Brave New Box

Computers and Television Eye One Another, January 1996

I'm getting a little confused with the new products companies like Sony and Apple are bringing out blending your computer with a television set into a single brave new box. Or was that blending your television with the computer? Whichever way you look at it 1996 will be the year these two devices - and the programs both of them carry - finally start the year on speaking terms after many years of feuding.

Like many industries before it television first saw the computer industry as a threat to its dominance over our leisure time and entertainment dollar. Now it's finding real benefits from a closer association with its younger cousin. Just as theatre feared the advent of the cinema, cinema the new medium of video tape and broadcast television the coming of pay television, the television industry lost much sleep with nightmares of the fast and furious development of programs delivered by your "home entertainment" computer while your television lay dark and forgotten in a corner of the room.

In every case, after the fuss had died down, the older industry found - although there might be initial rivalry for audience share - in the end each successive new way of presenting information and entertainment actually promoted the preceding one. And it also provided rich new fields of creative ideas and tools for performers, writers and other artists that has kept television, film making and media generally at the forefront of our social activity and interest. Nevertheless, each older industry fought long and deviously to impede the new one gaining ground in their territory. Witness the resistance of our broadcast networks to new pay services and the reluctance of Hollywood studios - whose major income is from television - to sell the rights to popular films to computer companies desperate for content for their new entertainment platforms.

In a frenzy of rapprochement that began in earnest last year media and computer companies are gleefully buying into one another. Microsoft and the US network NBC formed the cheekily-named MSNBC Cable and MSNBC Online to offer a 24 hour news service over cable with an interactive version available on the Internet over the 'phone lines. John Fairfax, owners of the Sydney Morning Herald, bought into Steve Vizard's Artist Services, responsible for much popular local television programming and has many other ventures based around the new computer media such as CD ROMs and on-line publishing.

But for we viewers the issue will never be what kind of box will accommodate these two different worlds with what kinds of flashing lights and displays. It is more about how easily we can get programs and information, at what cost, and whether we end the day better informed and entertained.