Word: highway
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...Denver setup reveals the weakness behind a lot of the information- superhighway hype: for all their posturing, neither the phone companies nor the cable-TV operators are quite ready to build a fully interactive and automated data highway that stretches from coast to coast. But thanks to a number of technical innovations, they are getting awfully close...
...that nothing was going to change much in telecommunications or television until fiber was brought all the way to the home, a Herculean task that was expected to cost $200 billion to $400 billion and take more than 20 years to complete. The breakthrough that is bringing the info highway home much sooner than expected is the discovery, by both the phone companies and the cable industry, that it is possible to get around the bottlenecks in their respective last miles without replacing the entire system...
What shape the highway takes will depend to some extent on who ends up building it. The cable companies tend to think in terms of entertaining mass audiences. Their emphasis is on expanded channels, video on demand and video- shopping networks. They admit the possibility of more special-interest programming - such as MTV, the Discovery Channel and Black Entertainment Television - but only if they can be convinced that the demographics are sufficiently attractive...
...computer users, and some enthusiasts within the Clinton Administration, tend to see the information highway as a glorified extension of computer bulletin boards. Vice President Gore talks about making it possible for a schoolchild in Arkansas to have access to a book stored on a computer in the Library of Congress or take a course at a distant college. Mitch Kapor, co- founder of a computer watchdog group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wants the superhighway to do for video what computer bulletin boards did for print - make it easy for everyone to publish ideas to an audience eager...
...even easier to picture the information highway being exploited to make a lot of money. The powers that be in entertainment and programming have their eyes on the $4 billion spent each year on video games, the $12 billion on video rentals, the $65 billion on residential telephone service, the $70 billion on catalog shopping. They are eager to find out how much customers will shell out to see last night's Seinfeld or the latest Spielberg. They are exploring the market for addictive video games and trying to figure out how much they can charge for each minute...