Jon Nicholls is chairman of ice, a Toronto-based multimedia production company.
When W.P. Kinsella wrote the phrase ‘If you build it, he will come,’ he was creating one of the most cherished fantasies of our generation. Happily, because it was a fantasy, they did come – Shoeless Joe Jackson, Happy Flesch and the rest – to play in Ray Kinsella’s ballpark.
The phrase has found extraordinary resonance with the architects and engineers of Canada’s information highway. But they cannot expect the same salutary outcome.
Unless the people who are actually going to use the highway have a voice in how it will be designed, unless they can contribute their expertise now into how new interactive, multimedia services are going to work, the technocrats may find themselves sitting alone in the bleachers vainly waiting for a ‘killer app’ to step to the plate and start the game.
Like the field of dreams, the killer app is now also widely acknowledged to be a fantasy. No lightning bolt is going to strike and leave in its place an exquisitely crafted must-have application that will validate the huge investment we’re making in information highway construction.
The actual process of developing new services for our multimedia interactive future will be laborious and characterized by trial and error and unavoidable setbacks. One way to keep the setbacks to a minimum is to widen the circle of consultation as much as possible.
Industry Canada will suggest that a broad-based consultation was exactly what it had in mind through its Information Highway Advisory Council that filed its report in September. ihac was composed of very bright, well- meaning people who gave generously of their time to produce the report. But it also represented a very `Bellhead’ approach to defining the future.
For all that content is supposed to be king in the information age, the vast majority of ihac’s members were drawn from the carriage, middleware and equipment sectors of the information industry. Where content was represented, it was generally by ‘Canada’s traditional cultural industries’ – book publishing, film production, music and theatre. Virtually no voice was given to the burgeoning ‘new media’ industry in Canada – the place where new interactive service development is likely to happen first.
The promise the information highway holds is new, better, more efficient ways of doing things. If users are going to pay to use the services, the differences had better be compelling. Chat lines and electronic magazines are amusing but they aren’t going to drive widespread use.
Up till now, most ideas of what info highway content will look like are relatively unimaginative adaptations of existing media: video on demand, electronic shopping, interactive soaps. At its worst, today’s content is little short of stupid – why on earth anyone would want to deliver a video commercial through the Internet is beyond me – we already have too many of those on tv.
If broadband content is going to change the way we do things it has to offer real advantages, be entertaining and be easy to use. So how come those entrusted to build the highway here in Canada are ignoring the people experienced in producing electronic content and ‘middleware’ – the access and navigational tools so necessary to a new service’s success?
One of the best and so far the only model for tapping the ingenuity of content and software developers was Dialogue Canada Multimedia (dcm). dcm was a consortium of nine companies (of which ice was one) that combined to apply for a licence to offer wireless broadband services using Local Multipoint Communications Systems or lmcs.
dcm deliberately crafted an enterprise that combined Canadian expertise in the areas of carriage, middleware and content with partners such as Coscient Discreet Logic and Bell Mobility in the mix. It deliberately sought to unleash the talent and the unique point of view of the new media community.
But, alas, in a field of 13 applicants, there simply wasn’t enough spectrum to accommodate everyone. dcm marked the first time that content and middleware were actively engaged in architectural discussions along with engineers and technocrats. Speaking from the perspective of someone with a significant stake in new media, it would be a shame if it were to be the last time, too.
The realities of electronic content change pretty darn fast. Who’s going to build content for a network that doesn’t exist when it may be outdated by the time it comes into use? Microsoft Network is virtually the only vertically integrated model combining carriage, content and middleware. And even with msn’s deep coffers, the business case is dicey. Microsoft apparently capitalizes the media company’s revenue shortfall in this area as r&d.
Who’s going to build a network where there’s no content? Not Time-Warner, or any of the others whose experiments with interactive tv suggests if you build it, they may not come.
If the information highway is to ever become more than a dream in the technologist’s eye, I believe carrier, middleware and content providers will have to work hand in hand. And if Canada wants to keep its place as a pre-eminent player in this field, it had better take notice of the partnerships being forged in the u.s., or evolve more inclusive models of our own.
