[This is an excerpt from my 1995 Yale Law Journal article “Cheap Speech and What It Will Do,” written for a symposium called “Emerging Media Technology and the First Amendment.) Thirty years later, I thought I’d serialize the piece here, to see what I may have gotten right—and what I got wrong.]
“[T]hough the perceived defects of [television] are many … they are often kind of subsumed in two phrases: huge wasteland.” Newton Minow, then chairman of the FCC, coined this pejorative in 1961, and it has (justly) caught.
But when your native bookstore allow you to purchase, at any given hour, solely 5 books—every chosen for max attraction to 250 million individuals—you’d consider publishing as an enormous wasteland, too. This might be true even when the shop had fifty books, or perhaps even 500 books to match the touted 500-channel cable system of the longer term. There’d be a higher likelihood that you simply’d get what you need, however nonetheless you’d usually be dissatisfied.
The issue with TV is not lack of fabric. Loads of wonderful tv has been created within the medium’s virtually fifty years. Add to that the numerous nice films which were made, and there is sufficient for every of us to observe for hours on daily basis and nonetheless solely get the stuff we take pleasure in.
The issue is that broadcasting cannot get you what you need if you need it. It might probably solely get you what tens of millions of individuals choose, and it could solely give it to you on the time chosen by the broadcaster, not the time chosen by you. 5 hundred channels could assist, as a result of they could make room for materials that appeals to solely, say, a couple of hundred thousand individuals; however that may nonetheless be insufficient.
What individuals would love, I consider, is to select from house—at any time handy to them—any TV present or film they need, simply as they select a e-book in a bookstore, solely extra conveniently and fewer expensively (and even free, for the reason that medium may nonetheless be advertiser-supported). Some individuals may nonetheless need another person to resolve; they could, as an illustration, ask for a random comedy, or a random comedy praised by a given reviewer. They may even ask for the most recent episode of a specific new present, simply as they do on TV right this moment, although at a time that is handy for them. However they’re going to be those who select, or select to go away the selection to another person.
This, after all, is “video-on-demand,” which is already being examined—in a primitive kind—in varied markets. Many present video-on-demand proposals have gotten a skeptical market response. However the obstacles all appear to me to be a perform of present expertise—the diploma to which right this moment’s houses are correctly wired (or fibered) for this service, the present prices of the gear, and so forth. The query, I believe, is just whether or not video-on-demand will begin arriving now or in a number of years.
Impact on What Will Be Obtainable: As with the opposite media, this customization will give individuals entry to far more various materials. At this time, to be broadcast on TV, new applications will need to have an anticipated viewers of tens of millions. To justify entry to the scarce shelf area out there in video shops, videotapes additionally want a big market. A number of good things that does not attraction to a big sufficient viewers by no means makes its technique to the TV stations or video shops.
The brand new system also needs to enhance the quantity of recent materials being made. The price of producing high-quality, high-production-values leisure—from $500,000 to over $1 million per hour—will decelerate this diversification. As long as manufacturing prices stay excessive, every new program will nonetheless need to attraction to many individuals. Nonetheless, it should most likely want much less of an viewers than it does right this moment, when producers face each excessive manufacturing prices and restricted distribution channels. Furthermore, some video programming—speak exhibits, speaking heads exhibits such because the McLaughlin Group, stand-up comedy, and a few sorts of sporting occasions—prices comparatively little to provide. Manufacturing of those exhibits should mushroom.
