When The Revolution Comes

SMELLOVISION REPLACES TELEVISION, trumpets a newspaper headline of the future, as spied by Elmer Fudd in a Bugs Bunny cartoon from 1944. Elmer, that old fuddy-duddy, is astonished, but the Merrie Melodies folks may have been onto something. The technological revolution about to sweep over TV will not be merely an incremental change -- more channels, more choices, more chances to play Jeopardy! along with the TV contestants (using your interactive home remote). Ultimately it could bring about a transformation so radical that the medium may scarcely be recognizable as television.

Bruce Springsteen's famous lament 57 Channels (and Nothin' On) now seems almost quaint. Very soon, the 57 will multiply to 500, or somewhere in the neighborhood. And even that will be only a way station. The final destination is a post-channel universe of essentially unlimited choice: virtually everything produced for the medium, past or present, plus a wealth of other information and entertainment options, stored in computer banks and available instantly at the touch of a button.

A dazzling scenario, to be sure. Maybe a little scary. And definitely fraught with uncertainties. No one involved in the TV industry has a precise idea of what the new world will look like, or how the audience will react to it. When TV offers custom selections to suit every narrow interest, will mass- audience programming disappear? Or will the interactive offerings appeal mainly to an audience of techno-freaks, while the rest of us, at least for the foreseeable future, stick with our favorite channels? Will the traditional networks survive? What about commercials, local affiliates, video stores? Will we wind up watching more TV or less? Or all go quietly mad?

Let's take it one step at a time.

First will come the channel bonanza: a simple expansion of today's cable world in which more and more stations and networks will become available on your box. Yet even 500 points of light will not necessarily mean a sudden bounty of new home entertainment. "There isn't an inexhaustible supply of talent out there waiting to fill 500 channels," warns Howard Stringer, CBS Broadcast Group president. "The first thing that comes to mind is what Alvin Toffler called the Law of Raspberry Jam: the wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets."

Many of the new channels will be devoted to information services (your morning newspaper on TV) and home shopping stations (specific ones for designer clothes, health products, sporting goods and so forth). Pay-per-view movie channels will proliferate, and premium services will grab up extra channels to "multiplex" their programming -- offering movies on several channels at staggered times to increase the viewer's options. (HBO, Showtime and the Disney Channel have already begun offering such a service in some cable systems.)

Existing cable channels will subdivide or create spin-offs: a battery of sports channels from ESPN, say, or targeted versions of MTV. "My guess is we'll probably do three to five feeds of MTV, much like radio," says Frank Biondi Jr., president of Viacom, which owns the music-video channel and several other cable networks. "We'll do hard rock, rhythm and blues, urban contemporary -- right down the line."