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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.11 - FEBRUARY 2001
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What's A Digital Media Futurist? HK: What do you think the biggest technological hurdle is at this point? JVT: Standards. But that's not the biggest barrier. The biggest barrier is the business game. What are the relationships among the players? That's the real unsettling part. Everybody wants to make the biggest dollar. Some of those relationships are in place, but everybody argues and more time is spent on that. Nobody starts out by saying, 'Okay, I'll take 2%.' Everybody starts out at 50%. There's a lot of players and some of them are not going to make it. Like the equipment people, I don't see that they are going to be able to stay in the game. HK: Do you see the telecommunications giants as being the real winners? They are the ones that control the pipeline. JVT: No, I don't. Again, I'm using a 50 year timeline, so I have a different take on it. In the near term sure, they are the winners. But I think that wireless communication is really going to challenge them and broadband satellite. HK: So who do you see as the main players in this kind of new world? Obviously you have the people designing the games. JVT: Yeah, they have a really good future. The content people do. If you have a hit, you have a hit. When you get it right, you get it big. The delivery people are the near term winners -- actually the infrastructure people underlying the delivery people -- until the network is extended to its economical end points, which is probably well short of a global broadband network. Still, there is a lot of work that needs to happen. There is some technology work that needs to happen, like bandwidth trading. HK: What is that, bandwidth trading? JVT: It's kind of like the way you envision the electrical grid and moving electricity to wherever you need it. It doesn't really work like that but it should, and you think that it does. We need a grid like that for bandwidth. It doesn't really exist for a lot of reasons. GTE's network is GTE's network and Quest's is Quest's. They do trade around a bit but there's no center. Los Angeles is in some ways, as they are developing these telephone hotels, so that's kind of the precursor to bandwidth trading. The interconnects need to be developed before you can really move around bandwidths. There is actually something called the BTO, the Bandwidth Trading Office, and people are starting to work on it and figure out how to do it. In the next five to ten years, we are going to see it. Large amounts of digital assets will be able to be moved and you won't know how. You'll just get a 'bit bill.' HK: So there's still a lot of system building that is going to handle this world that's coming? JVT: Yes, there really is. Those submarine cables: when this system is in place, you are going to be able to push material across the networks easily. Right now it's a nightmare. You have to hire somebody to tell you how to get material from here to Tokyo or worse Osaka. Like Carson City to Osaka? If you are not in a major place then you have to hire a company to tell you how to do that. We have specialists in that arena. It should be easy and everyone knows that you should be able to run material over a network and somebody gets paid for it. There's a settlements process that's not here yet. HK: It is like electricity; a distributor is buying electricity from a company and you, the consumer, don't even know it. You turn a switch and it works. You don't know how, you just get a bill. Well, everywhere except California right now, but it is the same principal applied to bandwidth. JVT: That's where we are, in this very fundamental working out of the distribution of bandwidth. We aren't even at the content part yet and we are not going to be there for a while. In the meantime there's all this richness of experiment. HK: What do you think is the most exciting or interesting thing going on right now leading up to this? JVT: The most interesting thing to me is the amazing speed with which it becomes second nature. But, the most exciting thing is the opportunity for relationships with people. People can really find the other people who offer what it is they need in their life to grow and be satisfied. That's really thrilling. Advanced Television Systems: Brave New TV, by Joan Van Tassel. Woburn, Massachusetts: Butterworth-Heinemann Publishers Ltd., 1996. 336 pages. ISBN: 0240802438 ($46.95) Digital TV Over Broadband: Harvesting Bandwidth, by Joan Van Tassel, Woburn, Massachusetts: Focal Press, 2000, 2nd edition. 370 pages. ISBN: 0240803574 ($47.95) Heather Kenyon is editor-in-chief of Animation World Network. After receiving her B.F.A. with honors in Filmic Writing from USC's School of Cinema-Television, she went to work for Hanna-Barbera Cartoons. Currently, she is an International Board Member of Women In Animation and on the Board of Trustees of Trees for Life.
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