Word: channelized
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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...
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...
...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...