The Hitchhikers Guide to Television

Where will your television take you today? Will you just dive in and channel surf the television offerings available on one of the three pay services and our five familiar networks. Or will you read the travel guide first and choose before you take the plunge? Most likely it will be a combination of the two.

But what to do when satellites using digital compression technology deliver 150 channels - like the Hughes/New Corporation DirecTV service in the States - on top of cable, the computer-based World Wide Web and video down the phone lines using ADSL and high speed modems? With hundreds of channels we might need a helping hand as popular paper-based guides buckle under the strain.

To find new electronic ways through to the kinds of information and entertainment we want when we want it is one of the hottest games to play in media today. Much money is spent on trials of new kinds of computer and television delivery of televisual material to watch and analyse how viewers use a range of systems. Somewhere hidden in the many different viewer responses to the trials is the holy grail of media and communications companies - a simple and easy-to-use system to find our way around.

As well as paper-based program guides there are now also electronic program guides (EPG's) delivered on the Optus Vision and Foxtel pay services which are largely computer-generated sets of graphical "slides" and text. When our pay television industry gets out of its diapers - or was that bandages - we might also get the US-style EPG's with full motion video and features to assist us to program our VCR's. But these guides are hard to read and use and, for the moment, paper guides are the preferred "map" television tourists use.

Whoever discovers a workable solution to the problem of the rapidly widening television landscape will create the next "killer app" or wildly successful computer application. This will ensure success, not only for their own "guide", but also for the services that appear in the most popular guides. And how cleverly these new systems are built to accommodate we viewers will determine whether we end up on a boring but reliable packaged tour, or can strike out on our own into new and interesting territories without losing our way.