Wired on Friday: American TV is an odd mix of sudden revolutionary leaps, followed by endless years of conservatism. It's a world where, in the same week as dozens of young shows struggle to last one more episode in the vicious free-for-all of the autumn schedule, talk show figurehead Jay Leno can lazily announce his retirement from a long-running talk show - and declare that it will happen more than five years from now.
Innovative shows such as The Sopranos, 24 and The West Wing come out of that first furious competition. The endless repeats of old formulas come from the terrified winners of those wars using their victories to secure a long, static, future.
The history of TV technology in the US is much the same. The television industry here, vaster and richer by far than any other television market, is entering one of those times of revolution. And the current incumbents are doing everything - including encouraging the government to ban new technologies - to keep themselves at the top.
High-definition television (HDTV) is the forthcoming change: a high-resolution digital video signal, far more accurate and crisp than your current TV.
In theory, TV manufacturers, media companies and the government should be keen for HDTV to take off - manufacturers, for an opportunity to sell every household a new television; media companies, for the chance to turn television into a more vivid experience for their work and their advertisers; and the government, because by launching this new digital standard for broadcast, they can shut down the old analogue TV transmitters, freeing precious chunks of the radio spectrum, which they can resell to other new wireless industries for billions.
And yet, instead of encouraging this new advance, manufacturers, studios and the US government, have conspired to slow down the HDTV revolution.
After July 1st, 2005, in the US, many current models of HDTV cards for computers, HDTV-capable VCRs, or HDTV recorders of any kind, will be forbidden to be sold. Instead, new ranges with more limited capabilities will be introduced. At the eve of one of those giant leaps forward, the key players in the TV industry are exhibiting not just caution but are actively attempting to rein back a new technology that is already in the market.
Such conservatism has played out before in the TV world. In the 1970s, TV and film media companies fought hard to prevent the adoption of the VCR in the 1970s and 1980s, before adapting and profiting from its adoption.
More recently, the studios have scrabbled to control and restrict another new, and therefore threatening, gadget.
In 1997, a small Silicon Valley company called Tivo built a gadget that sat on top of your TV. They called it a digital video recorder (DVR) - but it was really just a PC that could save TV shows to its hard drive.
Built on the open-source software Linux, it let people treat recorded TV the way they treated files on their computer, hunting around for what they wanted on demand, scrolling and skipping the adverts, automatically finding and recording shows based on complex search terms.
It's easy to see how Tivo became one of the most beloved of gadgets among its customers. Fan sites sprang up; books were written about getting more from your Tivo and your TV life.
But the innovation didn't stop with Tivo. The new equipment spawned a generation of applications and hardware geekery around DVRs. While the Tivo and its service can only be bought in a few places, people all over the world began building their own commercial and non-commercial DVRs based largely on open software. Software applications with names like MythTV and Freevo built on the ideas that created Tivo and added again more functionality to TV no one had thought of before, like Amazon-style recommendations accompanying content.
Tivo was, from the beginning, perceived as a threat by TV studios because the technology promised that consumers could skip the adverts that support and saturate US programming. A game of carrot and stick ensued, with TV executives offering millions of investment to DVR companies at exactly the same time as their lawyers threatened dire consequences if, for instance, Tivo made their advert-skipping too easy to use.
And if Tivo was dangerous, the part-time coders implementing Tivo-like capabilities on their own PCs were even worse. The TV companies managed to negotiate from Tivo some control over advert skipping; no such control was possible with software created by the TV watchers themselves.
The TV studios learnt an important lesson in this battle. When HDTV came along, instead of negotiating with the hardware manufacturers, they cut a deal with the US government.
The controls the TV studios asked for were simple: a "broadcast flag" that, when transmitted by them, would stop openly designed digital recorders from working. Only digital recorders that passed the TV studios' requirements for the new technology would be allowed to operate.
Those requirements are fairly specific, and designed to prevent what the studios call "unauthorised copying". Tivo and other companies whose equipment seals their recordings within the box and have no digital output are acceptable. The many software versions and free competitors to Tivo are not.
HDTV decoders usable by these systems will be withdrawn from sale next year; no new decoders that will allow open competitors to the restricted DVDs will appear.
The studios' successful lobbying for legal controls of technology (with the agreement of the tech companies themselves) is a worrying development.
Within a system that allows content providers a veto over new technologies that carry their content, there may never be another Tivo or VCR story.
Europe is moving towards its own broadcast flag provision. An industry group, the Digital Video Broadcasting Forum, is currently negotiating the future of broadcasting for Asia, Australia and Europe behind closed doors.
What emerges from those meetings will determine whether the next few years will see a burst of excitement and innovation in TV or just more repeats of the same old showdown.
