Costs are much higher in broadcast television or movies, so it’s tougher to try something risky. In the early days of TV there were only a few stations in each geographic area and most programming was targeted for the broadest possible audience.
Cable television increased the number of programming choices, although it wasn’t started with that intention. It began in the late 1940s as a way of providing better television reception to outlying areas. Community antennas to feed a local cable system were erected by viewers whose broadcast reception was blocked by hills. No one then imagined that communities with perfectly good broadcast television reception would pay to have cable so they could watch a steady stream of music videos or channels that offered nothing but news or weather twenty-four hours a day.
When the number of stations carried went from three or five to twenty-four or thirty-six, the programming dynamic changed. If you were in charge of programming for the thirtieth channel, you wouldn’t attract much of an audience if you just tried to imitate channels 1 through 29. Instead, cable channel programmers were forced to specialize. Like special-interest magazines and newsletters, these new channels attract viewers by appealing to strong interests held by a relatively smaller number of enthusiasts. This is in contrast to general programming, which tries to provide something for everyone. But the costs of production and the small number of channels still limit the number of television programs produced.
Although it costs far less to publish a book than to broadcast a TV show, it’s still a lot compared to the cost involved in electronic publishing. To get a book into print a publisher has to agree to pay the up-front expense of manufacturing, distribution, and marketing. The information highway will create a medium with entry barriers lower than any we have ever seen. The Internet is the greatest self-publishing vehicle ever. Its bulletin boards have demonstrated some of the changes that will occur when everyone has access to low-friction distribution and individuals can post messages, images, or software of their own creation.
Bulletin boards have contributed a lot to the popularity of the Internet. To be published there all you have to do is type your thoughts and post them someplace. This means that there is a lot of garbage on the Internet, but also a few gems. A typical message is only a page or two long. A single message posted on a popular bulletin board or sent to a mailing list might reach and engage millions of people. Or it might sit there and languish with no impact whatsoever. The reason anyone is willing to risk the latter eventuality is the low distribution friction. The network bandwidth is so great and the other factors that contribute to the cost are so low that nobody thinks about the cost of sending messages. At worst you might be a bit embarrassed if your message just sits there and nobody responds to it. On the other hand, if your message is popular, a lot of people will see it, forward it as e-mail to their friends, and post their own comments on it.
It is amazingly fast and inexpensive to communicate with bulletin boards. Mail or telephone communications are fine for a one-on-one discussion, but they are also pretty expensive if you are trying to communicate with a group. It costs nearly a dollar to print and mail a letter and on average about that much for a long-distance phone call. And to make such a call you have to know the number and have coordinated a time to talk. So it takes considerable time and effort to contact even a modest-size group. On a bulletin board all you have to do is type your message in once and it’s available to everyone.
Bulletin boards on the Internet cover a wide range of topics. Some postings are not serious. Somebody will send a message with something humorous in it to a mailing list or post it somewhere. If it seems funny enough, it starts being forwarded as e-mail. In late 1994 this happened with a phony press release about Microsoft buying the Catholic Church. Thousands of copies were distributed inside Microsoft on our e-mail system. I was sent more than twenty copies as various friends and colleagues inside and outside the company chose to forward them.
There are many more serious examples of the networks’ being used to mobilize those who share a common concern or interest. During the recent political conflict in Russia, both sides were able to contact people throughout the world through postings on electronic bulletin boards. The networks let you contact people you have never met or heard from who happen to share an interest.
Information published by electronic posting is grouped by topic. Each bulletin board or newsgroup has a name, and anyone interested can “hang out” there. There are lists of interesting newsgroups or you can browse names that sound interesting. If you wanted to communicate about paranormal phenomena, you would go to the newsgroup alt.paranormal. If you wanted to discuss that sort of thing with others who don’t believe in it, you would go to sci.skeptic. Or you could connect to copernicus.bbn.com and look in National School Network Testbed for a set of lesson plans used by kindergarten through twelfth-grade teachers. Almost any topic you can name has a group communicating about it on the network.
We have seen that Gutenberg’s invention started mass publishing, but the literacy it engendered ultimately led to a great deal more person-to-person correspondence. Electronic communication developed the other way around. It started out as electronic mail, a way to communicate to small groups. Now millions of people are taking advantage of the networks’ low-friction distribution to communicate on a wide scale via various forms of posting.
The Internet has enormous potential, but it’s important for its continuing credibility that expectations aren’t cranked too high. The total number of users of the Internet, and of commercial on-line services such as Prodigy, CompuServe, and America Online, is still a very small portion of the population. Surveys indicate that nearly 50 percent of all PC users in the United States have a modem, but fewer than about 10 percent of those users subscribe to an on-line service. And the attrition rate is very high—many subscribers drop off after less than a year.
Significant investments will be required to develop great on-line content that will delight and excite PC users and raise the number on-line from 10 percent up to 50 percent, or even the 90 percent I believe it will become. Part of the reason this sort of investment isn’t happening today is that simple mechanisms for authors and publishers to charge their users or to be paid by advertisers are just being developed.
Commercial on-line services collect revenue, but they have been paying information providers royalties of only 10 percent to 30 percent of what customers pay. Although the provider probably knows the customers and market better, pricing—the way the customer is charged—and marketing are both controlled by the service. The resulting revenue stream is simply not large enough to encourage the information providers to create exciting new on-line information.
Over the next several years the evolution of on-line services will solve these problems and create an incentive for suppliers to furnish great material. There will be new billing options monthly subscriptions, hourly rates, charges per item accessed, and advertising payments—so that more revenue flows to the information providers. Once that happens a successful new mass medium will come into existence. This might take several years and a new generation of network technology, such as ISDN and cable modems, but one way or another it will happen. When it does, it will open tremendous opportunities for authors, editors, directors—every creator of intellectual property.