Rather quietly, ESPN has been running a service called ESPN 360 (formerly ESPN Broadband). Compared to the mammoth promotions for their various made for tv movie-productions and new services such as ESPN-U, ESPN has not pushed this service very hard. One can only access it if one's internet service provider subscribes to the service, though the ESPN 360 page does suggest users contact their ISP about this.
ESPN describes the service as follows:
ESPN360 is an always-on application that provides
sports content directly to your computer, including live sportscasts,
on-demand video, interactive games, event coverage, news analysis and
more.
What's interesting is that ESPN 360 is potentially a taste of the future, but not one being embraced by the cable and telephone companies that provide broadband service (it's not available on SBC, for example). Buzzwords like synergy and the merging of media have been bandied about for years now, reaching their peak when AOL took over Time Warner in 2001. One pipe (presumably fiber optic) with enough bandwidth could provide television services like ESPN 360 and others at HDTV quality, the regular internet, and internet telephony (VOIP) that could be delivered to the television, computer, and whatever other wireless devices one has. But this vision is not being embraced by the companies dominant in current internet infrastructure, who are actually incompetent in even providing rather slow cable internet, as Comcast subscribers have found out recently.
It seems to me that in the United States, there are three main obstacles to the merging of television, telephony and the internet, as this interesting article in Foreign Affairs emphasises: 1) It is not in the short-term interest of the powerful cable companies to merge internet and television, since they would then have to charge less than the considerable amounts they get by bundling their cable television and cable internet services together; 2) It is not in the short-term interest of the powerful telephone companies to merge broadband internet and their telephone service, since they would then have to charge less than they get by bundling their telephone service and DSL internet services together; 3) There is, compared to Japan and South Korea - essentially the world's leaders in broadband - little governmental pressure in the U.S. to create a national high-speed (and by high speed, I don't mean 1.5mb dsl!) internet infrastructure.
The significance of this for the U.S. is considerable. I know many people who now do not see the point in cable television service, when they can receive so much information and entertainment via broadband, and can download the tv shows they like from Bittorrent. Bittorrent, though, doesn't really work for live sports: whilst mlb.com does offer live video feeds, the quality is appalling, and certainly is not suitable for viewing on television, let alone HDTV. I for one would love one pipe to deliver me the internet and video service: I'd like to be able to choose certain services, such as ESPN.360 or MLB.TV and certain television programmes, such as The O.C. or whatever else I'm into to subscribe to. I'd have a box that serves as a media center peforming DVR functions and acting as a central server for media. I need high-speed streaming media to other devices in the house (and beyond, to my wireless phone/pda/laptop) . This is not an outlandish request. The technology is either there already, or could be within a year or two of some serious investment.
A whole generation is growing up used to content being picked and chosen by them whenever they want and without delays for commercials, due to their experience of the internet that does not mesh with the old-school idea of cable television serving up a 100 channels that one never watches. Private companies in the U.S. are very slowly laying this infrastructure, at a pace way behind that of Japan. Comcast now offers a content-poor On Demand service (presumably the fear of loss of DVD sales are hampering the addition of top-rated programmes and movies to this service) and Comcast and SBC are laying some fiber optic lines, though at a slow and limited pace.
As America falls behind in the digital revolution, it is worth recalling a similar event several decades ago. In the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. fell far behind Japan as the world moved to post-Fordist consumption/production in areas such as automobiles, as the outmoded mass production techniques of Detroit became obsolete in the face of the flexibile production system of Toyota. There were fears that "Japan, Inc." was waging an economic war that would eclipse America, mired in post-Vietnam and Staglated malaise. The post-Cold War era has in many ways eclipsed these fears and memories of this era (as long as you live outside the Midwest Rustbelt), with the much-touted American victory over Communism and its imperial actions from Kosovo to Iraq suggesting it has reasserted itself as a global hegemon. In many ways, though, this an illusory military-based hegemony resting on weak economic foundations. The fact that the U.S. cannot really afford the wars it embarks upon and has a dollar and deficit extremely vulnerable to foreign capital movements is proof of this. Though East Asia (apart from China) struggled mightily in the late-90s, the U.S. is by no means the economically dominant force it was in the 1950s, when the infrastructure of its technological and cultural dominance was set-up. Japan was hardly defeated; Toyota is the #2 car company in the world.
If there is not an adequate infrastructure developed in the U.S. to distribute services such as ESPN 360 and beyond, U.S. technological and cultural dominance will not be as straightforward as is usually presumed. For if the potentially massive China market becomes dominated by Japanese technology companies (however unlikely that seems now in the light of recent events) due to their earlier success in delivering rich broadband media, the U.S. economy will only be eclipsed further. Of course, some argue that it is the sheer size of America and its mix of high and low density population areas that make developing this infrastructure much harder than in Japan or South Korea.
This is an interesting point, but it raises a new challenge for the U.S.: its history has been one that has benefited from its huge landmass and expanding markets and populations, able to bring in endless streams of low-wage immigrants and benefiting from great economies of scale and raw materials that previous economic powers such as Britain could not match. But does the digital revolution invert this? Or can U.S. companies raise their game and meet the challenge of serving the digital needs of the U.S. on a national scale? Or is it the case that whereas in previous eras, massive government investment has paid for the development of private infrastructure (railways, etc), such is the current level of neoliberal obfuscation that ideology will stymie the possibility of government-led technological infrastructure advance? I'll be watching the development of ESPN 360 closely, as a test case for the ability of the U.S. to meet the needs of twenty first century culture and technology.
