Media consumers are usually too busy paying attention to content to consider the channels through which it arrives. Yet the nature of those channels and the rules governing them have historically had a huge, unacknowledged role in creating and shaping what we read, watch and listen to.
The motion picture business was founded by people who owned tiny movie houses; the future moguls knew nothing about making films, but they owned the exhibition outlets, and needed content to sell tickets for. So they learned, and they shot, and they founded the studios. Channel preceded content, and gave birth to Hollywood.
Channel control has long prefigured media development. In the electronic age, wherever the creative artists went, the engineers had gotten there first.
Broadcasting started out as the late 1920s brainchild of people who made and sold radio sets. They wanted to give customers a reason to buy their receivers, so they then began making programs and transmitting them over the air. First came the distribution channels, content followed.
FM radio languished for 30 years until the 1960s, when regulators told station owners they could no longer fill the high-quality FM band with the same programs they were putting out on scratchy AM. Suddenly huge bandwidth opened up, perfect for audio engineered for clarity — and the revolution in alternative rock was born.
And the feds’ 1962 insistence that all TV sets be equipped to receive signals broadcast in the UHF range – another 60-some channels on top of the four or five that most consumers received — broke the network stranglehold on TV broadcasting and started the industry down the road to the multi-channel cable explosion.
That brief history lesson goes some way toward explaining why today’s controversy over so-called net neutrality matters.
Net neutrality is the policy that has barred the companies that furnish Internet connections from playing favorites. It means Internet
Continue reading “Net Neutrality Debate a Reminder that Content Was Never King”
