And the Media Gods Said, Go Forth and Multiply

Our 21st century man, Tyler, decides to watch a little television. Turning on his wide-screen set, he encounters a menu of options recorded by his personal video recorder: episodes of “Friends”; a few Jean-Claude Van Damme and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, in keeping with his taste for thickly accented action fare; and some new shows he might like based on past choices.

He opts instead for a live telecast of the Lakers game, using his remote to cue specific cameras and replays, punch up stats, answer trivia and even select which commercials to watch during breaks. At halftime, Tyler flips between game highlights and a camera trained on the Laker Girls, quickly switching to the former when his wife enters the room.

The technology for all this electronic puttering already exists. The only thing missing, in fact, is a clear vision of how programming will fit in. For the people who create shows, TV’s inevitable collision with computers, the Internet and e-commerce has been less pressing than the here-and-now concern of audience defections to new channels that seem to sign on daily. Rather than fret about convergence, they’ve been out chasing some hot young actor or writing phenom--touted by his agents, no doubt, as the next David E. Kelley.

Meanwhile, those who track TV as a cultural medium are wondering just how titillating content will get as programmers seek to hold onto viewers accustomed to watching car chases, wars and assisted suicides in their living rooms.

TV is poised to change dramatically, and while the breakneck pace of technology often renders day-old predictions moot, a few conclusions are inescapable:

* Audiences will continue to scatter, compelling advertisers to rely more heavily on placing products within programs. Tie-ins will go the next step, too, so Tyler can click here if he wants to buy a T-shirt like the one Matthew Perry is wearing on “Friends.”

* Screens will grow bigger, clearer and incorporate features such as Internet links to data streams that augment whatever program or movie happens to be on.

* Hundreds of channels will supplement the existing 200 broadcast and cable services via interactive delivery systems that allow users to create “personal viewing experiences.”

A glimpse of this future can be found within the National Digital Television Center in West Los Angeles. With sleek teal-blue walls curving around a multilevel core that looks vaguely metallic, the building more resembles the Starship Enterprise than a venue for taping sitcoms and distributing dozens of channels. General manager Rosemary Danon, who left a job running a local TV station to explore this strange digital world, sees a future in which there are no commercial breaks, just brands featured in the programs.

“That’s where all this is heading,” she says. “Our kids will look back at TV and say, ‘I can’t believe you watched this.’ ”

Still murky are the innovations that might capitalize on this pipeline. “It’s a very weird time” in TV history, observes David Belson, an IBM veteran who advises TV stations on the switch from analog--the delivery system in use since TV’s infancy--to digital. These changeovers allow networks to tinker with a signal. They can either devote it to a single high-resolution, movie-style picture of, say, Shaquille O’Neal, or divvy it up to deliver a less dazzling Shaq plus stats or trivia to occupy idle hands.

As stations go digital, tech companies are gearing up with gadgetry that can pass the “three-beer test”--i.e., simple enough for a guy to use after slugging down a few cold ones. “That’s why we’re starting with sports,” says Brent Imai, vice president at ACTV, a New York-based digital media company. “It’s easy and simple, and guys know how to use the remote.”

We have already begun to see signs of convergence as more people surf the Internet while they watch TV. During TBS’ James Bond movie marathon in December, the cable superstation witnessed significant blips in Web site traffic whenever its Internet address was announced, and “page views” more than doubled from the previous 007 marathon.

A study conducted in January by Showtime Networks estimated that 18 million households, roughly 18% of American households, have both the TV and computer on at the same time. In an MTV Networks survey on new media and leisure time, young people said they’re “using more of everything”--and often simultaneously, with the newer options complementing traditional media. And by 2002, an estimated 10 million to 16 million homes will achieve high-speed Internet access through cable TV hookups activated by TV remotes.

Children and teenagers are racing past their parents into this world where there is no distinction between channels 2 and 52. Ads for TiVo, one of two enterprises (the other being Replay TV) at the forefront of Personal Video Recorder technology, exploit that generation gap, promising a system with a remote control that “even an adult will have no trouble using.”

By all accounts, PVRs will be a cinch to operate. That’s why Josh Bernoff, principle analyst for television at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., foresees 14 million viewers adopting the devices in the next five years, and as many as four in five owning one by 2009.

For a “Friends” aficionado like our man of the future, the personal video recorder will scan the dial for every episode, fresh or rerun, and record it on a hard drive. If Tyler were a Civil War buff, his PVR would record any relevant program, from “Gone With the Wind” to Ken Burns’ landmark documentary series. Moreover, the system learns what he likes based on past selections.

The first generation of PVRs, priced from $500 to $1,500, should be widely available in retail stores this year. As complex as the machine might sound, Bernoff sees it merely as a more convenient version of a VCR. “It doesn’t require you to know what times those programs are on,” he says, noting that for programmers, “All I have to do is get it on television somewhere, and the audience will find me.”

The implications of the PVR could be enormous, crippling networks now dependent on ads as a revenue source. Viewers could program the devices to skip or at least zap through all the commercials in a network show, and enough PVRs out there could sabotage broadcaster schedules, which often rely on two hit series to prop up a clunker sandwiched between them. “It’s the middle of the television schedule that’s at risk,” Bernoff says. “It’s not the top five shows. It’s the other 119 [that people might skip] when time slots don’t matter anymore.”

Advertising will thus have to become unavoidable. As it is, programming promos are squeezed into the tiniest lulls in sporting events, from NBC touting tonight’s movie between free throws during NBA games to Fox filling choice World Series seats with its own prime-time stars. The UPN network has even experimented with digitally adding logos and products into finished scenes. “The ad agencies will figure out ways to make advertising more attractive to view and less attractive to skip,” Bernoff says. “There’s all kinds of sneaky ways to get the ads back in.”

Like many of his colleagues, Robert Broder, a partner in the Beverly Hills literary agency Broder Kurland Webb Uffner, believes technology has wrongly overshadowed the creative process in talk about TV’s future. “Content is still everything, and all of these Wall Street types are going to have to focus on this sooner or later,” he says. “If you don’t have the content, you don’t have the fuel to run the delivery systems.”

Producers are struggling now to find fresh, engaging material for the channels sprouting up. Networks are making deals to air popular shows in different slots on secondary channels. ABC, for example, plans to launch a soap-opera network that will rerun daytime serials during prime time. For all the industry talk about finding fresh talent, Broder says, its short-term solution will be to “run the sprockets off” existing shows.

A growing desperation to get noticed amid the clutter of channels also promises more provocative content. Fox has already found a loyal audience for programs depicting actual mayhem, as seen on “World’s Wildest Police Videos” and “When Animals Attack,” and some wonder how conventional drama can compete as real life-or-death scenarios invade our living rooms. “We always want to be surprised, but it’s harder and harder to get us surprised now,” says Jonathan Field, a cultural strategist for Wenham, Mass.-based Mullen advertising firms.

Does this mean a 24-hour channel tracking Tyler’s every waking moment, as posited in the films “The Truman Show” and “EDtv”? Mary-Ellis Bunim, co-creator of MTV’s groundbreaking documentary series “The Real World” and “Road Rules,” sees more elaborate looks at everyday people as “a natural next step.” Certainly there are plenty of willing subjects: 20,000 applicants vied for a spot on the latest incarnations of those programs, which assemble a group of youths to play out everyday life, then serve up the scenes to voyeurs.

Says Bunim: “The lives of real people, if they’re cast well, can be as or more compelling than your dramatic hour series.”

She believes the two forms will coexist, but others say conventional programming must adapt. “Packaged media is going to have more and more problems, because people are going to be more sophisticated about taking it apart,” says Field, the cultural strategist. He points to the proliferation of talk shows on radio and TV as a sign that people want to engage, not just veg. “They want to feel as if they have a voice,” he says. “Celebrityhood is not sacred anymore.”

Yet even Bernoff’s research identifies a need for “lazy interactivity,” which describes applications designed for “quick decisions, short attention spans, hand-held remotes and instant gratification.” Rachelle Chong, a former Federal Communications Commission member who now represents high-tech clients at the San Francisco law firm Coudert Brothers, also questions just how interactive the average couch potato wants to be.

“I think there’s going to be more personal control of your TV and more information services coming across it,” she says. “[But] people don’t want to sit there and do a lot of stuff with their TV programming. They generally want to sit there and watch, because they’re tired.”

So far, Hollywood’s creative community seems confident that this mentality will prevail. “If we don’t know how to use our VCRs, how the hell are we going to learn how to use this?” Broder asks.

Even so, television’s 50-year reign as America’s cultural adhesive--something you can chat about with a total stranger in a supermarket line--appears unlikely to survive. Huge blocks of viewers, such as the 30 million committed to NBC’s “ER” every Thursday, will disperse, making communal “water-cooler” banter rare. Fretting about this shift, as “ER” executive producer John Wells has observed, may be akin to lamenting the disappearance of the horse and buggy. He envisions more shows that target clusters of Tylers, like-minded viewers who already gab electronically across the world.

This, some argue, could spawn a better class of TV, just as narrowly focused art-house films, at least among critics, rate above blockbusters catering to the masses. Yet it’s worth remembering that television is an industry inured to failure--one in which four of five programs die during their first season. In that respect, technology, for all its bells and whistles, can’t make writers smarter or funnier. “With all of our research and audience measuring and marketing,” notes Broder, “we still get it wrong 80% of the time.”