moves. With GMI's paper
costs rising by 60 percent and postage going up 34 percent, and with the
magazines being "marginally profitable" at best in their history,
the move to electronic publishing will be a profitable one, Bob Guccione,
founder and chief executive officer of GMI, told Newsbytes. He said the move
to cyberspace is a real 'opportunity.'"
Source: "Omni & Longevity Move Completely To Online World,"
Newsbytes News Network article, February 1, 1996
- "Look at (the emerging network) not as a
broadcasting system, but as a phone system. When Bell created the phone
system, he imagined it would be chiefly used to transmit radio broadcasts.
The idea of people using the network for personal communications was quite
alien to him. Similarly, today we look at the emergence of vast bandwidth
networks and we imagine they will be chiefly used to transmit broadcast
video. I think this is a similar misconception. In fact, these networks will
be used for teleconferencing of all sorts. You will be sending your own
image, your own personal videotapes of whatever; digital video products of
all sorts will be zipping back and forth across this network. The chief
suppliers will be people on the edge of the network. Most of the commerce
will gravitate to the networks. There will be more business conducted over
the networks than in any single arena. It will be the central nervous system
of the new information economy. ... The passive broadcasting model of TV is
dead."
Source: George Gilder, quoted in Frank Beacham, "The
New Networks: -- Not Just for Video," Interactive Age, November 28,
1994, p. 17
- "Will radio be left behind in the digital age?
Probably not. Radio survived both the television and video revolutions, and
is now proving its staying power by adapting to the online revolution.
Transforming radio waves into bits, radio stations far and wide are carving
out a niche on the Net. The sounds echoing across these sites may not be
quite up to broadcast standards, but they do stretch the boundaries of a
medium still dominated by text and graphics."
Source "Surfing the
Waves: Radio thrives on the Web," The
Utne Lens
- "We are at the dawn of the era of desktop
broadcasting. FCC licenses, 3 ton transmitters, and 200-foot antennas just
aren't a requirement anymore. Broadcasting is about to become a 'Volksmedium',
like print. Today, anyone with a photocopier, pencil, and paper can be a
publisher. And in the next few years, any organization or person with a
computer and a connection to the Internet can transmit their programming
throughout the world."
Source: "The
First 24-Hour, Internet-Only Radio Station Finds A Global Audience,"
press release, Hajjar/Kaufman
Advertising, May 9, 1995
- "Marrying television with the World Wide Web, Intercast
is designed to continually download and cache HTML pages that relate to
a particular TV channel’s programming. While the TV broadcast is displayed
in a window in the corner of the PC screen (via a TV tuner), related Web
pages dominate the screen, with new Web pages appearing for different TV
sows or parts of a show. ... Users can link to other pages in their own
private hard disk-based Web universes, and when they click on a URL that’s
not cached, the software promises to ‘seamlessly’ connect them to the
appropriate live Web site via the user’s modem-based Internet
connection."
Source: Eric Brown, "Intercast: Mixing PCs, TV and the Web," New
Media Magazine, November 1995.
- "The Intercast Industry Group (IIG) today announced
that Continental Cablevision, Inc., General Instrument Corporation, TCI
Technology Ventures, a division of Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI), and Time
Warner Cable Programming, a division of Time Warner Entertainment L.P.,
intend to join the Intercast Industry Group to promote a new medium called
Intercast(tm). ... Intercast technology will allow television content
providers to create new interactive content -- text, graphics, video or data
-- around their existing programming and deliver this content simultaneously
with the TV signal to PCs equipped with Intercast technology. For example:
- A breaking news story could be linked to additional
information on the geography or historical background of the event.
- A television police drama could allow a viewer to
watch the program while also viewing clues, the DNA reports and other
- information not seen on TV. The viewer could try to
solve the case
- before the onscreen detectives do.
- A music video could air with Web pages featuring
concert dates and hyperlinks to independent fan club information on the
Internet.
- Sports programs, like the Olympics, could provide
broadcast Web pages with information on individual athletes and live,
continuous statistics on the athlete, the game, and/or the league.
- A fashion program could be accompanied by broadcast
web pages allowing the viewer to purchase highlighted apparel
instantaneously
Because the Intercast medium will use existing
communications infrastructure and open industry standards from the
broadcast, PC and Internet industries, it can be quickly and inexpensively
deployed. Open specifications will also make it easy for software and
hardware developers to create new applications for the Intercast
medium."
Source: "Continental Cablevision, General Instrument,
TCI Technology Ventures And Time Warner Cable Programming To Join Intercast
Industry Group," Business Wire article, February 8, 1996
- "They’ve got a lot of overhead, a lot of
employees, and they hedge their bets by playing it safe. They’ve been
running the show for the past 100 years, and things are pretty much the same
as when they started. The movies you see today are still dealing with 1940s
form and structure. But it’s changing big time now. There’s a new
Hollywood that’s going to be around for a lot longer than the old
Hollywood, and that’s the one I want to be a part of. ... Computers
started out as something for the moviemaking elite, but they’re evolving
into something liberating for everyone. ... It used to be that if you saw
something in your mind’s eye, you had to get a whole bunch of people to
believe in it, somebody to organize it, somebody to direct it, somebody to
shoot it. Now, whatever you see, if you know the right couple of people, you
can make it. It’s getting back to the single person, the author, who has
an idea and can go with it without having to run the gauntlet of a table
full of studio lawyers."
Source: Scott Billup, quoted by Paula Parisi, “Shot
By an Outlaw,” Wired, September 1996
- "The dispute over digital TV is not trivial. NBC
and other broadcasters will have to spend millions on new transmission
equipment to send digital signals, which promise super-sharp pictures,
CD-quality sound and data delivery. The new technology will also allow
broadcasters to condense their signals so they can send up to four or five
channels of broadcasting or data services — such as stock quotes, local
weather or traffic updates — in the space where they can now send only
one, enabling them to generate new revenues."
Source: David Bowermaster, "When hand-holding titans
collide" MSNBC
- "Once digital TV arrives, the question of who will
deliver programming will get interesting. Take the Atlanta market. Four
network affiliates broadcast there, plus six independent stations. If they
all go digital, each could multiplex its signal into, say, 10 channels. (No
one knows for sure how many digital channels will ultimately fit on a
broadcast signal.) Suddenly, there could be 100 channels available over the
air, all looking sharp and free of snow or static. ... The huge capacity of
digital TV might open up some other interesting possibilities. ... Unusual
new alliances might spring up. Newspapers could ally with broadcasters. A
digital channel could be used to quickly dump an electronic copy of the
newspaper into PCs armed with a tiny antenna. pushing for strong public
interest requirements for broadcasters. A software company such as Microsoft
could use a digital channel to send updated copies of computer programs to
PCs. (Tune in at 7 p.m. for the latest version of Windows!) Clearly, a lot
is up in the air. Plans for digital TV could be altered five times between
now and 1999. But digital TV is coming. More than likely, it will be much
bigger than the advent of color TV. Sometime in the next decade, the very
idea of television is going to change."
Source: Kevin Maney, "CES
preview: Going digital means sharper boob tubes," USA Today,
January 8, 1997, p. 1B
- "Forget television. In three years, there won't be
any. Through the agency of digital broadcasting, the gizmo we use for
entertainment will evolve into a richly personal, multi-network, realtime
processor. This wave was begun with misdirected attempts at higher
definition that assumed the technology of TV could be changed without
sending ripples through the industries that create, distribute, and deliver
video information. The HDTV people got the idea right but the sign bit
wrong: instead of HDTV and nothing else, we now have normal-D TV and
everything else."
Source: Andrew
Lippman (Associate Director of the MIT Media Laboratory)
- "As the old analog technology slips into merciful
oblivion and gives way to digital technology, television worldwide will make
the most fundamental technological change since its invention and its
subsequent colorization. I call this 'digitization' a revolution because
digital technology will radically change television's means of
communication, its quality, its flexibility, the conduct of the business,
the scope and effectiveness of the service, and virtually every aspect of
the medium. Every broadcaster in America, and indeed throughout the world,
will feel the impact of this digital revolution. ... Today, the flowering of
digital technology opens a wealth of opportunity. Beware of a poverty of
vision!"
Source: Joseph Flaherty, "Broadcasting's
to be or not to be!", Public Television International ATV Workshop,
1995
- "The choice is really the broadcasters'. At
Microsoft, a year and a half ago we found the same thing handed to us, it
was called the Internet. We knew all the technologies and that it was going
to happen, but we were surprised at the speed at which it became a popular
phenomenon. And Bill Gates said, "The Internet is our
opportunity." And within one year, every product in Microsoft got
adapted to the Internet. And that's the opportunity the broadcast media has
right now. The question is, do they do anything with it, or do they get run
over?"
Source: Craig Mundie, Sr. VP of Microsoft, quoted by Don
West, "Convergence
The Hard Way," Broadcasting & Cable, April 7, 1997
- "United Press International CEO James Adams tells
publishing industry executives the Internet revolution threatens to sweep
away the traditional news media unless they recognize and exploit the
opportunities the revolution has created. Adams, in his keynote address to
the Seybold Seminars New York/Publishing 98 conference today said, 'I
believe we are watching the demise of the traditional media, as we have
known it for much of this century. ... The issue is unavoidable -- either
the media and publishing industries come to grips with the challenges and
opportunities of the knowledge age, or you're toast. Because if you don't
provide the knowledge that the people seek, they'll find it somewhere. Even
if they have to fashion it themselves.' ... To meet the serious competition
from the infosphere, he said, 'every old media company must revolutionize.
... The infosphere is a place for revolutionaries. Join the revolution or
die.'"
Source: "UPI's Adams: Internet forces
revolution," United Press International release, March 19, 1998
- "I've always had a view that erosion is going to
continue. Paraphrasing Mencken, I don't think you can ever go broke
overestimating the desire of American consumers for more choice. And there's
no doubt that we're going to see more choice. Digital is just another way of
saying we are about to be hit with infinitely more choice than is available
today."
Source: Tom Rogers, president of NBC Cable, quoted in
"Building
NBC's Future," Broadcasting & Cable, May 5, 1997
- "Around 700BC a major invention took place in
Greece: the alphabet. This conceptual technology, it has been argued by
leading classics scholars such as Havelock, was the foundation for the
development of Western philosophy and science as we know it today. It made
it possible to bridge the gap from spoken tongue to language, thus
separating the spoken from the speaker, and making possible conceptual
discourse. ... it was the alphabet that, in the West, provided the mental
infrastructure for cumulative, knowledge-based communication. ... A
technological transformation of similar historic dimensions is taking place
2,700 years later, namely the integration of various modes of communication
into an interactive network. Or, in other words, the formation of a
Super-Text and a Meta-Language that, for the first time in history,
integrates into the same system the written, oral, and audio-visual
modalities of human communication. The potential integration of text,
images, and sounds in the same system, interacting from multiple points, in
chose time (real and delayed) along a global network, in conditions of open
and affordable access, does fundamentally change the character of
communication. And communication decisively shapes culture, because as
Postman writes 'we do not see...reality... as it is, but as our languages
are. And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our
metaphors create the content of our culture.' ... I argue that through the
powerful influences of the new communication system, mediated by social
interests, government policies, and business strategies, a new culture is
emerging: the culture of real virtuality ... it is a system in
which reality itself (that is, people's material/symbolic existence) is
entirely captured, fully immersed in a virtual image setting, in a world of
make believe, in which appearances are not just on the screen through which
experience is communicated, but they become the experience."
Source: Manual Castells, The Rise of the Network
Society, Blackwell Publishers, 1996
Revolution in Television Entertainment
- "With the $5000 trinity box and a decent Pentium
system, you can hae your own TV studio and produce professional-quality
video. Add the new digital camcorders and writable digital videodiscs (DVD),
and the result will be a spate of innovative TV documentaries, dramas, and
odd-ball entertainments. Most of those will be silly or useless, but not
all. I expect some real revolutions in television entertainment over the
next few years, and the cost to get in on it is about the same as a year's
tuition at a major university. Graphic arts is one of the fastest-growing
fronts in the computer revolution. Affordable digital camcorders, Play's
Trinity, and DVDs form one synergy. "
Source: Jerry Pournelle, "New Synergies for
Computing," Byte, September 1997, p. 117
- "Ultimately, anybody will be able to have their own
multimedia broadcasting operation on the Web. Any time, any day, we'll be
able to watch John and Midge down the street eating dinner or Lisa and Frank
and Joe in the house on the corner having sex. Sure, the audience for most
of these things will be small. (In the future everybody will be famous to 15
people). Then again, I turned on my TV last night and skipped across 54
stations of utterly boring crap that some morons are spending millions of
dollars to produce. ... a substantial minority of people are moving from
self-identifying as consumers of media to producers of media. The Web is
their playpen. When I say that Jack and Jill up the street are going to be
uploading their homemade porn clips and that Chuckie's going to follow his
cat around all day with a live digital feed, THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. It
may not be video yet, but the Web is inundated with home-brew sites,
everything from pornography to family scrapbooks. What's fun about the Web
(as opposed to the Net) isn't so much interactivity as access: Stand up and
make your presentation. I figure if you've got 1,000 people trying to
entertain you, 3% are going to succeed."
Source: R. U. Sirius, quoted in "Web
vs TV," The Web Magazine,
September, 1997
- "'Right now, I think the world of video is only
just beginning to come of age,' White sums up. 'In my experience as an
expressive artist, this is the renaissance. Over the years, I've done music,
and in spite of the fact that I got radio airplay for my songs, I was never
able to get signed. With my still photography, in spite of the fact that I
was getting published, I never could get a show of my work. But with video -
wham! With all the festivals out there, it seems like it's FM radio back in
the early 70s all over again, when it was still possible to get your work
heard or observed. I don't know how long it will stay this way, but - given
the way it's spilling over into computer and digital formats, and the way
it's allowing people at any level to express themselves cleanly and clearly
- the sky's the limit for the expanding media of video.'"
Source: Larry White (independent video producer), quoted in Colette Connor,
"Affordable Formats Enable the Artist," Videography, May 1997, p.
43
- "Over the past few years, the direct-to-home (DTH)
satellite industry has emerged from nowhere. It has grown in just three
years from a niche delivery mechanism for a few million hard-t0-reach
households into a mainstream business that is expected to reach 87 million
subscribers over the next decade. The spread of subscription-based satellite
TV has enhanced choice in developed countries, and promises to do so for
many households in developing countries too."
Source: Scott Beardsley, Alan Miles, and John Stone,
"A Bouquet of Choices," The McKinsey Quarterly, 1997, No.
1, pp. 56-81
Rise of Camcorder Journalism
- "It is a small but growing part of the televisual
landscape, showing up on everything from public-access cable to Nightline.
Its practitioners range from teen-age chroniclers to video artists to
veteran reporters. And as it grows, it gives rise to tough questions about
applying accepted journalistic standards to innately subjective reporting.
The subject is personal journalism by camcorder. It is still a marginal
player in television, known to most of the public only through the silliness
of America’s Funniest Home Videos or the sensationalism of shows like I
Witness Video or the choreographed realism of Cops and its ilk. But indeed
so-called small-format video is growing, and its potential is vast. That is
partly because camcorders themselves are spreading like locusts; more than a
fifth of American households have them and more than three million are sold
each year, according to the Electronic Industries Association."
Source: Pat Aufderheide, "Vernacular
Video," Columbia Journalism Review, January/February, 1995
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