Distribution, Online

Origins

Inspired partly by European experiments with delivering textual information via telephone and television, several U.S. media companies flirted with electronic delivery of information in the late 1970s. These videotex and teletext services sent text and low-definition graphics to subscribers' television sets. The systems were costly and slow and found little reception among readers, though the Minitel system in France did see some level of success.

With the introduction of personal computers into the home in the 1980s, commercial dial-up services such as CompuServe, America Online, and Prodigy were developed, and some publishers experimented with delivering news over those services. But those experiments, such as proprietary services undertaken by USA Today, The Washington Post, and Time Warner, failed to gain much traction in the marketplace. There were a number of obstacles, many of them economic: early PCs cost as much as $3,000 or more, connection fees added up to another $100 or more each month (and long-distance charges, for those who did not have locally available Internet access, could add up to as much as $1 a minute in many cases). Meanwhile, each service offered access to content from only a handful of news outlets.

The World Wide Web

Only in the mid-1990s did electronic news delivery begin to attract serious attention, with the dawn of the World Wide Web and graphical web browsers, such as Mosaic and, later, Netscape Navigator. In contrast with earlier attempts at delivering news electronically, this new forum offered several advantages to the news consumer. Prices for personal computers began falling as they became more of a commodity Internet service providers began offering large blocks of connection time for a flat fee, often as little as $20 a month. In a rush to stake out their territory in the Internet medium, most news outlets offered their content at no charge. And finally, the World Wide Web offered the convenience of access to hundreds of different news sources.

Initially, news offered on most websites was primarily text based. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), used to construct webpages, has always had the capability of including inline graphics as well as text. But slow (usually telephone-based) connection speeds made web readers reluctant to wait for graphics to load. In addition, many publishers devoted little effort to preparing web content, merely reprinting news stories online in a practice that came to be known derisively as “shovelware.”

As HTML specifications evolved and Internet connection speeds increased, publishers began [Page 432]incorporating more graphics into their Internet news feeds. Some sites also tried offering audio and even video content, but again connection speeds were a limiting factor. By the late 1990s, Real Networks developed a protocol that allowed audio and video content to be “streamed” with the audio or video starting to play almost immediately while the rest of the content was still being sent. While that theoretically provided a solution to waiting for long periods to download an audio or video file, the reality was that still modest connection speeds and Internet congestion meant that content suffered from low-fidelity audio with frequent pauses or jerky low-resolution video not much larger than a postage stamp. Nevertheless, some radio stations began streaming their programming and several television networks began offering limited video content, although it typically was the same as the broadcast content.

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