[yet another - NOW's Obit?] What happens when you cross TV with the Web?
Published July 7 2000 Now History?
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It's called the Network of the World, it's in Chiswick, and this man wants to put it in your home. Raymond Snoddy reports
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A vision of the future of television and information is being born in the West London suburb of Chiswick. It is grandly called the Network of the World. It is backed by Richard Li and his multibillion-dollar Hong Kong communications group Pacific Century CyberWorks, a company now finalising the £25 billion acquisition of PCCW, the main Hong Kong telephone company.
The network, which launched this week, is called NOW.com. It claims finally to have cracked the ultimate convergence of telecommunications, computing and television technologies to forge a new medium.
"With NOW, television viewer and Internet user become one: a viewser," the company says. It is still too early to say how many "viewsers" NOW has, but it is clear that, far from the public gaze, many millions of pounds have been lavished on its vast newsroom and more than 350 staff - average age 23. "It's been a bit like the Manhattan Project," says Michael Johnson, 51, the man who runs the project, in a jokey reference to the secrecy surrounding the development of the atomic bomb. Johnson, an American, launched the AsiaSat satellite system and was an influential part of the team that in 1991 helped Li to launch the Star satellite television service, covering all of Asia. After the sale of the Star service to News Corporation, parent company of The Times, there was an agreement not to compete. In the intervening years Johnson was given the task of developing a new form of news and entertainment for the age of digital and the Internet.
"It is no longer possible, I think, to sit back and imagine that all this is a bubble that is going to go away, and somehow we are going to magically return to this wonderful romantic era where the power of the nondigital world is going to reassert itself. We're past it," says Johnson.
At the heart of the NOW network, he says, is the decision to tear down the walls between television and the World Wide Web.
In old-style television, journalists would gather the elements of a programme and someone would make a decision about how the pieces were put together. The rest would be left on the cutting-room floor.
The world has changed, Johnson believes, and the audience is no longer searching for one person to decide things for them.
"They don't feel they need a Larry King (the CNN interviewer) - they are not from the Fifties," says Johnson.
Instead of discarding what went into making a programme, he says, "You take the elements that you have gathered and they are seeded in the Web, connected by an overall topic. Then you make it searchable."
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The audience is no longer searching for one person to decide things for them
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As the staff assemble more and more information - words and pictures - on an expanding range of topics, the richness of the offering increases.
Johnson sees NOW as creating the equivalent of an endless number of niche magazines for an equally endless number of communities of interest around the world.
Log into NOW.com and one of the categories on offer is "mothership", which constantly monitors natural phenomena about the Earth, from hailstorms and earthquakes to the latest on the world's volcanoes.
"We are monitoring the development of a super-typhoon at the moment," says Johnson, who has the restless gait of an impatient visionary. Another major category of interest is sport. PCCW has signed an alliance with Transworld International, one of the largest sports broadcasters.
As well as showing sport, NOW invites the individual sports fan "to step in, in front of a global audience, live on TV and the Web".
The company is also developing a virtual stadium, rather like in the film Gladiator, in which real sports events can be placed. Users will be able to send digital pictures of themselves to be included in the crowd.
At the moment, those logging into the NOW website can also follow the progress of Colin Bodill, who is trying to become the first person to circumnavigate the globe in a microlight aircraft. There is live coverage in text, video, audio and images, 24 hours a day.
Those who logged on last month could hear Bodill's consternation as he was forced to land by Chinese aircraft firing flares after he had been blown off course by a storm.
As part of his search for the next step forward in media, Johnson spent more than two years in Silicon Valley, part of it with Intel, the chip manufacturer that has a joint venture with PCCW.
As a result of what he learnt about the increasing power and falling price of computers, he was convinced that the new service should be mainly on PCs rather than proprietary on television set-top boxes.
"By the end of 2001 you will maybe have a gigabyte of power, plus umpteen gigabytes of storage available for $500. No dedicated device could ever keep pace with that," says Johnson, who studied film at university.
The NOW executive spent at least nine months thinking about the philosophy of what he was doing and trying to evolve rules for "non-linear storytelling".
His solution was to ensure that it didn't matter technically how what was used was produced.
"You have to look at everything that is made as a tool, whether it is text, a graphic, audio, vision, and put it into an environment where I can tell linear and non-linear stories interchangeably with the things I make," he says.
Although he is busy inventing the future, he believes conventional linear television still has a place - as a promotional device for NOW's other offerings.
Currently, NOW is produced entirely from Chiswick and distributed on the Internet. New production centres are planned in Chinese, Japanese and Hindi, located in Hong Kong, China, Japan and India. The service will also be available via satellite in Asia.
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