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I've been traveling again this month, Seoul, South Korea this time. When I go to a place I've never been before I always try and look into how “technical” the place is (mainly so I can tell if I'll be able to check email from the hotel). Let's just say in Seoul my expectations were exceeded. Seoul is a very interesting city, with an incredibly dense population crowded together, but with areas of serene beauty like the Buddhist temple across the road from my hotel, whose tolling bell and flower-strewn paths were a peaceful refuge of calm in the frenzied activity surrounding me.
It turns out South Korea has the largest broadband penetration of any Internet-enabled nation, at 78 percent of households with broadband. What's more, many of these connections are fiber-optic, meaning the amount of data they can transfer is staggering to those of us stuck on a wimpy six mega-bit per second DSL line. I didn't have to wait long when checking my email (even though the Internet charges at the hotel were, as usual, a complete rip-off).
Interesting things can happen when data-rates change this much. The precedent for this is in the birth of the Free Software/Open Source movement itself. In the late 1980's, when Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation, he funded its activities by selling tapes of the source code for the software he wrote. I remember receiving such a tape when at Manchester University. That was a time where I was personally able to keep track of every single Free Software (no such thing as Open Source then) project in the world. Try and imagine a world where Free Software programmers had to communicate by sending each other batches of tapes, or uploading patches in the small number of kilobytes to isolated bulletin boards with no central connections, and that's the world where Free Software had its slow birth.
What changed things was the Internet, and ubiquitous cheap communications bandwidth allowing programmers to quickly send source code changes to each other. The Usenet news groups were the first instance of this. Groups such as comp.sources.unix were some of first places that Free Software was exchanged. I remember seeing Linus's announcement of the start of the Linux project (“just a hobby, won't be big and professional, like GNU” he wrote) in the comp.os.minux news group. I do remember thinking “good luck, no one will bother with that”, just going to show how cloudy my own crystal ball is (so read all these columns with the appropriate grain of salt). Free Software/Open Source is now changing the face of software development, and it was only possible due to the ready availability of cheap communications bandwidth.
So what will be the result of the availability of not just a few mega-bits per second of bandwidth, but up to 20 mega-bits per second or more available to everyone ? I know what the “content” industry would like to see: that is the new high-speed Internet as a new kind of television. Masses of passive consumers blindly downloading pay-per-view content packaged with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to control their every viewing. I'm sure there'll be some of that, the lure of Hollywood movies and Cable television-like services are too strong to resist. But just like the Free Software/Open Source movements were unexpected beneficiaries of the new bandwidth availability I'm guessing there will be other collaborative endeavors that will be created from a high-bandwidth world.
What can you do with high-bandwidth that you can't do with low ? The answer, as hinted at in the previous paragraph, is video. Collaborative video, impossible in a dial-up world, becomes intriguingly possible with a fiber-optic connected world. The first Open Source animated movie, “Elephants Dream”, has already been released, and if the history of Open Source software is any guide this is only going to be the first of many to come. The rise of the “mash-up”, where creative people take existing video art and re-mix and re-release it in an infinite variety of entertaining ways is another hint of what is in store. If you haven't already seen it I'd recommend downloading the re-mix of the movie trailer for Stanly Kubrick's horror movie “the Shining”, re-packaged as a trailer for a schmaltzy Hollywood comedy for a delightful view of the new kind of art that can come from this creativity. Web sites like www.youtube.com are becoming the new contact points for mass video collaboration.
I'm going to stick my predictive neck out (hey, that's part of the fun of doing a column, looking back after a few years and being amazed at how wrong and naive you could be) and say I expect in the next year or two to see a smash-hit Open Source (or Creative Commons content, which is like the Open Source license for art instead of code) television show or movie become available over the Internet, bypassing the normal TV distribution channels. The science fiction fan-boys as usual are leading the way, with the absolutely awful “Star Trek: New Voyages” project (not the special effects or stories, the acting is awful of course) and the special effects obsessed “Star Wars: IMPS the Relentless” movie which spends a good fifteen minutes of its twenty or so minute running time on slow panning around CGI models of Star Wars ships to show how cool the Star Wars universe is. Heaven if you're a fan I suppose. Eventually some adult supervision will arrive and something genuinely new is going to bubble up from this sub-culture of Open Source art. There is precedent for it, the hit television show “South Park” started as an animated Christmas card emailed over the Internet.
Quite possibly it's going to happen in Korea first (or maybe Japan, which also has cheap and ubiquitous high-bandwidth connections to the home). The sad thing is it's less likely to happen in Europe or the USA due to the incredibly grasping and short sighted nature of our telecommunications monopolies, who are too busy trying to work out how to make people pay premium rates for “fast” traffic like voice and video on the common Internet to be interested in making high-bandwidth available to all with no restrictions on use. That's a subject for a future column. Still, as all our physical goods are now made in China maybe it's the future that all our video art, movies and television will come from collaborative artists working in Korea or Japan. As my brother always says, “No problem, in the future we'll just all earn a living selling each other haircuts over the Internet :-)”.