Cyber-cable: coming to an online

market near you

As we hurtle toward the techno-madness that is nab – and soon after that, the buy-sell frenzy that is mip-tv – it seems Web-focused announcements demand our attention every nano-second, like the interminable ‘bongs!’ ushering new e-mail into your digital parlor. But some Web-focused changes are more noteworthy than others. One key change has to do with what content is going to be available online and who will be able to access it. In fact, a new order is emerging. In it, website owners will demarcate cyber ‘territories’ and sell access to content in much the same way as cablers demarcate their co-ax fiefdoms on hard-wired Earth.

Essentially, now that vehement protests and threatened lawsuits have forced renegade website iCravetv.com to shut down, entertainment types are racing to find a better way to protect content on the Web.

iCrave may only be down for a few months. Meantime, principal Bill Craig’s team tries to develop technology that would allow it to buy rights to ‘play’ programming on the Web for viewers based only in the territory or territories licensed. Craig says his promised iWall technology will allow the creation of what he calls Country Area Networks – which he likens to lans, Local Area Networks – such that viewers in any country can access only programming licensed by iCrave for that country or territory.

In theory, this would go a long way toward resolving rights holders’ objections to iCrave; in theory, with the Internet converted to just another link in the distribution chain, creators and distributors would see order restored in place of the chaos iCrave invited.

Once Internet buyers and content producers and sellers worked out a system for licence fees, exclusive and non-exclusive periods for online exposure, all will go on as before, right? Perhaps, but what will this post-Net distribution world look like?

If the colonization of the Internet continues on its current course, will eager users scurry blithely into an online mousetrap, where they can nibble a little Cheddar while the Camembert remains beyond their grasp? Is the entertainment industry, although rightly aiming to protect artists’ rights to be paid for their work, simultaneously confounding the free exchange of ideas the Net first promised to be?

iCrave boldly blasted distributors’ carefully constructed, window-by-window universe of sales. iCrave mocked the entertainment industry’s relentless efforts to create order out of chaos. iCrave, in fact, reveled in the chaos.

Now, an about-face is underway, the iCrave troops marching smartly forward. But, as Denise Caruso wrote in the New York Times earlier this month, ‘Privacy and free speech issues aside, (many people) might say – for good reason – that such a system would devolve the Internet into a model very much like the restricted, centralized control of cable television.’

We know what the masses think of that. Millions of Roseanne fans laughed long and hard when the story line in one episode satirized the hilarious, and pathetic, lengths some people will go to for free cable.

But that’s history, like the series. By tomorrow, the burning, caste-cracking question will be: ‘Do you have pay-Web?’