COMMUNICATIONS & MEDIA (Mini-articles) Index

Want to know if your house is likely to be flooded? Want to know which areas have seen outbreaks of salmonella in eggs? Want to know about the safety record of your local factory or the pollution in your local river? You can find out only at a price. This is the nature of "open government" in the UK in 1995. The government, which so loudly proclaims it is opening the door to official information, is putting up a subtle barrier: cost.

When the British workplace safety monitoring group, Hazard, askd for details of Health & Safety Executive improvement and prohibition notices to factories, it expected to have to pay. Nevertheless, the group was stunned when the HSE wrote back and said that the price for the information under the government's new open government rules would be £226, 399-41p. The National Rivers Authority charges over £100 for two pages of data. And on and on it goes in almost every government department.

In April 1994, William Waldegrave introduced the Code of Practice on Access to Government Information (which helped to stop a putative Freedom of Information Act in its tracks) and to provide "timely and accessible information" to the citizen. Instead, senior civil servants in a bewildering variety of schemes are now charging heavily for the information.

Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information says that government moves towards openness have been accompanied at every stage by charging regimes which actually block access to information.

From an article in the Independent on Sunday, 18 June 1995

The stakes in the race to offer the first satellite-based, global, hand-held mobilke phone service have risen sharply. TRW, the US aerospace group, has finally been awarded patent protection for its design of the global phone system. And Immarsat-P, the competitor most affected by TRW's patent claim,yesterday said it had chosen Hughes Space and Communications to build the 12 satellites needed for its service in a contract worth more than $1.3 billion. Hughes, a leading manufacturer of commercial satellites, plans to become a strategic partner in the Inmarsat-P consortium with a substantial but undisclosed investment.

Both TRW and the London-based Inmarsat organisation plan to begin operations in 1999. Their competitors include Iridium, a consortium headed by Motorola of the US, which is already ahead with the design and construction of its system. Last week, Iridium said it was raising $300 million in loans to fund developments on top of $1 billion in equity raised earlier.

TRW is the principal partner in a consortium called Odyssey. Earlier this year, it claimed the US Patent Office had given it exclsuive rights to a satellite orbit 10,000 km above the Earth's surface, which would have excluded the Inmarsat-P consortium. The patent was withdrawn at the last moment for revision. Odyssey said that a new patent covering 35 aspects of its system rather than the 50 originally claimed, has been issued, and they maintain that any imitator would have difficulty in launching a commercially viable medium Earth orbit system without infringing their patents. Thus it would seem that the patent covers novel features in Odyssey's design, but falls short of excluding competitors from its chosen Earth orbit. Inmarsat has completed its first round of equity funding while Odyssey intends soon to announce its investors and the amounts raised. Communications analysts do not believe that more than two or three operators can be commercially viable, so the race to provide hand-held communications from space in on in earnest..

From an article in the Financial Times, 21 July 1995

Nicholas Negroponte's new book, "Being Digital", is the latest vision of the brave new world being spawned by advanced in computing, multimedia and the communications industries. In Negroponte's digital world, there is a social chasm between the "digital literate" young and "digital homeless" middle-aged. Only the former, he claims, will be able to succeed in a universe which is undergoing an "irrevocable and unstoppable" transformation from physical atoms to digital bits.

Negroponte writes: "Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living." He cites an array of statistics in support--the 30 million estimated to be on Internet, the 35 per cent of American families that now have a PC (50 per cent among households with a teenager) and so on. And the picture he paints is boundlessly optimistic: a digitalised American dream. Wholly new content will emerge, together with new economic models "and a likely cottage industry of information and entertainment providers". Even the world of nations may crack at the hands of the new generation "emerging from the digitial landscape free of many of the old prejudices".

Negroponte expects the cost of computers to fall fast so that even the poor will be able to buy into this digital dream. As he rightly says: "Mother Nature and commercial interests, more than regulatory incentives, will make fibre happen naturally." And they will do so in their own good time.

From an article in the Financial Times, 10 April 95

Video-on-demand is turning out to be the lass leader rather than the "killer application" of the interactive media revolution, according to a study by the Stanford Research Institute. SRI believes video-on-demand, as a substitute for renting video tapes, would attract subscribers to an interactive network. The problem would be cost.

SRI says that, at least in the short-term, digital broadcasts offering near video-on-demand--showing a small number of films at staggered starts so that the viewer is never more than 15 or 20 minutes away from the start of a movie--withh be "the right service" compared with full-service VOD technologies. So if VOD is no is not going to be the financial engine which will drive interactive networks, what will?

SRI points out that the most obvious answers--interactive shopping and advertising--are hardly out of the conceptual stage. The problem with both is that they require substantial amounts of bandwidth and use of video servers that hold database information. This use is "free" to the customer but not to the operator, and potential customers could be exploring the virtual mall all day without any purchases. In the longer term, when the cost of bandwidth comes, such a scheme may be feasible. As a result, everyone, from network operators to equipment suppliers, is trying to include business applications into the package in order to supply services for smaller businesses and professionals working from home. Games, too, might sell well.

From the Financial Times, 5 June 1995

All of us are involved in a change from an industrial society to a global informational society. It means that any person on the planet who has a computer, a modem and a telephone, has access to a world of information. For a modest cost, you can search for information on any topic that interests you from Atoms to Zoology, from entertainment to recipes to medicine to outer space. Previously, much information has been the exclusive province of remote specialists or only to be found in libraries. Today you can have an astonishing wealth of information in a matter of minutes without leaving home.

The changes in worldwide culture resulting from the arrival of the Global Society will be as sweeping, and as traumatic, and as beneficial as the changes brought about a few centuries ago by the change from Agricultural Society to the Consumer Society -- the so-called Industrial Revolution. The world went from a world of farms to a world of farms and factories. And the farms were never the same afterwards -- for the methods changed, and factory methods were applied to farms. So with the Information Revolution. As we now change from the Consumer Society to the Global Society, we are moving from a world of farms and factories to a world of farms, factories and communications. The new methods of computers and communications are being applied to farms and to factories and to global society.

You and I will be swept along by these changes and we will need computer skills. Whereas, the Agricultural Society had a love affair with the horse, and the Consumer Society had a love afair with the car, so the Global Society will have a love affair with the personal computer. So make friends with your computer. Get to know its foibles. Understand the software and systems it uses. This is your new workaday companion in the business of living in the new Global Society.

tomp@cruzio.com

The computer industry is rising on a snake-charmer's rope. Straight up, but if life's experience teaches anything, destined to descend one day. The practitioners of microchip technology are clever. The stars among them are possessed of vibrant minds and boundless energy. They have already produced a great many wondrous gadgets including the device on which I am composing and preparing to despatch these words. The gee-gaws they are designing today are likely to be even more breathtaking. Yet the performance cannot go on forever. The rope disappears into the sky; humanity is ill-equipped to follow it.

At Intel, where they make the Pentium chip, not everyone is sure about that. Avram Miller, whose task it is to think ahead, reflects on the growth potential of his company's products. We will live in an environment in which, among other things, voice-operated computers will be all around us doing our bidding, manipulating everything in our homes and places of work. There will be convulsive changes in every industry. At Oracle, whose group of palaces sits by a lake, the executives are particularly convincing because their core activity, the management of digitised information, is aimed primarily at a business market. This is something we can see, measure, kick. On the other hand, John Batelle,and the editor and founder of Wired, a magazine that did not exist three years ago, is dedicated the thinking about computers as a cult, an embryonic religion, a political movement, as bringing in a new libertarian era . The new culture, we are told, will not resemble anything we have yet seen. It is arising around us at a pace nobody in the receding generation could understand.

I have toyed with Wired-style notions and, yes, computers have already changed a lot of things in our work. They may well alter the way some, or most of us, spend our leisure time. Home shopping, home banking and outworking all exist. But a new kind of world? A different kind of humanity? Forget it! Cyberspace is a popular cliche, an illusion. Look out of the window, see real people on the pavement. The rope collapses in a heap.

From Financial Times 15 July 1995

The media and entertainment industries are to urge the government to introduce a transmission right to ensure that intellectual copyright owners are paid when their images, words or sounds are distributed on the Internet.

The transmission right is par of a package of proposals which will be presented soon to the Department of Trade and Industry by a working party composed of representatives of music, media, film and computer companies including the BBC, IBM, Pearson, PolyGram and bertelsmann. The working party was formed earlier this year as part of the DTI's multimedia taskforce. It was asked to examine how intellectual property rights would be affected by new forms of digital communication and to consider what action should be taken. Mr Duncan Campbell-Smith, the Pearson executive who chaired the working party, said it had conclusded that existing legislation did not offer adequate protection in some instances, such as relaying music on the Internet. However, the working party is convinced that copyright law could be satisfactorily amended to accommodate new forms of digital transmission as it has been in the past to incorporate the emergence of radio and television.

The transmission right would enable a record company to claim a royalty payment if one of its singles was relayed on the Internet, just as if it was played on television or radio. If the company could not track down the source of transmission it might be able to claim the royalty from the Internet service provider. Alternatively, the service provider could be compelled to block transmissions. The working party will also urge the government to clarify its position on the application of libel and obscenity laws to interactive communications such as bulletin boards.

Another proposal is that the system of copyright clearance should be simplified to take account of the more intricate requirements of new products such as CD-Roms. Up to 100 different rights of many different sounds, images and pieces of text are used on a single CD-Rom, far more than for books and films which generally contain fewer rights.

From the Financial Times, 5 July 1995

Forget about "video-on-demand". The latest buzzword on the lips of media mavens is "advertising-on-demand". The target is the Internet-- and, in particular, the 5 to 8 million users of the World Wide Web. At last count, in April, there were 25,000 web-sites -- up from a few hundred a year or so before. The number is doubling every 80 days or so. And most of the growth is coming from companies advertising their wares to on-line users.

Surveys show that most people browsing the Web are educated, well-heeled and potentially keen to use the Internet for serious shopping. But companies have been reluctant to commit their advertising dollars. One reason is that there are no independently-audited figures for the number of people examining their products, akin to Nielsen TV ratings or Arbitron figures for radio listeners. On the Internet, there is nothing more reliable than a web-site creator's in-house calculations. Organisations with web-sites of their own use software that logs how many times their site has been "hit" by someone browsing the Internet. But this can be misleading. A WWW Home Page can comprise literally dozens of small graphic files and separate bits of text, access to each of which can count as a hit. Penthouse magazine claims 2 million hits a day for its web-site, but only 100,000 actual visits -- many of those are believed to be repeats by the same people browsing furtively while at work.

Now the researchers are moving in. The biggest is Nielsen media Research itself, which has signed an agreement with HotWired, the web-site affiliated with Wired magazine, to measure the content-provider's cyberspace traffic. Nielsen has also teamed up with a television show-tester, ASI Market Research, and a consumer research firm, Yankelovich Parners, to form ANYwhere Online. The aim is to publish ratings showing the popularity of various business sites on the Web. Other contenders are Internet Profiles, Digital Planet, MCA, MGM/UA and Young & Rubicam. Tracking usage is easy; knowing something about the users is much harder. Browsers on the Internet are reluctant to give details about themselves. Perhaps prizes will have to be given away in order to persuade browsers to fill out questionnaires. Perhaps devices will have to be installed in users' homes and measure their Internet behaviour. Anything less will be guesswork.