Coming soon, to a personal computer near you: television.
Or maybe the computer will come to your television.
Either way, it may not be long before the day when we will use a single device served by one cable to read e-mail, cruise the World Wide Web, make a telephone call or watch our favorite TV show.
But what price will consumers pay for what the glib geeks call "convergence?" Will the World Wide Web become as predictable and boring, but just as marketable, as prime-time television? Will the selection of goods and services that you might buy be determined by the marketing relationships between advertisers and the Web site you're using?
Those are just some of the questions being raised as New Media becomes increasingly dominated by Old Media, and the Internet becomes less about changing the world than about selling stuff.
"People don't think of the Web as a new art form anymore but as a giant cash register," said James Poniewozik, a media industry columnist for Salon, an online magazine. "It worries me that people are pinning their hopes on e-commerce, not content."
Nobody is sure when the computer keyboard and TV remote control will become one or, for that matter, how we'll get there. But the search for an answer to that question, more than anything, explains the rush of mega-mergers in the Internet world.
Big, established media companies are jockeying to "own" the first screen that viewers see when they turn on that device of the future. That's why Walt Disney Co. bought Infoseek, NBC bought Snap, and AT&T tried to buy Yahoo! and America Online.
These acquisitions - and others that are likely to come - have shifted the balance of power from gearheads who founded cool little companies in the garages and graduate schools of Silicon Valley to the giant media conglomerates, the very companies that the Internet was supposed to displace or make obsolete.
In this new world order, broadcast programmers trump computer programmers. And consumers will be called upon to do what they always have: Buy something.
Consider the proposed merger between Lycos and USA Networks. If approved, it would link the Home Shopping Network with the second-most-visited search engine on the Web, a company that also owns Suck.com, one of the first and still one of the funniest "e-zines."
"But I don't think Barry Diller (USA's CEO) was thinking, 'I have to own a piece of Suck.com,' " Poniewozik said.
No, he wasn't. What Diller and the analysts liked in this marriage of Boolean logic and cubic zirconium was the possibility that USA Networks could sell merchandise and advertising on the screens of Lycos' 30 million visitors and direct those visitors to its broadcast properties.
The deal may yet fall apart; some major Lycos shareholders are unhappy about the price. But if it does, Lycos will end up with someone else, maybe NBC. The partner might be different, but the dance would be the same.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the television and Internet worlds would converge. Broadcasters already were talking about "interactive" TV in the early 1990s, even though it meant nothing more than viewers who picked up their phone and bought something they saw on an infomercial at 3 a.m.
Netscape Communications' browser, which put a TV-like interface on the Web, suddenly expanded everyone's horizons. Writing in Wired magazine in 1993, author Michael Crichton gleefully predicted the end of the media oligopoly. "To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within 10 years. Vanished, without a trace."
Today, Wired, a sassy, upstart magazine that gave itself top billing in the new media revolution, is owned by Conde Nast, the same company that publishes Vogue and GQ. CBS MarketWatch stories appear on Yahoo! because CBS pays Yahoo! a "slotting" fee, not because Yahoo! has concluded that MarketWatch is the best source of financial news.
In their defense, Internet companies say they have no choice but to strike such deals because most Web surfers will not pay for content.
This has forced most Web sites to adopt the television programmer's business model: attract viewers to your site with free e-mail and free news and entertainment; keep them there as long as possible - make them "sticky" - with free home pages, Web calendars and discussion groups, and bombard them with advertising.
So, even though Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos and other sites might call themselves "portals" - points that are supposed to lead somewhere else - the last thing they want visitors to do is leave. In this respect they are no different from network broadcasters or even America Online, which has emulated the broadcast model since its founding.
So far, it seems to be working. The online population is growing and changing. According to the Pew Research Center, 41 percent of all Americans used the Internet in 1998, up from 14 percent in 1995; 12 percent go online every day, compared with just 3 percent in 1995. Other studies show that time online also is increasing.
Marketers have taken note. Net advertising more than doubled through the first nine months of 1998, from a year earlier, and was expected to approach nearly $2 billion for the year, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau. During the third quarter, consumer companies spent more on advertising than technology companies, the first time that ever has happened online.
Rates for banner advertising - those commercial strips that appear at the top or bottom of most Web sites - are growing faster than television or radio advertising rates. Banner rates on Yahoo!, the single most popular destination on the Web and one of the few that is profitable, rose 28 percent between March and November of last year.
Those kinds of numbers have prompted the big network broadcasters into a virtual binge of buying up valuable cyberspace real estate. They're scared because their audience is shrinking, said Roger Bullis, a communications professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
"These alliances are about selling products on the Web," Bullis said. "They're about controlling what people see on the Web."
And Internet companies, most of which hold sky-high valuations despite losing millions of dollars a year, have been all too willing to sell. Lycos never has turned a profit, but investors had bid its market capitalization to $6 billion. @Home, a cable modem company partly owned by cable giants TCI, which is about to merge with AT&T, and Comcast, used its inflated stock to pay $6 billion for Excite Inc., another chronically unprofitable Web site.
Craig Evans, an online advertising specialist at Periscope Marketing Communications in Minneapolis, says it's too early to tell whether this grab for eyeballs will pay off, or how Web surfers will react to attempts to hem them in. He's skeptical but said there's no doubt it's changing the character of the Web.
"It used to be about information and communities of like-minded people," he said. "It has now become much more of a general distribution vehicle for brand messages and commerce." |
