Television programming and the 500 channel universe: The influence of multiple conduits on the strategies of moving picture, news, and entertainment programmers

The disciplines of radio television film, mass communication, popular culture, media studies, cultural studies, and sociology all contributed to this research, within the context of social science and the humanities. As we approach the turn of the Millennium, we are on the brink of a technological leap that will put television as we know it into perspective as an artifact of the 20th Century. The number of channels will proliferate. Other media, heretofore considered distinct from television, will converge with it to create a new information system, sometimes called the National Information Infrastructure or NII. That portion of the NII called the 500 channel universe and intended to carry moving picture, news and entertainment is the central focus of this investigation.;This study analyzes statements made by programmers, and individuals who influence programmers. It identifies ways they believe programming strategies and tactics will change or remain the same as we move toward almost limitless channel capacity. While our analytic lens is focused on the role of the mass media programmer, we recognize the term "programmer" encompasses not merely broadcasters of the "big three" networks but also alternative, oppositional, educational, and other commercial programmers working in venues that include, but are not limited to, Cable Satellite, Microwave and the Internet.;In the Twentieth Century, television has been characterized by the network paradigm based on over the air broadcasting, limited spectrum availability, time consuming and expensive modalities of production and relatively low picture and sound resolution. It is possible as we approach an age of almost unlimited channel capacity that a new television paradigm will develop. This study describes existing programming strategies, and analyzes the discourse around their purported increasing or decreasing influence in the multichannel environment of the twenty-first century. It describes and analyzes what individuals with an influence on programming today claim will be the strategies for programming in the television paradigm of the future.