Medial Scope: Waiting for Planet Broadband - Is the Slow Introduction of Broadband Technology

Medial Scope: Waiting for Planet Broadband - Is the slow introduction of broadband technology and content making monkeys of Internet users? Harry Browne reports on what might be on offer, and why it might not matter

09/19/2001

Irish Times

What an exciting future is on offer thanks to broadband communications. Whereas up until now you've probably been using the Internet mainly to read websites, access newsgroups and send e-mails, soon you'll be able to watch movies, enjoy live entertainment, download more music more quickly, play high-quality games, conduct voice conversations and much more.

What's that you say? Oh, yes. You can already enjoy all these forms of entertainment and communication thanks to TVs, cinemas, videos, radios, consoles, CDs, DVDs, CD-ROMs and old-fashioned telephones. Why do you need to do it on the Internet?

Perhaps the answer is: maybe you don't.

Consumers are constantly being told that broadband is the future. And governments are constantly being warned that they must invest hundreds of millions of pounds in broadband infrastructure if they want their economies to be competitive and their citizens to be happy shining e-people. But there still is neither great consumer demand for broadband Internet access, nor much great content out there for us to be demanding. (See the panel below for a brief explanation of what broadband is and what it does.)

High-tech companies like broadband communications: it means they can send whopping computer files around the country and around the world much faster. These businesses are especially happy if the State helps pay for the technology.

It isn't clear, however, whether people are willing to pay for broadband 'content', or whether companies are going to spend the money to produce content we'll want to see. At the moment, they're ganging up to offer us proven audience-grabbers, a cheapish way to persuade us that we need broadband. Record companies are joining together to organise music-download sites, and movie studios are doing the same thing for the pictures. In August, four big film producers and distributors joined up to plan broadband Internet movie distribution: multimedia giant Sony, plus MGM, Paramount and Warner Brothers (all of which are themselves part of much larger media corporations).

Then two weeks ago more of the remaining big players teamed up too, not with the other crowd, but on their own Internet platform, to be known as Movies.com. Its big names, Disney and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, should be arch-rivals. And Miramax made its name as a distributor of 'independent' cinema. But on Movies.com you'll be able to download movies from Disney (and its Touchstone label), from Twentieth Century Fox and from Miramax too. This means everything from Fox's precious Star Wars movies and its Planet of the Apes to Miramax's Shakespeare in Love and Disney's Toy Story.

The chief executive of Disney, Michael Eisner, said Movies.com would provide consumers 'an unequalled level of flexibility, quality and choice, and we are excited to be at the forefront of this new entertainment medium'. What Movies.com isn't promising yet is that it will release movies for download before they are available on video or DVD. After all, it might be a waste of a perfectly good launch to 'premiere' movies via a technology that few people use.

The proponents of broadband insist that schools should certainly be keen users. Broadband makes the vision of online classrooms a potential reality, via much-improved 'videoconference' facilities: your class could present its media-studies reports to other classes connected through cyberspace. And broadcasters also see schools as ripe audiences for a new generation of educational 'webcasts', so the multimedia programme of your choice can be delivered into your classroom with a few clicks of a mouse. And you'll be in a much better position to 'interact'.

Again, however, there is a question of how far companies are willing to go in funding these developments. In Britain last year, the government auctioned 26 wireless-broadband licences, aimed at small businesses and expected to earn in the region of (pounds) 2 billion. (It had made such a killing on mobile-phone licences the forecast didn't seem over-optimistic.) In the end, the auction raised only (pounds) 38 million, less than 2 per cent of the expected sum.

As Britain's Guardian newspaper stated in an editorial in July: as far back as the 1980s the British government decided that the development of high-speed telecommunications should be left to market forces: 'Well, it was left to market forces, and we are still waiting.' In the United States, companies have been more daring about providing capacity that may prove to be unwanted. It has been estimated that the US has as much as 10 times more fibre-optic network than is currently being used for telecommunications traffic. And you've probably seen the headlines about what's happening to high-tech companies in the US.

In order to avoid going bust, the providers of broadband are going to have to convince customers to start paying more money. But customers, already living in a entertainment- and communications-rich environment, aren't so sure, especially if there's a recession looming. And so the companies can't afford to provide more 'content' for these fickle customers - apart from recycled movies and music that they've already financed for distribution on CDs and in cinemas.

Sure, we'd like our Internet connections to be a little faster, and a bit more reliable, but mostly we're pretty happy with that fraction of our lives that we live on the Net. Gerry McGovern, one of Ireland's leading Internet observers, wrote recently in his online newsletter New Thinking: ' for a great majority of people there is no compelling reason to pay a lot of money to get broadband the Internet will remain a multimedia-poor, text-rich environment for the average person. They like the web for the simple but powerful reason that it allows them to find out stuff.'