Just Like TV

It's impossible to travel the Web anymore without being struck (even bombarded) by the increasingly common metaphor of the Web as another form of television. Pundits speak as if "channels" are a fundamental part of the Web and its architecture, and "push" technologies are all the rage.

No doubt this metaphor may make the Web seem a little less intimidating. After all, if the Web is just like TV, it can't possibly be as overwhelming as it seems, and it can't be all that hard to use.

There's only one thing wrong with this metaphor. It's totally false. It's even misleading.

Sure, you can place intermediate layers onto the Web to make it behave like television. You can also glue a book shut and make it behave like a paperweight.

But once you do, you lose the essence of the "thing." Just as a book-glued-shut is no longer really a book; so, too, the Web-as-TV isn't really the Web, either.

In fact, it's hard to imagine a technology more different from the Web than television. Television is a high-bandwidth, multi-channel, non-interactive, broadcast medium that is extremely content-poor. The Web is a low-bandwidth, single-channel, interactive, narrowcast medium with virtually unlimited content.

Now, before you go writing email about the phrase "content-poor," consider what it means in context. As a medium, television has a severe restriction on the amount of content available at any one time. In the 1950's, TV sets could receive a total of 12 channels. Thus, television as a medium was limited to a total "content universe" of precisely those 12 channels.

Even though today's high-tech digital satellite TV systems can receive hundreds of channels, the basic "channel" restriction is still in place. N�channels�= N� total possibilities for content at any given moment

In contrast, the Web makes tens of millions of content choices available at any given instant. And in the time it takes you to read even one Web document�-- this essay, for instance�-- 5-10 new documents will become part of the Web (assuming average reading speed and very modest Web growth). So as far as any individual is concerned, the possible choices for Web content are essentially infinite.

With "push" media, such as television, it is broadcasters who decide what content gets transmitted across a particular channel at any given moment. But the beauty of "pull" media, such as the Web, is that they allow the user to determine what content is transmitted. If you want a television-based "pull" experience on a par with the Web, you'll have to travel to New York City or Los Angeles, and pay an extended visit to the Museum of Television and Radio.

In other words, where television is weakest is precisely where the Web is strongest. In fairness, it's also true that the very things that the Web does poorly are the very things television does well. Thanks to its extremely high bandwidth, television can provide a remarkably rich audio/visual experience, in real time.

It's ironic that in the rush to transform the Web into TV, there's an increasing emphasis on bandwidth-guzzling multimedia effects in Web pages. But simple arithmetic makes it undeniably clear: the Internet is spectacularly ill-suited to multimedia. Even a single-speed CD-ROM transfers data faster than an Internet T-1 line.

There's a very real danger in the metaphor of Web-as-TV. Multimedia "push" strikes at the Achilles heel of the Internet�-- its limited bandwidth. To the extent that the TV metaphor prevails, "pull" may become difficult, or even impossible. There's a palpable danger of the Web degenerating into "40 million channels�--�and nothing on."