The creation of hybrid multimedia content makes sense for the television industries in an age of competing media forms. The convergence of television and PC technologies, with the attendant promises of interactivity, has spurred the development of multimedia programming, particularly in statistics-heavy categories such as news, sports, and financial investment. Many major television and cable news networks around the world have a strong presence on the web, using streaming video and complementary programming to extend their brand recognition. Television network websites are increasingly designed as portals into a more general online experience, offering program guides, search engines, stock quotes, news, sports, and interactive game, chat, and e-mail functions. In addition, broadband offers multiple venues for existing programming content, whether a single program is broadcast across multiple outlets from television to the Internet or whether it is “repurposed” for online interactive engagement. Through the use of set-top boxes and various subscription schemes, the television viewer gains access to an array of additional programming services that build upon and enhance the primary broadcast. At the same time, there is a significant opportunity for the development of original programming for broadband distribution, including “parallel programming” that spins off from original broadcast content, and original programming like animated short films or the increasingly popular web soaps and reality-based webcam programs. Internet game shows, spun off from TV standards such as Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, take advantage of “incomplete content,” where the user is prompted to fill in missing content such as the answer to a question. Here, the traditional back-and-forth of the game show (which dictates the textual parameters of the established television genre) can be maintained in a familiar, demarcated form of interactivity. At the same time, a company like Sony (which owns both game shows) can enter into alliances with interactive television companies to produce set top boxes designed to facilitate game interaction. While it offers possibilities for engagement with broader forms of electronic commerce—including video-on-demand, gambling, and multiplayer interactive gaming—broadband technology also affords the creation of new digital formats for television.

Programming designed for broadband delivery blurs traditional generic distinctions between the web page, the newspaper, and the television program. At the same time, because broadband operates at the effective conjuncture of the telephone, cable television and satellite, and computer software and hardware industries, its technology permeates traditional industrial boundaries. With business models garnered from a number of communication technologies—including traditional telephony service, pay television, Internet service providers, and hardware and software development—broadband involves the synergy of a vast array of network services. Not surprisingly, cable companies that also provide consumer broadband access are now developing set-top boxes, which bundle a number of these services together, providing digital video, high-speed data and Internet connectivity and, most recently, cable residential telephony.

Television broadcasters in many Western countries are updating to digital transmission (in the United States, they are mandated by law to do so). However, advertisers, broadcasting’s traditional source of revenue, are unwilling to subsidize the cost of modernization by paying higher rates. Instead, media corporations have focused on developing a “walled garden” of proprietary content with access based on subscription services, contributing to the gradual erosion of free-to-air broadcasting on a large scale. The commercial control of delivery conduits is the most crucial issue here, and content industries (like film and television studios) have entered into mergers with companies that have access to the pipelines of digital delivery. Coupling programming and delivery under the same corporate umbrella, so the commercial logic goes, subsidizes the unending task of technology development by using content that has already been tested in another media. The massive technological investment in broadband infrastructure is therefore supported by the use of established content providers in order to minimize risk and maximize subscriptions.

The worldwide climate of industrial deregulation, which allows for cross-ownership and vertical integration, has facilitated the “merger mania” that dominates the media trade today. For example, the merger of America Online (AOL) and Time Warner attests to the powerful presence of vertically integrated new media firms, merging AOL’s Internet portal services with access to both original content and Time Warner’s extensive library of programming. AOL Time Warner also has an exclusive contract with RoadRunner, the second largest provider of residential broadband service in the United States. While broadband platforms for content distribution and exhibition might offer independent producers greater opportunities to showcase their product, smaller production companies have no way to deal with the tremendous leveraging power available to the newly merged new media conglomerate. In addition, the gradual shifting of the computer industry away from hardware manufacture and software development, and toward Internet service provider and multi-mimedia content developer, is indicative of the synergistic logic of commercialized new media. In 1997, for example, Microsoft acquired a significant stake in Comcast, the third largest cable system operator in the United States. The same year, Microsoft also purchased the WebTV networks, a move clearly designed to bolster the penetration of web-based services into non-PC equipped households by providing Internet access to ordinary television sets via preexisting telephone connections.

Traditional television broadcasters in the United States and other countries have often viewed the streaming of television signals over computer networks with considerable skepticism, lobbying against the adoption of technological standards to make convergence a practical reality. Nevertheless, many in the industrial and regulatory community agree that a combination of compelling multimedia content and high-speed data connectivity will drive broadband subscriptions (many broadband developers insist that it is easier to design information services rather than produce entertainment programs). While the traditional television industries’ ambivalent relationship to distributing over broadband networks is partly a function of intellectual property concerns, the Internet is increasingly important as a programming venue, especially when enabled by broadband connectivity. For the first time, Internet rights were negotiated separately from broadcast rights for the 2004 Olympics, which testifies to their centrality in the new media landscape.

The Internet is simultaneously a transmitter technology and a delivery conduit, an exhibition and point-of-purchase site, a distribution philosophy, a content gathering and talent differentiating device, an advertising platform, and a globally linked network of copying machines. These multiple (and sometimes divergent) forms of address signal the array of possibilities that the Internet makes available to the traditional television industries. Even the single act of viewing either parallel or repurposed programming can attach a number of different profitable schemes for the television industry: from being a sale (the Internet as a point-of-purchase), to a broadcast (the Internet as transmitter technology), to a mechanical copy (the Internet as a copy clearance center) (see Mann, 2000). It is inevitable that the television networks will become even more interested in the “value-added” opportunities afforded by the Internet. Television and cable broadcasters can take advantage of a number of opportunities from the positioning of content delivered via broadband networks: tracking services (providing instant audience feedback and consumer mining capability), in formation management tools like electronic programming guides (EPGs), video-on-demand (built from preexisting audiovisual libraries), and personal video recording services (like TiVo). As digital television continues to fragment audiences in the multichannel environment, electronic program guides and other navigation aids become crucial sites for the recruitment and influence of audience preference.

However, the possibilities for ownership abuse are clear, and telecommunications regulators in Europe are on the watch for equal access to EPGs and other “conditional access” systems. Indeed, for all the techno-futurist proclamations of radical technological and programming possibility, broadband invites the perennial issues that have accompanied the emergence of communications networks from the telegraph to the cable television: intellectual property, technological standards (particularly compression standards and backward compatibility), content regulation, and regulatory issues around the preservation of the public access versus the commercial logic of media ownership and delivery. Government intervention in the administration of broadband service is commonplace around the world, including the production of cultural heritage content for Canadian new media, the European Union’s extension of “must carry” rules requiring that digital cable and satellite operators reserve space for consumers to access public service broadcasting, and calls for the Australian government’s support of subsidies for universal broadband access and the facilitation of export opportunity.

Of course, any export of new media technology takes place on a terrain defined by uneven development on a global scale. Certainly, world PC sales were estimated at well over 80 million units in 1997, approaching the 120 million color TV sets sold the same year. Yet, of over 3.5 million homes with broadband connection worldwide in early 2000, over 2.5 million were in the United States, 500,000 in the Asia Pacific region, 340,000 in Western Europe (concentrated in the Netherlands and Austria), and 25,000 in Latin America. New research suggests that broadband users in the United States will surpass dialup users by 2007, with numbers growing from 10.8 million broadband users in 2001 to 41.7 million in 2007. Although 45 million U.S. households were online with dialup connections at the turn of the 21st century, with less than 5 million possessing either DSL or cable modem hookup, an estimated half of American television households were broadband-ready by mid- 2004. Korea has the highest broadband penetration in the world, at around 10 percent, with adult entertainment and gaming offering the most common programming choices. Canada ranks second in broadband connectivity.

At the same time, there are tremendous and systemic inequalities in basic telecommunications access. For example, Africa is home to 12 percent of the world’s population, but has only 2 percent of its telephone lines, and telephone penetration in India is .7 per 1,000 people. Clearly, there is a need for installation of noncommercial and nonhierarchical community infrastructures, the continued use of narrowband technologies that power tactical media networks and free and open-source software movements around the world, and even the social benefits of pirated hardware and software technologies (see Sundaram, 2000).

Convergence technologies are nothing new in the history of television. Television pictures were sent over telephone wires as early as 1927, and fiber optic technology has existed since the 1950s. By the mid- 1990s, low-resolution video became available to dial-up modem users using new video software. Now, compressed audiovisual (AV) data could be sent from an encoding site (e.g., an Internet server) to the consumer in real-time in buffered form. In this way, AV data can be played before the entire file is received, a close approximation of the traditional broadcasting experience. Rather than waiting for enormous files to be fully downloaded, the PC user equipped with the proper decoding software can now interact with the media as it “streams” onto their desktop, with enough material stored in a temporary buffer to allow smooth playback.

With broadband’s capacity for greater data transmission rates, the corporate owners of intellectual property are also fond of the streaming format, since it does not involve the downloading of the full file onto a consumer’s computer, which would make it more susceptible to piracy and retransmission. The fidelity and inexhaustible reproductive quality of the digital image have pushed the commercial media into a lobbying frenzy for the circumscription of viewer’s rights, especially the strict maintenance of the bar between creators and users of new media. However, the televisual future of broadband will be defined by three interrelated factors that have traditionally shaped the private consumption of image media: quality, cost, and malleability. This means that all the familiar issues are still in play: the development of genres and programming forms suited to the emergent technology and the fidelity of the transmitted image; the price of procuring the image, including transmission speed and the carrying capacity of its network; and, most importantly, the options available for the consumer to engage the image across a variety of delivery platforms and viewing occasions.