Luego de los nombramientos en TVN y el cuestionamiento que se le ha hecho al modelo de televisión pública en Chile, un artículo sobre el futuro de la televisión digital publicado en The Economist.

POWER IN YOUR HAND
Apr 11th 2006
The Economist

The digital era is supposed to revolutionise television. The way people
use it will change, argues Sophie Pedder, but television will remain
mainly a vehicle for mass entertainment

THE Californian sun is searing and the palm trees are tilting in the
breeze, but the workers on the back lot are touching up icicles and
snowdrifts. This is the set of “ER”, a medical drama for television,
and the far corner of the lot at Warner Brothers is doubling for
Chicago. Just across the way, past the peanut-butter-coloured walls of
the vast studio sound-stages, beckons the dazzling white entrance to
the White House. Off the set, an improbably tanned actor, Rob Lowe, is
shooting basketballs into a hoop. This set is Washington, DC, home to
“The West Wing”, a drama about an American president. Round the corner,
they are dressing the interior set for “Friends”, another hugely
successful TV show, set in New York.

These are just three of America’s most popular TV shows, set in three
different corners of the country and exported around the globe. But
they are all shot by one studio, on one lot, in the shadow of the
Hollywood Hills. The bulk of the stuff that fills prime-time television
screens in America is filmed between two valleys in Los Angeles, and is
in the grip of a handful of production companies belonging to large
media conglomerates. Over the past decade the country’s television
industry has enjoyed a bonanza that has brought millions of dollars, an
ice-cool attitude and an air of entitlement to this West Coast city.
The men in black T-shirts picking at salads in the smarter Beverly
Hills restaurants–writers, producers, TV executives, actors and
agents–have been the beneficiaries of the most sustained boom anyone
in the business can recall. Movies may still have the edge for glamour,
but as a business television dwarfs feature films, even in America:
with a total turnover of $100 billion, it is around six times bigger.

UNDIMMED ALLURE
Despite the formidable array of new gadgets–electronic games,
computers, portable MP3-players, mobile telephony–that is now
rivalling the television set for attention, the flickering image on the
75-year-old box still captivates people. The average American spends
four hours a day watching television, and keeps the set turned on for
longer than that; the average German, Briton and Frenchman spends over
three hours. Watching TV was the single most popular way to spend an
evening, Americans said in a recent Gallup poll: three times more so
than seeing their friends. And according to research by MTV, a
music-video channel owned by Viacom, an American media giant, even the
widespread use of the Internet has not eaten significantly into TV
time. “In most cases,” says Betsy Frank, head of research and planning
at MTV Networks, “what MTV viewers do less of, now that they are
spending more time on the Internet, is sleeping, talking and personal
hygiene.”

Television continues to enjoy a robust hold on the popular imagination.
There are few social phenomena, pernicious or benign, for which
television is not being held responsible by someone or other: the
stifling of children’s imagination, the increase in obesity, the
decline of the family meal, the erosion of morality, the vulgarisation
of taste, the worship of celebrity, the promotion of violence, the
undermining of authority, the maintenance of American cultural
hegemony–and the spread of democracy.

At the height of the dotcom frenzy, which helped feed the television
boom, a broader revolution was promised for the humble TV set itself.
Just as the computer and mobile telephone were to be transformed into
devices for receiving and consuming entertainment, the television was
to become an all-purpose screen through which people would engage in a
dizzying array of multimedia experiences. Viewers would treat the TV
like the PC: indeed, the two devices would merge into one. From the
ease of their living-room, they would shop for groceries, choose their
holidays, browse a department store, educate their children, send
e-mails, play games, place a bet, even pick their own ending to an
episode of a favourite soap.

Thanks to the flush times, the cable and satellite-television companies
and broadcasters have spent huge amounts of money on installing and
upgrading their systems to deliver digital multi-channel television
into people’s homes. Governments have egged them on, because the switch
to digital frees up part of the spectrum, which they can then auction
for other purposes. Digital delivery, which provides far more bandwidth
than old-fashioned analogue distribution, not only provides better
picture quality, it also allows more stuff to be squeezed down the
pipes–and for signals to be sent back from the living-room. For
viewers, this “interactivity” means they can “talk” to their TV sets
just as they can interact with their computers and the Internet.

All this promises a wholly new television experience, argue the
enthusiasts, where people will call up what they want, when they want.
Ultimately, this could mean that the mass experience of sitting down in
front of the box to watch scheduled shows all at the same time is over.
Audiences will fragment into tiny pieces, and TV channels will become
narrow specialists to serve them. Stamp collectors will watch
Philatelist TV; pot-holers the Cave Channel. Indeed, viewers will not
need to bother with channels at all, but will simply download
programmes from a vast menu.

“Erstwhile couch potatoes will no longer settle for a few score
lowest-common-denominator programmes; they will range databases around
the globe to pick out their first choice of materials,” wrote George
Gilder, a technology guru, back in 1994. “The entire TV culture will
give way to a radically different teleputer culture. The result will
resemble the current arrays of thousands of specialised books and
magazines far more than a few TV shows oriented to the morbid fears and
prurient interests of a mass audience.”

Even now, technology companies and manufacturers are working on “home
entertainment gateways”, devices that will enable viewers to do away
not only with their computers, but their CD-players, DVD-players and
video-recorders too. Powerful voices in the media believe that a new
era in television is on its way. “Everything on AOL is on demand,” says
Jerry Levin, head of AOL Time Warner, America’s biggest media
conglomerate. “Now we have the infrastructure to do the same with TV.”

OPEN THE BOX
In these harsher economic times, however, the television industry is
having to reconsider some of these plans. On the production lots of Los
Angeles, parsimony is now battling profligacy. Television executives
are breathing down the necks of creative types to keep budgets down.
Car chases and helicopter scenes are giving way to more dialogue; guest
stars to unknown actors. But the re-evaluation that is taking place
within the industry ranges far more broadly t
han this. Technology may
be promising endless possibilities for that frumpy old box, but how
many of them do people really want to use? And how many of them will
they pay for?

This survey will look at where television is going, and who stands to
benefit. It will concentrate on America and Western Europe, because
together they account for the vast majority of the world’s television
market, and others are likely to follow where they lead. The survey
will argue that, despite all those costly efforts to transform it into
an all-purpose multimedia device, the television set will remain
primarily a screen to keep people entertained. Although the digital era
will vastly widen the choice of entertainment on TV, it will leave its
potency as a mass medium undiminished. It will, however, overturn the
way television is consumed.