When The Revolution Comes

By Richard Zoglin

SMELLOVISION REPLACES TELEVISION, trumpets a newspaper headline of the future, as spied by Elmer Fudd in a Bugs Bunny cartoon from 1944. Elmer, that old fuddy-duddy, is astonished, but the Merrie Melodies folks may have been onto something. The technological revolution about to sweep over TV will not be merely an incremental change -- more channels, more choices, more chances to play Jeopardy! along with the TV contestants (using your interactive home remote). Ultimately it could bring about a transformation so radical that the medium may scarcely be recognizable as television.

Bruce Springsteen's famous lament 57 Channels (and Nothin' On) now seems almost quaint. Very soon, the 57 will multiply to 500, or somewhere in the neighborhood. And even that will be only a way station. The final destination is a post-channel universe of essentially unlimited choice: virtually everything produced for the medium, past or present, plus a wealth of other information and entertainment options, stored in computer banks and available instantly at the touch of a button.

A dazzling scenario, to be sure. Maybe a little scary. And definitely fraught with uncertainties. No one involved in the TV industry has a precise idea of what the new world will look like, or how the audience will react to it. When TV offers custom selections to suit every narrow interest, will mass- audience programming disappear? Or will the interactive offerings appeal mainly to an audience of techno-freaks, while the rest of us, at least for the foreseeable future, stick with our favorite channels? Will the traditional networks survive? What about commercials, local affiliates, video stores? Will we wind up watching more TV or less? Or all go quietly mad?

Let's take it one step at a time.

First will come the channel bonanza: a simple expansion of today's cable world in which more and more stations and networks will become available on your box. Yet even 500 points of light will not necessarily mean a sudden bounty of new home entertainment. "There isn't an inexhaustible supply of talent out there waiting to fill 500 channels," warns Howard Stringer, CBS Broadcast Group president. "The first thing that comes to mind is what Alvin Toffler called the Law of Raspberry Jam: the wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets."

Many of the new channels will be devoted to information services (your morning newspaper on TV) and home shopping stations (specific ones for designer clothes, health products, sporting goods and so forth). Pay-per-view movie channels will proliferate, and premium services will grab up extra channels to "multiplex" their programming -- offering movies on several channels at staggered times to increase the viewer's options. (HBO, Showtime and the Disney Channel have already begun offering such a service in some cable systems.)

Existing cable channels will subdivide or create spin-offs: a battery of sports channels from ESPN, say, or targeted versions of MTV. "My guess is we'll probably do three to five feeds of MTV, much like radio," says Frank Biondi Jr., president of Viacom, which owns the music-video channel and several other cable networks. "We'll do hard rock, rhythm and blues, urban contemporary -- right down the line."

But there will also be a fresh batch of original channels aimed at special tastes. Already being planned, or at least promised, are channels devoted to game shows, talk shows, crime shows and soap operas. Also the Golf Channel, the Military Channel, the Television Food Network, Ovation (for fine-arts programming) and the Wellness Channel (for recovering addicts). A major stumbling block to such niche services in the past was the limited channel capacity of most cable systems. Soon these fledgling networks will have all the room they want.

The question is whether they will have all the money they need to survive. Some special-interest offerings may be able to attract related advertising or even blur the distinction between advertising and programming. Others will have a tough time gaining enough advertising revenue to support themselves in the increasingly fragmented TV marketplace. Charging subscribers -- either directly as a "pay" service or indirectly through the cable operator -- is one alternative, but that might be difficult at a time when both viewers and federal regulators are unhappy about soaring cable bills.

ONE PROSPECT: CABLE SYSTEMS could switch to an a la carte system of billing, in which subscribers build customized cable menus channel by channel, rather than paying a lump sum for an entire "tier." Such a system would probably be ; a boon for narrow-gauge networks (golf enthusiasts would presumably be willing to fork over a buck or two a month for a channel aimed at them). But many general-interest services, from the Weather Channel to USA Network, would surely see their circulation -- and thus their ad revenue -- drop if viewers were forced to choose and pay for them individually.

At this stage, the traditional broadcast networks would probably be hurt, but not necessarily crippled. Though their audience will be nibbled at further by a fresh attack of narrowcasting barracudas, they would retain their special role as providers of national news, big sports events and broad-based entertainment fare. "I think it is conceivable that a 200- or 300-channel environment might work in a perverse way to the networks' advantage," says Herb Granath, president of Capital Cities/ABC Video Enterprises, "in that it will be more and more difficult for people to identify what they're watching. You keep flipping with the remote from channel to channel, and after a while it all becomes a blur." Overwhelmed viewers may continue to seek refuge in the networks' old and familiar nightly lineup.

All bets are off, however, when the TV revolution reaches its next stage. As interactive technology fully kicks in, the very concept of channels will start to disintegrate. Virtually everything will be instantly accessible to home viewers hooked into the new "full-service" (TV, computer and telephone) network. Not 500 channels, or even 5,000, but just one: your own channel that can call up anything.

The first concept that seems outdated in this post-channel world is the traditional network schedule. No need to be in front of the set at 6:30 p.m. for World News Tonight or at 9 o'clock on Mondays for Murphy Brown. Simply call up the show when you want it. The consumer, rather than the network, takes control of the schedule, and TV viewing becomes akin to browsing through a huge library and making a selection.

In a post-channel world, the traditional broadcast networks (and cable networks too) could, if they're not careful, start to look like superfluous middlemen. ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox might want to indicate combination of functions simply turn into producer distributors with a familiar brand name. (Partly in anticipation of that day, the networks are fighting to be freed from government regulations that have prevented them from owning more than a small portion of the programs they air. They won a victory last week when the Federal Communications Commission significantly relaxed those restrictions.) Predicts W. Russell Neuman, author of The Future of the Mass Audience: "You'll have a television network that, instead of giving you The Cosby Show at 8 o'clock on a particular evening, gives you the peacock instead. Then the peacock turns to you and says, 'What do you want to watch?' And you say, 'Something funny.' The peacock says, 'Something new, or do you want something from our classic archives?' Basically, you'd have a conversation."

Other familiar components of the TV landscape may disappear as well. Local affiliate stations, which have the exclusive right to pick up network shows and distribute them to viewers in their localities, would seem to have no function -- except as suppliers of local news and other community-based programming. The video store may be another dodo bird. When any Hollywood release can be called up instantly on the home screen, a cumbersome system in which people have to trek to the corner video store to rent a tape, then return it a day later, seems like a low-tech anachronism. Film studios might even release a major movie as a high-priced pay-per-view offering at the same time it opens in theaters. (Hollywood might then be less likely to target its blockbusters to the tastes of teenage boys, who are currently the chief ticket buyers.)

The same interactive technology that would enable programming to be customized for individual homes could be put to use by advertisers. "If you can deliver a single program to one home, you can also make sure a certain commercial goes into that particular home," says Larry Gerbrandt, a senior vice president of Paul Kagan Associates, a media-research firm. "Another way you can do it is to make sure that no matter what they're watching in the home, your commercial goes into that show." From spending and demographic information, advertisers could determine that one home should see an ad for a Buick while another is getting the soft sell for a Jeep.

Interactive technology could, moreover, give rise to a hybrid of advertising and infomercials. Viewers could order up lengthier, information-packed ads for such products as insurance or automobiles the same way they order up programming. "When you get ready to buy a car," predicts Geoff Holmes, Time Warner's senior vice president for technology, "you could literally call up the showroom of each of the major car dealers and do a sort of 15-minute browse." Video classifieds could be next: simply scroll through the house listings and call up the ones that interest you for a full video presentation.

The options for new forms of advertising are likely to be attractive enough to ensure that a lot of programming will remain ad supported. The question is whether newly empowered viewers will continue to sit still for the traditional 30-second commercial interrupting a show. If not, more programming of the future may be financed instead by viewer fees. The monthly TV bill could ultimately look something like today's phone bill, with message units reflecting the household's viewing.

SOME FUTURISTS LOOK FORWARD TO this brave new world, forecasting a burst of creative programming for niche audiences and a withering of mass-audience pap. George Gilder, in his book Life After Television, raves that the new technology will "liberate our imaginations from programs regulated by bureaucrats, chosen by a small elite of broadcasting professionals and governed by the need to target the lowest common denominators of public interests." Other seers are as depressed as Gilder is sunny. "I worry seriously about a world in which it's too easy to simply flip around the dial and think you are gaining access to the world of knowledge and meaning," says Todd Gitlin, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "There's a kind of mental and emotional laziness that gets built up."

At this point we should all take a deep breath. The post-channel world may mean the transformation of TV programming, the demise of the mass audience, the death of the networks -- or it may not. While technology pushes in one direction, a host of societal forces are pulling in the other. No telling where the point of equilibrium will be.

One powerful countervailing force is corporate America. No matter how many narrowcasting options are made possible by the new technology, advertisers will still crave network television's unique ability to reach a critical mass of consumers at one swoop. For that reason, if no other, there will be pressure to retain some semblance of a network schedule and programming that appeals to a large cross-section of viewers. One possible scenario: a network show such as 60 Minutes or Roseanne will still "debut" each week at a set time. Many viewers will plant themselves in front of the set to watch at that time; others will call up the show on their screens later. Compare it with the typical movie opening today: the biggest crowds rush to see the film on the first weekend, while others catch up with it in due course. In fact, this could end up increasing the potential mass audience for a name-brand show, since more people would be able to watch an episode of Roseanne whenever they wanted, without having to figure out how to program the VCR.

Other economic and psychological pressures will work in favor of the status quo. For one thing, not every home will be connected to the information superhighway (even now, 39% of American homes are still not hooked up to cable), which means some form of traditional broadcasting will stick around for at least a decade or two. In addition, pressure from Congress and the FCC is likely to protect the role of free broadcasting and local affiliates.

Video on demand, moreover, will not obviate the communal pleasures of watching a popular show at the same time as everyone else in the country. "The shared experience is the value of television, and of network television in particular," asserts CBS president Stringer. "It's part of the nature of the beast, and that is worth conserving." And no matter how dazzling the home screen becomes, people will still want to get out of the house -- to a movie, to the mall and maybe even to the corner video store.

The irony is that the explosion of choices is more likely to reduce, rather than increase, the amount of TV people watch. It will wreak havoc on the TV habit. Turning on the set each evening to see what's on becomes meaningless when "what's on" is essentially "anything you want." Will old movies, sitcoms and talk shows still be viewed as diligently when they are taken off the daily schedule and put in a computer file for instant access? Doubtful. People watch reruns of old network sitcoms mainly because cable channels dust them off and give them a daily time slot. The day The Patty Duke Show is put in a computer bank is the day The Patty Duke Show will start to vanish from human memory.

Consumers demand packaging: someone to select, present, organize, promote. The networks, or some 21st century transmogrification of them, will probably stick around to do that job. But they may be shrunken entities, offering only a few shows a week while concentrating on news, sports and such big events as the Academy Awards. What is likely to disappear are the mediocre fillers, the disposable sitcoms and the cop shows that exist primarily because there's a hole in the schedule on Friday night at 8:30.

That may be good news for the future video landscape. A TV world where viewers get what they want, where the good drives out the bad and the mediocre falls away? Now, there's a revolution worth storming the barricades for.

With reporting by William Tynan/New York