Net advantage

WOULD you have thought the day would come when television would depend upon the Internet in more ways than one? Almost unnoticed, the Net has become a major driver of TV news, and leading news organisations are scrambling to respond. If MSNBC is the world's most visited TV news site followed by CNN and the BBC, it is because it pops up on the Internet Explorer browser every time a user logs on. But the other two are investing considerable money and energy in their online businesses because the synergies are becoming clearly apparent. And CNN hopes that if and when the America Online-Times Warner merger goes through, it will get a similar boost by virtue of being on the AOL homepage, a platform which will give it default entry into millions of homes.

TV News channels get their audiences when there is a major breaking story. But the Internet is actually more effective in such a scenario: the news is there for the asking. You do not even have to get to a TV to catch the latest - there is a large at-work population that is increasingly being served by online news from traditional TV organisations. "BBC TV cannot reach people in their offices," says the world editor for BBC News Online, Nic Newman. "But if they hear of a development they can follow it on our site on the Net." The Net delivers a new delivery mechanism for BBC News.

A small United States TV station, an affiliate of NBC, has worked out a neat strategy for using the Internet to promote its news programmes. WAVE 3's Internet director has built up a data base of local viewers and sends an e-mail alert informing them of a breaking story. It has found that people react in two ways: they either log on to the station's website for more information, or to its TV channel for the next bulletin, or both. This has pushed up ratings for the channel's news show.

The impasse over the U.S. elections was a major draw for surfers worldwide. Last fortnight at the United Nations TV Forum, Televisa's vice- president for Information declared that more people in Mexico have followed the U.S. elections on the Internet than on satellite TV. CNN says that before the impasse began, on Tuesday, November 7, its website recorded 40 million page views, and on Wednesday its bosses claim, they were averaging a million page impressions per minute at one point.

The BBC has been fairly nimble in its response to the new medium. For one thing its international channel is cleverly positioning itself as one that offers programming on Information Technology and the new economy, for another the British Government has increased the organisation's budget to enable it to develop BBC World Online. There is regionalisation afoot here: the website uses BBC radio resources to offer audio in Arabic and Chinese languages, and a Hindi audio service online is in the offing. It is also working on modular ways of serving up text for different requirements, through a single data base. Ideally, a website aimed at both the developed and developing world should have a low graphics version for bandwidth problem areas.

The advantage that a broadcasting organisation has is that it can use the same resources to feed radio, TV and Internet, and also cross promote its services across all these. CNN's ongoing regionalisation since 1997 is now evident on its website, where Spanish, Turkish and German language news is on offer, and separate English editions of the news for Europe, South Asia and Asia.

It can also use the Net to augment the information that goes out on television. The two programmes produced by UTV that CNN has just introduced on its India beam in the areas of style and information technology, are supplemented by more information on the Web. "The Internet audience is a particularly forensic one," says Chris Cramer, President of International Networks at CNN. "They want more information, and have more questions."

The organisation has hired close to 50 interactive journalists at Hongkong who are co-located with TV journalists. They are there to add value to the television content. "A programme is not fit for broadcast unless it has an accompaniment on the Web," says Rena Golden, CNN's Executive vice- president. This certainly is a new way of looking at television programming.

The Internet also enhances news gathering. For one, correspondents can sent tracks via the Internet, for another e- mail responses to news telecasts can be used to change the information telecast. Newman says that during the BBC coverage of the Iranian elections viewers pointed out mistakes by e-mail, which the channel then hastened to correct. For a third, the Internet can ask surfers to become content providers and send in news in situations of war and anarchy, when normal news sources are not there. Recent examples: Indonesia and Kosovo.

The Net is also a source of news: Chris Cramer's favourite example is that of a website for air pilots which reports near misses before they are officially acknowledged. The site gets the information by monitoring pilots talking to each other. TV can pick up leads on near misses from this site. "This is raw news gathering," says Cramer.

Internet technology has had to keep pace with the medium's emergence as a major news source. HTML, the hyper text mark up language, has been augmented by XML and NewsML. The last is an XML encoding for news which is intended to be used for the creation, transfer, delivery and archiving of news. NewsML is media independent, and allows equally for the representation of the evening TV news and a simple textual story. It provides a structure within which news objects, of whatever type, relate to each other. NewsML can represent text, video, audio, graphics and photos with the same felicity.

Other technological innovations are being used by local TV stations in the U.S. to intertwine their TV and Net operations. A company called World Now services these with a user-friendly, browser-based, site management tool. This enables publishers to manage text, graphics, and video assets. WTKR, a local TV station in Virginia, produces active video webcasts as on-demand newscasts exclusively for Internet distribution, using news and footage from its TV operation.

So with the Internet so integral to TV news, what does a TV network do when it is not able to used its televison content for the Net? That is the dilemma the Star News Network currently finds itself in. In 1996 when Star negotiated with New Delhi Television to produce Star News, the latter was quite clear that it only wanted to part with TV rights for the content it produced. At that time the Internet did not seem so terribly important. Today, in the era of convergence, Star News is a TV network that cannot use its TV content for the Net. And that has become a serious disadvantage

On the National Geographic Channel: Tomorrow at 9 p.m., "An Unholy Mission", an episode on Meghalaya from the Channel's series "India Diaries", which aired throughout November. Mark Shand and Aditya Patankar have a rather free-wheeling approach to documenting their travels among the Khasis.

Attractive footage wraps a hotch potch of observations on the matrilineal culture of the Khasis, on the rural economy which sustains them, on their embracing of Christianity, and on customs such as bull fighting and pig catching. The half hour also including some horsing around among the presenters.

SEVANTI NINAN

E-mail the writer at sevantininan@vsnl.com

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