500 TV Channels? Make It 500 Million

A few weeks ago, I was at a reception at the Directors Guild, over on Sunset Boulevard, dying. I was critically underdressed. The place was thick with guys in brilliant suits and I was wearing a T-shirt. In fairness to me, it was a new T-shirt; it cost nearly $30 at the Gap, and I even ironed it in my hotel room that morning.

Still, it was like one of those dreams you had as a kid, where you show up at school naked. I was there to be in a panel discussion hosted by the Caucus for Writers and Producers, an organization of 240 veterans who write and produce prime-time television. So I had figured: Creative Types + Hollywood = Don’t Need to Dress Up. Wrong answer. I was never good in math. Or dressing.

I skulked around the perimeter and soon fell into conversation with someone--I don’t recall whether he was a writer or a producer--about the panel I was to be on, which was a discussion of the future of television. You know, 500 channels. To me, the whole notion of 500 channels is silly, an idea that collided with public perception and got twisted beyond all recognition.

I have always assumed that the 500-channels metaphor came from some cable guy attempting to explain the concept of bandwidth--how the wire that carries information into your home can only carry so much of the stuff at a time. Five hundred channels was simply a creative measurement of future capacity, demonstrating how many channels you could get if all that information were headed in one direction.

The problem is, the Info Bahn won’t be going in one direction, but two: to your house and from it. We’ll be able to send and receive full-motion video as effortlessly as our phone lines now handle voice. (Point-to-point communications is what the telecommunications geeks call it.) “Forget about 500 channels; 500 million channels will be more like it,” I assured the writer-or-producer, explaining that we’ll be able to “dial-up” programming from millions of computers all over the world, in the same way we use our telephones today.

You’ll be able to log in to a computer loaded with, say, SCTV reruns, and if there’s an empty port, connect to the program you want to see; if all the ports are full, you’ll get a busy signal. Try again later.

He blanched. “That would be terrible,” he said. “Do you have any idea how much money it costs to put together a television program? How could anyone ever expect to recoup their costs, let alone make a profit, with millions of programs to choose from?”

And I had one of those yuppie-Marxist moments: It struck me that the whole prime-time industry would be smashed in such a world. This guy was worried about the $20,000-a-week jobs--no more suits--and perhaps with good reason.

The I-way has been heralded as a utopia for unempowered creative people, allowing anyone to create and distribute programming to a mass market. But it is horribly threatening to other creative people--the ones with high-paying jobs. It wrecks the distribution model that pays their celestial salaries. Prime time is about control, after all. Limited choices, carefully aimed at a segmented market, paid for by advertisers who are reasonably sure that so many million people will see their message.

It was a well-timed epiphany and allowed me to sit through the conference, smug as a sophomore in Economics 101. The theme was “Television: Its Impact on Society,” and a lot of it, on the surface at least, concerned itself with the quality of TV. Producers and writers alike stood up to denounce the conspiracy of network bosses that made it so darned hard to get quality shows on television. Many of them cried longingly for the good old days, the so-called Golden Days of Television, when quality stuff filled the airwaves.

As the father of young children, I had to agree. Recently, a friend asked me what our household policy was on TV. “TV’s a real problem,” I said, as she nodded her head vigorously, “I mean, I just can’t get my kids to watch enough of it.”

That wasn’t the answer she was looking for, but it’s true. My kids, 4 and 6, are bored with television. (Outside of Nickelodeon’s “Rug Rats,” that is.) They’re starting to spend as much time in front of the computer as they do in front of the television. That speaks volumes about where the world is headed. They don’t look at computers as technology any more than you think of television as a wireless network interface. Millions of channels will bring us tons of dreck, it’s true. But it will bring quality too.

At the caucus conference, Howard Stringer, the latest info-age visionary, talked about how the phone company Bell Atlantic was, for now, abandoning its wired efforts in favor of a mostly wireless scheme that would deliver a few hundred channels of programming, on demand, to subscribers via radio frequency. Choices would be limited to the information provided by the telephone company, a cable-on-steroids scenario.

I don’t know if it’s because Stringer is such an amusing and engaging speaker or because the audience understood the safe haven his world promised them, but there were lots of smiles all the way around. By the time our future-of-TV panel went on, the last panel of the day, only a few people remained in the audience. Most of the others had gone home, presumably, to muse about the days when TV was great.

*

Joshua Quittner is co-author of “Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace.” Michael Schrage’s final Innovation column appeared two weeks ago, and the column now rotates among several writers.