Clive James on broadband
The collapse of ITV Digital, the announcement that Britain's largest cable company NTL has debts of over ?11 billion and the launch of the BBC's new digital channels raise queries over the future of broadcasting. Digi-telly has very high quality sound and vision, and enables broadcasters to transmit many more channels with fewer frequencies. These channels also have the potential to be interactive, so that viewers can have the thrill of choosing their own camera angle for a Beckham free kick, or of push-button voting in the finals of Pop Idol. While the government has committed to turning off analogue signals sometime between 2006 and 2010, companies in the new market are failing to find the millions of loyal viewers necessary to stay afloat.
There are, however, other forms of digital broadcasting that offer an alternative future for the medium. I have recently taken the plunge and bought a broadband connection to the internet, which has increased the speed of my connection by ten times. Gone are the days of waiting for the screen to fill, line by line. The net has become zippy and exciting. The awesome BBC website becomes a true multimedia experience, with unfragmented streamed radio broadcasts (BBC Radio 6 is only available with a digital set or via the internet), and smooth audio and video news.
welcomestranger.com is the brainchild of Clive James. Its mission is "to become a whole new broadcasting channel for the discriminating audience across the world." There's no mention of digital telly here; instead, the talk is of "web-casting in video and audio." The list of those with whom James converses includes Piers Paul Read, PJ O'Rourke, Cate Blanchett, Peter Porter and Simon Callow. Martin Amis, who finds the nugatory way that television deals with ideas impossibly restrictive, drinks and smokes his way through a gripping half-hour conversation with James that ranges from Russian writers under Stalin to Larkin's poetry and reputation.
With a dial-up connection-the means by which the huge majority of surfers connect to the web-the site is nearly unusable. This makes James and his associates commendably (or recklessly) ambitious. But with a fast connection, the effect is revelatory. The webstream is not completely flawless-it still stutters and jitters a bit- but to watch these 27-minute interviews is to visit broadcasting's parallel universe, where individuals can become their own independent television stations and where those who despair of having anything other than sport, sex and shopping piped into their homes can find refuge. As connections get faster and as all our links to the outside world-from phones to e-mail, radio to television-come increasingly into our homes via a single cable, it may be that television and the web will merge.
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