'Beyond on 3' producer, Gordon Greaves, and director, Clive Todd, interviewed him:

GG:

One of the areas you're very active in is mulitmedia on the web.  Packages like RealAudio and RealPlayer are improving the quality of audio and video on the net constantly.  And with high bandwidth networks like Teledesic, Globalstar and Iridium coming online in the next years, is traditional TV broadcast on its way out?  Is a body like the IBA (South African broadcast regulatory body) an exercise in futility?

GN:

I would say it will become an exercise in futility, but right now television is still the predominant push media out there. But as the infrastructure level rises in the world, and it becomes more and more easy to put streaming video content up onto the Internet, the IBA will become futile.  Anybody will be able to run a TV station because to put video content up onto the Internet is easy -  all they have to do is get a leased line.  So anybody who is trying to control the Internet, I think is attempting to do something that is impossible.

GG:

Do you think you will see a move away from traditional television broadcast to more of an Internet protocol-type streaming video?

GN:

I have a more holistic opinion of it. The whole concept of the Internet being a wire-based network is a limited view.  I think of the Internet, or the future of the Internet, as the data-sphere.  It's not just going to be wires; it's going to be wires, satellite, wire-less  - so radio, infra-red, microwave will also be carriers. It's going to be a combination of all these various things - together, will create the data-sphere and so it's not limited to a particular type of delivery mechanism."

GG:

How do you see that affecting the kind of media we receive on the Internet?  Is it still just going to be mainly  images and text?

GN:

If you look to the future of the Internet and the Web, you'll see a merging or a marrying of all thesel these various media and it will all be delivered via the same mechanism, so you'll have one interface into the world of information - be that television, radio, data or pure information content. We are already seeing that to a greater or lesser degree, it's just the infrastructure - the bandwidth - once again that's the limitation.

In America they're projecting that by the year 2005, available bandwidth will not be an issue - so everything can then be delivered via the same mechanism. Of course in America, they're far further down the line with it - simply because of things like cable TV -  their models are set up to deliver all kinds of content via cable already, so now to get it to deliver Internet content is actually a very small switch - both in mind set and in technology."

GG:

What about in developing countries, like South Africa and Asian territories?

GN:

Well, some of the Asian countries have had a commitment to technological advancement for some time, seeing it as their way to become players in the international arena, so they've really gone full steam ahead to get as much bandwidth as possible.

South Africa is very advanced technologically - we're right up there with the most developed countries in the world, but infrastructurally we're way behind, and that's what's weighing us down at the moment - the fact that we have inferior infrastructure. And I think that's really the limitation of those countries and ourselves of course...and that's really because of costs, we don't really have the markets to support such huge infrastructure."

GG:

Might this influence the traditional way of doing things. Now that anybody can go and broadcast their own little television programme on the Web, might it even mean the demise of the large networks?

GN:

I don't think so, because all you are doing is changing the delivery mechanism - not influencing content. Big media houses or big television companies are really about gathering content, producing that content - putting it together in a way that makes it visually appealing.

If I'm a two-man operation and I decide I want to put a television station up - what kind of quality am I going to generate? It's going to be - this is me, this is my house, this is the tree I like to climb. There will always be those big institutions that produce content - they'll just expand the types of content they deliver and the delivery mechanism. They will probably deliver it via multiple delivery channels.

GG:

Do you think multiple delivery channels will make it a more customer friendly service?

GN:

Absolutely, with things like video and data, it will be delivered on demand - you'll be able to choose what you want to see, whether it's video, whether it's audio. If you want to listen to a CD, you'll be able to download it to your house and it will put it in your Hi-Fi and you can record it at any time. If you want to send it to your car radio, you'll be able to do that via some short distance wire-less mechanism and it will be stored in you car radio.

I think what will happen is that the devices that we've known or come to know and love will change subtly. You'll still have your television sets and your PC's, but those devices will have IP addresses and they'll be network-enabled so they will be able to do a lot more than they do today - but they'll pretty much look and feel the same way.

GG:

Experts are predicting that you are going to have home LAN (Local Area Network) and even a personal LAN.  Companies like Nokia are saying that you'll have like a little pin that's got your business card in it and someone will just point the infrared phone at it and download your business card.

GN:

I've heard some very interesting things about using the body as conductivity, where the actual LAN on your body will be your flesh itself, because there's micro conductivity across the flesh.  So  you can have devices that touch your body, or are embedded in your body, or communicate via your body.

As far as home LAN is concerned, you already have one if you think about it. You have an electricity network in your house. You already have an electricity network in your house, so the next step up from that might be piggy-backing data across powerlines.  But it may also be that they wire it in the same way they wire in your power. In America, for instance you already get apartments that are fully wired with optical fibre ensuring that kind of connectivity.  So it's just a logical extension of what we've got today.

GG:

Is this not an invasion of privacy? Are we not getting to the stage of Big Brother and implanted microchips?

GN:

That purely depends on how the technology is used - I mean technology is just technology.  It can  used to snoop etcetera, but that's a moral issue and not in my area.

GG:

We recently interviewed Richard Laubscher (CEO of South African banking group, Nedcor), who told us about a recent trip he'd been to at Bell Laboratires in the USA, where they demonstrated  technology able to scan your smart card in your wallet, inside your pocket as you walk in the bank's door.

GN:

There are two kinds of smart cards - connection-less smart cards and connection smart cards. Connection smart cards have little metal plates which have to come into contact with a reader to pick data. Contact-less smart cards are basically a small chip which they scan, and then it can release its data.

GG:

That's great, but what's to stop organisations installing smart-card scanners on every street corner?

GN:

Nothing.

CT:

Will television or radio stations broadcasting on the Internet affect productivity in the  workforce?

GN:

I'll answer that by asking you a question: How many people in the workplace have got a normal radio? ' - it's exactly the same scenario.  You have the same problems with pornography - it's a matter of controlling via policy or via physical limitations like a firewall and protecting your network from abuses like that.

I'd also say in some areas it's actually a plus - certainly as a technologist in the technology area there's a lot of content out there that's now video and audio based.  For instance, every day, using RealPlayer,  I have a choice of technology TV channels that I go to every morning and I get my own personal briefing made up of certain channels that tell me what is happening in the industry.  It is not continuous, so it doesn't eat up too much bandwidth and I find it a very positive business tool. Certainly, inside the company, if you want to do video conferencing - it's also very viable

CT:

Copyright is a major issue on the Internet.  Is this going to mean greater plagiarism?

GN:

Absolutely, I think that even today you could probably find full CD's online that have been copied and digitised and put onto the Internet at CD quality - so you could actually listen to a full CD online.  I don't think it's a specifically Internet thing but I'd say yes, we are going to see that kind of thing happening.

What also might happen is that people start using various encryption-type methods, public/private key -type mechanisms, and vendors of movies and CD's will protect their data. You will purchase that recording and it will be encrypted with something that is unique to you, so only you can un-encrypt it.  If you then decide to put it onto tape, well, then we are back in the old paradigm and there is nothing we can do about it. But we must stop thinking that the Internet is a new set of rules - it's the old set of rules, delivered via a new mechanism.

CT:

South Africa is a strange combination of first world and third world, and yet when cell-phone technology hit South Africa, we became one of the market leaders in terms of the technology and the delivery system.  Do you foresee South Africa becoming the leaders again with the next delivery system on the Internet or whatever form?

GN:

I think cell-phones are different. The cell-phone represents the personal communication device.  It means that you are reachable at all times.

I think the evolution of the Internet and the Web is more about presentation of information - so the Web at the moment is something that you interact with through a PC.  But the presentation scenarios for the Internet are going to become far richer, and you are going to be able to get data via a cell-phone or a personal communication device - like a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant).  But it will be connection-less, and assuming the infrastructure is in place in South Africa, I'm sure we'll see a similar thing here.

' Macho', these days is judged by how fast your car is and how small your cell-phone is, so I'm sure, as soon as these small personal communication devices are available, we'll see a proliferation of them in South Africa.

CT:

But South Africa has no delivery system. We have copper cables while the rest of the world is utilising all available technologies.

GN:

South Africa does have a very advanced infrastructure but it's very prohibitively expensive because we don't have the market.  If we had those 240 million people to utilise that infrastructure, it would be cheap.

There's a lot of international bandwidth capacity available for South Africa but because it's so expensive we can't get at it - so that's really the bottom line, it's that we don't have the market to justify the use of that infrastructure.  As soon as we hit upwards towards the 500'000 or 750 thousand Internet users, we should see the prices start to drop. There are some projections that say we only have an Internet market of a million people, which is quite scary because no matter how you project it the Internet in South Africa is always going to be relatively expensive. I'm not sure we'll ever get out of that.

In America, they're saying that by the year 2000, connectivity will be free because it's not about the connectivity, it's about the data on top of it  - that's where you add your value. The value is not in roads, it's in cars - so that's the ideal that everyone is moving towards. We'll get to a point where bandwidth is free.

GG:

That means that, to get the market to the critical mass that we need, we need to take the Internet from Sandton to Soweto?

GN:

Absolutely, we have to take it from Sandton to Kwazulu-Natal ubiquitously. The same way that people acquire televisions in this country, we need the same model for the Internet.

GG:

Is the answer then not something like set-top boxes which makes access to the Internet a lot cheaper?

GN:

Maybe in the mid-term the answer is set-top boxes, but in the short term what we need is very inexpensive devices, very simple devices for a set-top, but the whole concept has to be simplicity.

Interacting with a television is a great way to do it because people are used to the metaphor - it's actually a very intuitive way to interact with your television. So if we can extend that metaphor slightly, so that instead of changing channels you change URL's (Universal Resource Locators - otherwise known as Internet addresses), and then obviously delivering some meaningful content.  Perhaps we could say "e-mail available to everybody in South Africa" is the standard.

Once you get people comfortable with the technology,  which I think is really nine tenths of the law - it's not about the technology itself and what the technology can do, it's about human interaction with the technology. When people are comfortable with the technology they will use it, if people are not comfortable they'll fear it and they'll distance themselves from it.

What needs to happen in the initial phase is some very simple, very cheap technology that we can deliver out to everybody and then slowly but surely to extend that until we have full connectivity for all kinds of data to everybody. That's the dream of the Internet - to hook every human being up together.