Electronics Weekly’s issue of Feb 23 1972 has a story starting: ‘Britain seems to be at last waking up to the fact that its cable television operators, who now turn over a lively £15 million a year by piping TV programmes to nearly two million homes, hold the keys to what could be a vast national information grid, capable of supplying a whole host of specialised services from facsimile newspapers to community television’.
Oh yeah? I’ve had cable to my home for a decade but no one’s ever suggested faxing me a newspaper or indulging in a spot of community telly.
If I want a newspaper I have to walk along the Hogsmill, past the Eight Bells, The Wheatsheaf and The Spring (if I can get past them all), around the Horse Pond and beside Bourne Hall Lake to the newsagents.
The 1972 EW report continues: ‘Cable response systems with built in viewer response capability point the way to a multitude of new, interactive television possibilities. Access to banks of videotapes, data banks and computing facilities, pay TV, shopping by television, remote booking of airline and hotel reservations, and on-line banking, not to mention the utopian vision of ‘communicating to work’ by TV – all these schemes have now moved a step nearer to realisation’.
Oh yeah? So far as I’m concerned it was only on getting broadband access to the internet in the last five years that most of these things were made possible for me.
Why didn’t cable make it happen?
There’s a law which says that whenever a group of guys obtains ownership of a network, whether a cable network, TV network or a wireless telecoms network, their brains disappear into their boots and they totally fail to exploit engaging new uses for it.
It is is any consolation, the same "law" applies in the U.S.
Ha ha. Very good. Thanks for that.