Take One (Apr 1967)

MEDI UM by nts RUSSEL 2. DEMAND BROADCASTING The more I think about the home communicator, with its feedback cable linking it to the central computer network, the more I am convinced that broadcasting as we know it is a wierd aberration, a form of licensed piracy akin to Elizabeth’s dispensations to ply the Spanish Main some years ago. (Our Lord Thompson of Fleet described it as a license to print money.) Let’s look at TV: Within less than a generation, most of the juicy VHF bands have been leased by the government to commercial interests, who put out identical schedules of programs on a competitive basis. In the morning if you’ve got nothing to do you can watch housewives’ breakfast programs or school shows. Afternoon: movies -hacked up, sually by incompetents, for commercials -or housewives’ programs. Then kiddy shows, news, situation serials filmed in Hollywood, and there’s often something different and special on before the news. Plus (of course) movies, movies -truncated for time and commercials. I’m not suggesting this issome vast wasteland, on the contrary, there’s great watching there for people with the brains and imagination to appreciate it. I’m complaining about something else, from another perspective. It’s a terrible waste. Five networks, spending hundreds of millions to bring me a hundred hours a day of broadcasting, of which I might see three or four. The hours I’m free to watch, they’re showing situation comedies or variety or hockey. But if I wanted to stay up until one or three a.m. I could see some movies I’ve missed, and theclassroom documentary on at 10 this morning might have appealed to me. I’ll never know. Sunday afternoon they’ve got allthe goodies on at the same time. Imagine spending Sunday afternoon indoors with the blinds pulled down! Sunday evenings in Canada wecanchoose between the two only really interesting public affairs shows of the week. Choose between! A couple of hours of interesting programs and they’re on at the same time. What a rich country to be able to squander its resources so insanely! Will it improve? Apparently there’s still room for a channel or maybe two in our larger cities, and then there are a few channels in the UHF band, plus the possibility that Arthur Clarke’s Comsats will broadcast straight to the home. Will this add the variety? Will this mean I’ll be able to see what I want from the schedule, when I’m ready to see it? Of course not. It’ll mean twice as much of the same. The broadcaster doesn’t care what I want. He’s after statistics, not individuals. And so, if I want to get the most out of life, I’d better conform; I’d better learn to like what the Trendex or Nielson people say most people like. Mass media breed conformists, not individuals. The pressures aren’t too difficult to understand. But that doesn’t make it any the less insane. The alternative might be called ‘Demand Broadcasting’’. Let’s start with the cable. Ina big city, we can only use some of thetwelve channels: stations can’t be right next to each other on the band without causing intolerableinterference. Not so on a cable. Twelve channels per cable, and I suppose as many cables as, you like. Twelve cables, a hundred and forty-four channels, etc. Better still, a single two-way cable with a telephone dial would hook my commie into anything I wanted to see, provided they had the right things and the right program in the computer at the other end. So the next step is to figure out the other end. I'd dial the CBC, or the CTV, and ask the computer for a particular program from the week’s catalogue. The program mightchangeevery Sunday, perhaps around noon so as not to keep the Christians away from church. We could look at anything we wanted to on any of the networks (still with commercials, I suppose, unless we want to pay for it ourselves), and see it when we liked, or as often as we liked, anytime during the rest of the week. If a friend tells us about a new program and we haven't seen it, we dial it in. If we want to see a children’s documentary about lions or dolphins or the New Maths, we dial it in. No more arguments with the younger generation about which shows we will watch: we take turns. The critic is in a far more influential position with this system than with the old pirate broadcasting. If he says a show is terrific, people will have the rest of the week to catch it. This will give the advertisers a strong incentive to put out exceptional shows, for now there is no reason why every show shouldn’t reach its maximum audience. There’s no reason why a show should be withdrawn simply because a rival network has~ put out a better show on the sametime slot. Now ; it’s no longer either, but both. There’s another thing that always frustrated me about broadcasting in the old pirate tradition. If the National Film Board or CBS put out a W