Word: highway
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Welcome to the information highway. It's not here yet, but it's arriving sooner than you might think. Already the major cable operators and telephone companies are competing - and collaborating - to bring this communicopia to your neighborhood, while the Clinton Administration is scrambling to see how the government can join...
Suddenly the brave new world of video phones and smart TVs that futurists have been predicting for decades is not years away but months. The final bottleneck - the "last mile" of wiring that takes information from the digital highway to the home - has been broken, and a blue-chip corporate lineup has launched pilot projects that could be rolled out to most of the country within the next six or seven years. Now the only questions are whether the public wants it and how much it is willing...
...focus on the number of channels in a TV system is to miss the point of where the revolution is headed. When the information highway comes to town, channels and nightly schedules will begin to fade away and could eventually disappear. In this postchannel world, more and more of what one wants to see will be delivered on demand by a local supplier (either a cable system, a phone company or a joint venture) from giant computer disks called file servers. These might store hundreds of movies, the current week's broadcast programming and all manner of video publications, catalogs...
...should own the right-of-way. Computer companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun want to build the huge file servers that will act as video and information libraries. Such software companies as Microsoft and Apple want to build the operating systems that will serve as the data highway's traffic cops, controlling the flow of information to and from each viewer's screen. Meanwhile, TV Guide is racing against InSight, TV Answer and Discovery Communications to design electronic navigators that will tell viewers what's on TV and where to find...
During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton and Gore made building a "data superhighway" a centerpiece of their program to revitalize the U.S. economy, comparing it with the government's role in creating the interstate highway system in the 1950s. The budget proposal the Administration submitted in February includes nearly $5 billion over the next four years to develop new software and equipment for the information highway...