Was it Worth Doing?

 Last update: 2005/03/08

For a person who has spent the past 15 years trying to shepherd media from the analogue to the digital space, the current situation is a source of sadness. Making the transition possible required the long-term development of a range of disparate technologies and their integration in a way that creators would achieve untold levels of expression, users would attain higher levels of satisfaction enjoying new communication experiences, and manifold players would find new business opportunities by providing products and services to users. This is not the world we live in today, but let's see exactly how things stand. 

One way to use digital media today is to ignore that they are digital and pretend that media continue being analogue. You take a VCD disc, you slot it into the player and watch the movie. What is the difference with a VHS cassette? Well, the VCD is smaller, but people like their VCDs no less and probably no more than they like their VHS cassettes. Now take a DVD, the only difference with VCD is the video and audio clarity, an important feature compared with VHS, but the experience is overall unchanged. You still have to go to the shop and buy the disc or rent it choosing from a necessarily limited set on offer. What is the gain of the different players? CPs have another outlet for their media, but this is essentially substitution of the existing media. Manufacturers make new devices, but they are just a replacement of the old ones. End users watch more or less the same stuff. This is not necessarily bad, it is like when the CD replaced the LP. It is business as usual, with CPs able to publish old stuff that looks new and manufacturers pushing for device replacement. We did not need Digital Media to achieve that. We could have done it 20 years ago with the Laser Disc (LD).

More of the same is offered by DAB. Here, too, digital content (audio in this case) is packaged in a way that makes it look exactly like an old FM radio. Users are unimpressed: why should they buy an expensive receiver to get the same old stuff? Manufacturers do not sell and SPs do not gain.

Digital television is another story. The ability to offer a large number (a few tens, even a few hundreds) of simultaneous TV programs is great news and a step toward the fulfillment of the promises of DM. Is it really so? Pay TV services are all walled gardens. You pay the entrance ticket and you get in: you are amidst green meadows, fragrant flowers and shady trees. But users soon discover that yes, everything is nice, but the walls are too constraining. Outside, in the greater world, there are much more varied, good and new things. End users are not that happy and the churn out rate shows that. SPs apparently gain because they think they have created a new business, but you should look at their accounts to see that they are lying to themselves.

Another instance of digital television that keeps on drawing a lot of attention is DTT. In more than one country people have already tried going digital on the terrestrial network. One version, making it pay TV, did not work, no matter whether there is competition or not. Another version - making DTT unencrypted - reduces DM to the level of "let's save a few MHz of UHF bandwidth". SPs do not gain and end users are not enthralled. Manufacturers will gain, but only if analogue television will be phased out by the force of law and governments subidise STBs. Before reaching to the national treasury they may try selling the idea of e-government. Fine, but one day somebody will have to explain what it is and why we should replace a working system to offer people something they are already doing with their PCs connected to the Internet today. The only positive side of the story is that governments may gain some money in the future by auctioning an emptied slice of the UHF spectrum. 

Internet streaming is yet another story. An SP can use the Internet to stream digital media to end users, as is done today successfully with Internet radio. Today there are thousands of radio stations on the Internet streaming all sort of audio content and we may think that this is the first case of the "all content at my fingertip" dream come true. Well, no. You still have to "tune-in" to know what is available where. More offerings, yes, but no different from 80 years ago when people searched for a radio station on their dials. Somebody must tell Internet radio people that there is a technology called metadata that can be applied to audio signals. And in standard form, please!

Video streaming is a more complicated case. Video coding has made great progress, but if you want to have a quality that resembles VHS, you still need a bitrate in excess of, say, 500 kbit/s. As long as the number of users remains small, video streaming is a possibility enjoyed by the few, but if it becomes a mass phenomenon, the Internet of today collapses. Actually this was the idea behind one of the frenzies of the bubble: build high-capacity transmission trunks because video will require lots of it. People thought in the same way as I today hop to a web page in Auckland, New Zealand, to another in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, requiring a few kbit/s, people would do this for video sources requiring hundreds of Mbit/s each. Not so easy. Long distance transmission is a problem, but that has always been kind of easy. The real problem is in the access. This is the problem that must be solved first, the other will follow - I mean once rights holders are guaranteed that their content will not leak.

From this short list it appears that Digital Media have not provided anything substantially different than people had 10, 15 or even more years ago. Yes, devices may be more compact and lightweight, they may provide crisper pictures and better audio, there may be somewhat more offeings than there used to be, there may be a few more business players or, maybe the players before have got new skins. But where is the advantage in all this?

There are millions of people who are offered by P2P networks the kind of new experiences that would justify the huge investments that the scientific and business communities have committed in the last few decades. The problem is that, if the mechanism put in place by these networks reward users with new experiences, they also cause substantial economic losses to rights holders. This is not the only shortcoming: if you are a dog, P2P networks will keep you such. P2P networks damage the interests of the well-established and do not help the well-endowed to achieve the recognition they deserve.

It is a dark world with few glimmers. 

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