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
Return to CyberTrends