Video Dialtone: Its Potential for Social Change (1996)

Video technology will change our society... the information available will be much greater and more customizable ... one cable will allow a family to watch its TV, make a telephone call, and use computer, all at the same time. The term dialtone is by no means part of Americans' household vocabulary. Yet, the new telecommunications technology that it denotes has already started to penetrate hundreds of thousands of American households and businesses. It concerns the transmission of information in all forms that is, sounds, still and moving images, data, and text - having all kinds of old and new content, and in the latest presentation format. This enhanced scope of information will be made accessible to customers more easily, quickly, and in more innovative ways than ever before. The huge amount of information that video networks (or video for short) will make accessible to people will have a significant impact on their lives. The reason for this is that information constitutes a key determinant of the way in which people relate among themselves as well as to the rest of the world around them. Consequently, it strongly influences how people make all sorts of major and minor decisions almost every day, the sum of which has a cumulative, modifying effect on society. This technology is undergoing implementation today; it is not just a proposal. Major companies have already started to spend the tens of billions of dollars that they are planning to invest to ensure that information is collected, packaged, and communicated swiftly, accurately, and attractively through state of the art networks developed expressly for this purpose. The implementation of video technology in field tests is frequently associated with telephone companies trying to exploit to the full the capacity of their telephone networks by offering cable TV programming through their telephone wires. Its use, however, is by no means limited to those companies. Time Warner, the second largest cable TV company in the U.S. (after TCI), proves so. It has upgraded part of its cable TV network with video technology in order to improve radically the programming that it offers to its subscribers; but it does not yet Dr. Cordero is a freelance researcher and writer specializing in telecommunications and computer. Previously he worked in the areas of Financial law and securities regulation at Lawyers Cooperative Publishing and the Banking Division of the Commision of the European Communities. offer telephone services to them, even though it is technically possible to do so over the same network and the same cable that provides cable TV. The part of its network that it has upgraded -- serving Orlando, Florida -- constitutes its testing ground. From there Time Warner plans to extend service to cover gradually its subscribers nationwide, who as a result of several acquisitions of other cable companies now number around 11.5 million in some 34 states. Thanks to the deployment efforts of this and other companies, it is estimated that several million people could have access to video by the end of next year, andperhaps as many as 40 million by the year 2,000. If so, it could start to have a significant impact on society very soon. WHY IT IS INTERESTING Video is a new telecommunications technology that allows telephone and cable TV companies to use a combination of telephone wires, TV coaxial cables, and fiber optics as well as a combination of analog and digital signals to transmit not only sound, such as speech and music, but also still and moving images, such as pictures, graphics, text, and movies. Yet, if video were only a new combo hook-up of different types of strings that just gave more of the same, it would not amount to much. Any telephone company or cable TV station already delivers these forms of information, at least to some extent, through its network to its customers. …