INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL MEDIA
An Introduction to Digital Media is a clear and comprehensive account of
the development and future possibilities of digital media by one of their
most authoritative analysts. Tony Feldman addresses fundamental
questions about digital media and their potential use in our everyday
lives. What are digital media? What is special about them? How do digital
media systems work, technologically and commercially? And where is
the digital media revolution taking us?
Tony Feldman considers the new digital media in two distinct but
increasingly converging areas: the world of packaged ‘offline’ media such
as CD-ROM and the world of transmitted media, including digital
broadcasting and interactive online services. He begins with an overview
of the digital media landscape, and goes on to describe the impact of CDbased media and the development of a consumer market for multimedia
products. Feldman then traces the equally dramatic growth of online
services and the Internet in particular, assessing myths and realities
about the information superhighway and its commercial possibilities.
An Introduction to Digital Media concludes with an assessment of the
strategic implications of going digital for media industries such as
publishing, broadcasting, cinema and music, and considers the key role
that individuals will play in determining the course of the digital
revolution.
Tony Feldman, one of Europe’s leading digital media consultants, is a
founding director of the highly respected media and convergence
analysts Informed Sources International. A prolific writer, his recent
books include Multimedia (1994) and Electronic Media Markets (1992, with
Julian Dickens). He also edits the authoritative European newsletter
Interactive Media International.
CONTENTS
Foreword viii
Abbreviations xiv
1 WHAT DIGITAL REVOLUTION?
Analogue and digital information
Speaking the language of computers
Commercialising electronic media
What is interactivity?
Designing and implementing interactivity
Capturing hearts and mind
Do we need interactivity?
2 MULTIMEDIA
What is multimedia?
Digital video
Compressing digital information
Compression by redundancy
Compression in hardware and software
Maverick compression schemes
3 THE COMPACT DISC ARRIVES
The beginnings of optical media
How does a compact disc work?
The evolution of CD-ROM markets
The consumer market emerges
Multimedia entertainment in the home
CD video
The digital video disc
Using video in CD media
The distribution nightmare
European markets emerge
Developments in distribution channels
Evading the log jam
CD-ROM’s end game
4 MYTH AND REALITY ON THE SUPERHIGHWAY
The broadband vision
Taking cable online
Making broadcasting interactive
Paying for the superhighway
Interactive television
5 ONLINE NETWORKS
How online publishing works
The uniqueness of online networks
The evolution of the online industr
The making of a consumer market
Consumer online networks
Consumer online services in Europe
The Internet
The rise and rise of the Internet
The World Wide Web
Commercialising the Web
6 WEB COMMERCE
The Web consumer
Surfing the Web
Content and online success
Commercialising a Web site
The impact on proprietary networks
Security and Web payments
The changing face of the Web
7 WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
Content in the digital world
What is digital content?
Whose content is it, anyway?
New content or old?
Strategies for exploiting content
The vision thing
Index
FOREWORD
Writing about digital media is worse than painting the Forth Bridge.
British readers will know the old story of the trials and tribulations of
keeping the great bridge properly painted to protect it from the
depredations of the Scottish weather. There is so much ironwork that no
sooner has the paint dried on the last spar and buttress than the whole
process has to begin again at the other end. Writing about the so-called
digital revolution is like this but more so. No sooner has the ink dried
than the words already written need revision. But not for the same reason
that dooms those poor bridge painters to repeat the same exercise over
and over again. Words lose their currency in this subject not because it
takes so long to say them but because the technological and commercial
landscape that they describe changes so swiftly.
This is probably a very bad way to start a book of any kind. It hardly
instils confidence to say it is going to be out of date even before the
printer has printed it. There is, however, a genuine way round the
problem of delivering a static snapshot of a fast-changing subject. The
current work, and earlier ones on which it is based, aim to deliver a
foundation of material—ideas, insights and demystifications—which
remain current far longer than the superstructure of detail which makes
up the day-to-day helter-skelter of change. While sudden technological
breakthroughs can, of course, upset the apple cart completely, it is
broadly possible to sketch the logical geography of digital media so the
result delivers (hopefully) some lasting value. Even Multimedia, the book
published in 1994 which the current work effectively supplants, retains
some of its original value because it presents underlying concepts which
—while not quite eternal—are at least a fairly firm, long-term foundation
for making sense of the bigger picture with all its plethora of fastchanging detail.
There is, however, a more subtle problem which is personal to any
author writing in this field. Not only do the realities of technologies and
their commercialisation change from day to day, but also our
understandings of the implications of these processes change. Not only isthe real world a moving target. So is our perception of it. The reason is
simple.
No one has a monopoly on the understanding of what the headlong
rush into digital media means. There are no real gurus, only a great many
people grappling with what all the complex interplays of new
technologies, new business models and new social responses to media
and information add up to. The day of the expert is over. Everyone has a
legitimate viewpoint and should feel confident enough to express it. What
books like this one try to do, therefore, is not to dictate a point of view as
if cast in stone but to think through what is happening and come up with
some models for making sense of it. But a process of thinking it through—
like keeping the Forth Bridge free of rust—is actually a task without end.
In other words, if you do ever think you have reached a final conclusion,
it is probably the wrong one! So a book like this one has to be the author’s
take on the world at a given moment in time. It is not only a snapshot of a
real world of events and activity but also a snapshot of an internal world
of mental models, ideas, perceptions and—it has to be admitted—doubts
and uncertainties.
Few things spring new and fully formed into the world, least of all
books like this. The immediate antecedents are obvious. In 1990, I was
asked by the British Library to write a study in the British National
Bibliography Research Fund series. The idea was to focus on a new word
in the information and publishing industry and to examine what the term
meant and what implications the technology embodying it contained for
the publishing, bookselling and library community. The new word was
‘multimedia’ and the research study was eventually published in 1991 by
the British Library under the title Multimedia in the 1990s.
The study began by reflecting that ‘if the history of our technological
age is just a flicker of time, then multimedia, amidst all the bustle of
change is a word still forming on our lips. It is an embryonic concept in a
fast-changing environment and we have to be realistic about the limits of
our power to forecast or even speculate about its future’. Five years later,
this book deliberately avoids using multimedia in its title because it has
become both an over-used industry cliché and a false focus for our
thinking. Yesterday it was a word still forming on our lips ready to take
centre stage. Today it is just one word among the many we need to
interpret the wide-ranging processes of change and development that are
reshaping the media and information industries.
Within two years of its publication, I was asked by the British Library
to revise the original study and the result was then published early in
1994 by the Blueprint division of Chapman and Hall as Multimedia. The
new book—focused as it was upon offline, predominantly compact disc
(CD) based multimedia—has rapidly grown into a mild anachronism. Not
because it has entirely lost currency but because it treats CD multimedia as the important focus instead of placing it in its proper context as an
important fragment of a much bigger picture. Consequently, even if
this new work continues to owe some of its sections to earlier writings, it
is essentially an attempt to sketch the bigger picture and to do so in
simple, easily assimilable terms. It is a work of introduction rather than a
definitive treatise. In presenting it, the aim is to shape a mental map of
the digital media world which will be an aid to those embarking on all
the varied journeys that people tend to take in their different sectors of
interest and activity.
Because this book is motivated by a desire to demystify, to keep things
simple, some compromises are made. First, the book does not pretend to
be comprehensive. It sets out to provide the headlines and supporting
explanation from many key sectors of the digital media world but it will
not detail every avenue or look at the subject from every media
orientation. Second, it may—from time to time—play fast and loose with
technical rigour. The reason is that comprehension is higher on the agenda
than the fine tuning of technological cause and effect. This is not a book
about technology but about its implications and we need to understand
technology only so far as that understanding accurately informs our
insight into those implications.
Here is a thumbnail sketch of the book’s structure. First, we consider
what we mean by digital information in the first place and why it has the
power to reshape our experience of media so profoundly. These are basic
foundations on which all digital media activity stands. Next, we outline
the digital media landscape by crudely dividing it into two broad sectors:
offline, packaged media such as CD-ROM (compact disc read only
memory), and transmitted media—both passive and interactive—
delivered by a range of electromagnetic and physical pipes making up
the different forms of digital networks. Then—just to confound this
simplification—we show how offline and transmitted media do not exist
in isolation from one another but are rapidly merging to create powerful,
new hybrid channels of delivery. We look closely at the evolution of
online electronic services and, in particular, study the rise of the Internet.
A particular focus here is the commercialisation of the World Wide Web
and which business models and technological infrastructures are
emerging to make it possible. Finally, we end where perhaps we should
always begin: with the customer, the only person who will ever pay the bill
for all the human and technological resource deployed to make the digital
revolution deliver the goods. The key question is what goods do such
customers want to buy and how are they responding to the present
outpourings of new media products and services? We look at today’s
realities and consider what may lie around the corner.
You will notice as—and if—you read on that there is a distinctly
commercial emphasis throughout. The reason for this has nothing to do with value judgements about commercial motivations. It is merely a
reflection of the fact that technology will do what it can ultimately do
only if someone is prepared to pick up the bill. This is another way of
saying that not everything that can be, will be. Although this is a simple
and uncontentious proposition, much analysis of the digital future
throws it to the winds in favour of a kind of intoxication, an
undisciplined, unrealistic love affair with the potential of technological
advance to deliver all sorts of wonders without considering whether
those wonders carry with them any compelling commercial logic.
This is familiar territory because the idea that ‘what can be, will be’ is
an established view of how the technological future will pan out. There is
even a good pedigree for it. In the world of physics, for example, ‘what
can be, will be’ is an established principle, understood as a fundamental
characteristic of the natural world. Even if the event has only the tiniest
probability of taking place—sometime, somewhere—it will take place.
Things do not happen only if they are forbidden by a basic, underlying
physical law. This has some disquieting but illuminating consequences.
For example, the room you are sitting in is filled with molecules of air
buzzing around at thousands of miles an hour, colliding with one
another and bouncing about in a chaotic mêlée. There is—I fear to report
—a tiny but finite probability that, as you read these words, all the
molecules will suddenly rush into the far corner of the room, leaving you
to die horribly of asphyxiation! The good news, however, is that the
statistical probability of this happening, while not zero, is not much
greater than zero. In other words, if you need cheering up, just consider
that it is vastly more likely you will be run over by a bus than die through
lack of oxygen through a statistically freak event. The point, however, is
that the world of physics does not view such unlikely events as things
that may happen but as events that will definitely take place at some
time. Not only can the improbable happen, it will happen. If you wait
long enough, the least likely things in the universe will happen. Those
monkeys tapping away at the keyboards of their wordprocessors will
eventually write the entire works of Shakespeare word for word. In other
words: ‘what can be, will be’.
This same principle, consciously or unconsciously, is often made a part
of the logic of technology forecasting. We tend to believe that 3D
television, virtual love making and matter transfer (‘beam me up Scotty!’)
will arrive one day simply because we believe that the remorseless
advance of technology will necessarily deliver it. In other words, if
technology can do it, it will happen. This ‘what can be, will be’ principle
works well in physics but is fatally flawed when we try to apply it to
human beings and what they do with their society. For sure, technology
must be capable of delivering 3D television and other wonders before we
can have it. But it will emerge as a reality in our lives only if we are all
prepared to pay for it. We will have it only if we want it enough to buy it.
In other words, the engine of change in digital media is not
underlying technology in itself but clever technology married to
customers prepared to pay money to enjoy the fruits of its cleverness. The
key to creating the digital age, therefore, lies in the hands of those able to
envisage ways of putting the technology to work to generate products
and services that users will—whether they know it or not beforehand—
want to buy. So commerce is good. Indeed, it is the only thing that drives
the digital age forward.
The age itself is going to be one of radical change in our lives. After all,
the way we experience information, entertainment and education shapes
us as individuals and—on a grander scale—shapes the character of whole
societies. There is justification, then, in talking about the move to digital
media as a kind of revolution. However, one person’s revolution is really
another person’s evolution. If events move quickly and carry dramatic
change with them, they are likely to be called revolution. If the same
events unfold more slowly and carry less obviously radical implications,
they are likely to be called evolution. However, rapid or slow, the
processes of change—all change—do not spring from sudden
discontinuities of development, isolated breakthroughs with no link to
anything that has gone before. Even if some events—a very, very few—
which shape our technological world are stumbled upon seemingly by
chance, the interpretation of that chance event and its eventual
application is based on understandings that have been built up over
decades, even centuries of previous technological development. So,
however profound its long-term implications, the move towards digital
media is far from being a revolution. It is happening quickly but is an
organic process of development: a logical, step-by-step progress into an
extraordinary new future. So extraordinary, perhaps, that we can talk
about going digital as a process of evolution with revolutionary
implications.
This is more than playing with words. Seeing digitisation as evolution
encourages us to believe we can look ahead, even guide and influence the
pace and direction of its impact on our lives. Evolution is predictable and
is therefore something worth analysing. True revolution—if there is ever
such a thing—is impossible to call. So, if we agree that we are presiding
over digital evolution, we can at least take a stab at understanding where
it is taking us and how it might get there. This book, after all, is worth
attempting!
A fundamental belief in an evolutionary world returns us to the idea
that books—like the digital age—are built on antecedents. Some of this
book’s past has already been outlined. But it is worth concluding with the
antecedents that cannot be crystallised so easily. During the fifteen years have been involved in digital media, I have learned an immense
amount from industry colleagues. Many have been untiringly generous
with their time, explaining aspects of digital media development that
have been difficult for me to grasp. To all of those many people—past
and present—all colleagues and friends in the same basic endeavour, I
would like to express warm thanks and appreciation. I hasten to add that
the good bits in this book are due to their aid and the errors and
omissions are entirely my own responsibility!
I also acknowledge with thanks the kindness of my newsletter
publishers. To Interactive Media Publications, thanks for allowing me to
make some use of articles I have written for Interactive Media International,
the monthly publication I have had the delight of editing with my valued
colleague, David Powell, since 1990. To Pira International, similar thanks
for permitting me to draw upon some of my regular contributions to
their periodical, Publishing Technology Review.
Lastly, I must thank my children, Sam and Hannah, for reminding me
daily that there is a sense in which the world is invented afresh every
time the sun rises and that there is no end—nor should there be—to the
pleasures of exploring and discovering that world.
ABBREVIATIONS
ADPCM adaptive differential pulse code modulation
ADSL asymmetric digital subscriber loop
AOL America Online
ARPA (US Department of Defense) Advanced Research Projects
Agency
BT British Telecom
CCITT (European Commission) Consultative Committee on
International Telephony and Telegraphy
CD compact disc
CD-I compact disc interactive
CD-ROM compact disc read only memory
DAT digital audio tape
DCT discrete cosine transform
DOS disk operating system
DVD digital video disc
ELDA European Laser Disc Association
EPOD European Platform for Optical Discs
FTP file transfer protocol
GUI graphical user interface
HARC Houston Advanced Research Centre
HDTV high-definition television
HTML hypertext markup language
HTTP hypertext transfer protocol
iKP Internet keyed payments
IP Internet protocol
ISDN Integrated Services Digital Network
ISO International Standards Organisation
ISP Internet service provider
ITV interactive television
JPEG Joint Photographic Experts Group
MPC multimedia personal computer
MPEG Motion Picture Experts Group
MSN Microsoft Network
NCSA National Center for Supercomputing Applications
NTSC National Television System Committee
NVOD near-video-on-demand
OEM original equipment manufacturer
PAL phase alternation line
PC personal computer
PCM pulse code modulation
RTOS real-time operating system
SSL secure socket layer (protocol)
STT secure transaction technology
TCI Telecommunications Inc.
TCP transmission control protocol
UKOL UK Online
URL universal resource locator
VGA video graphics array
VOD video-on-demand
VRML Virtual Reality Modelling Language
CHAPTER 1
WHAT DIGITAL REVOLUTION?
We have already dispatched the idea of revolution and settled for seeing
the move to digital media as a process of evolution with potentially
revolutionary impact on our lives. But the word ‘revolution’ remains on
all our lips. Leaving the semantics aside, what we are really expressing
with the use of the word is not an analysis of whether digitisation is the
result of a discontinuity in technological development but a less rigorous,
general sense that something truly remarkable is taking place which is
likely to transform all our lives and—perhaps, more profoundly—the
lives of our children. The idea of digital revolution is implicitly an image
of humankind stepping through a doorway into an unknown and
fundamentally changed future. And it is a one-way journey, a doorway
through which we can never step back to return to the comfortable media
certainties of the past.
However, we need to begin any inquiry about the future impacts of
digital media by understanding the starting point of the whole process. It
can be summed up in a very few words. The digital revolution is being
forged by an accelerating move from a world familiar with analogue media
to a world that will be increasingly dominated by digital media. This,
then, is the key—a shift from analogue to digital. To make sense of that
simple statement, however, we need to know what analogue and digital
mean and, most important, why they are different. After all, the
revolution is in the difference.
ANALOGUE AND DIGITAL INFORMATION
A good way of getting a sense of what analogue information and digital
information are is to imagine ‘analogue’ as an expression of our
experience of the real world while ‘digital’ expresses a world belonging
exclusively to computers.
Whether we know it or not, therefore, we are all familiar with analogue
information. Typical examples of it are the continuously varying
intensities of natural light, the meanders in an audio record’s groove, the
variations in an electrical current and the mechanical fluctuations in the
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