Overview

The digital world that Owen shows the reader is one in which communication titans jockey to survive what Joseph Shumpter called the ""gales of creative destruction"". While the rest of us simply struggle follow the new moves, believing that technology will settle the outcome, Owen warns that this is a game in which Washington regulators and media hyperbole figure as broadly as innovation and investment. The book explains the game as one involving interactions among all the players, including consumers and advertisers, each with a particular goal. He also discusses the economic principles that govern this game and that can serve as powerful predictive tools.

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9780674872998

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Reviews

Focusing on both the effects of government regulation on the television business and the economics of communication technology, Owen, a communications economist, presents insights in both areas that are refreshingly different from the mass of speculation recently published about the nexus between television and the Internet...Owen's book is recommended for anyone interested in the television industry or the economics of the telecommunications industry. -- B. P. Keating Choice

An instructive, if misnamed, volume on emerging technology in the fields of television, telephony, and computers. Owens, an economist, tends to approach his subjects with the issue of cost-effectiveness foremost. He treats his material methodically from both historical and prognostic points of view, covering radio as a precursor to television and making predictions on the success of high-definition television (HDTV). In the case of telephones and televisions, there is a further division into analog and digital subsets, and with television additional stratification between broadcast and cable media. Much of this discussion is quite helpful, and Owen certainly renders the technical jargon far more clearly than a typical owner's manual for a product does. For instance, he offers an instructive discussion on the origins of the word broadcast, employing a comparison with narrowcast to underscore the importance of bandwidth to predigital and non-computer-based forms of communication. Similarly, Owens makes strong use of charts and diagrams to elucidate his contentions. His political stance, on those rare occasions when it can be discerned at all, is innocuously laissez-faire, criticizing both monopolies and government-sponsored protection of the industry. However, the study eventually sinks under the weight of too much material crammed into too slim a volume: confusion inevitably results, despite the helpful glossary. More importantly, the issue of convergence between television and the Internet - the very phenomenon that the book's title suggests is central - comes late in the discussion and is given short shrift. Owen seems somewhat behind the curve, predicting that television/computer convergence is further off than it may actually be, though his points about the requirements for higher computer speeds and greater memory capacity are well taken. Despite its future-oriented hype, more useful as a historical text than a handbook for the 21st century. (Kirkus Reviews)

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