What's the next big thing?

WASHINGTON -- Twenty years ago, the first movie ever to spin through my newly purchased Sony VCR was This Is the Army, an Irving Berlin 1943 Technicolor musical in which Ronald Reagan seeks to bolster the war effort. The Betamax cassette, via mail order, cost $99.95.

The other day, I watched This Is the Army via the Internet for free. The demo wasn't perfect. But it was like the story of the talking dog: It may not have had much to say, but the important thing is that it could talk at all.

Starting next June, MeTV.com plans to transmit thousands of flicks through cyberspace at $1.99 a pop. The people behind this new venture know that few folks will want to view full-length feature films on their monitors. So the movie rentals will come with a wireless device that will beam them through walls or floors into TV sets or home theater units.

"For the Hollywood studios, it will be just another distribution channel," said Martin French, MeTV's marketing director. "It will be possible for 100,000 viewers to see the same movie at home at the same time. No VCR rental store can do that."

Naturally, there's a catch. For MeTV to do its thing, you'll need an Internet link that's at least six times faster than today's most common modems. And for the films to look and sound really good, you'll need one, like mine, that's 16 times as fast as the current standard.

On the other hand, all signs indicate that these blazingly fast pipelines into the home will be the Next Big Thing to hit the Internet. Several recent studies predict that by 2002, upwards of 10 million U.S. homes will be equipped with so-called broadband devices such as cable modems, digital subscriber lines, wireless systems or satellite links.

Video streaming technologies are still so novel that fewer than 50 outfits -- most of them relative unknowns, such as MeTV -- have signed up for a Dec. 7 industry trade show in Silicon Valley. But it should come as no surprise that Bill Gates will keynote this event. Although the Microsoft chairman's image has reached mythic heights, Gates has an ear to the ground for the Next Big Thing.

Michael Lewis takes up much the same theme in his latest book, The New New Thing (Norton), which seeks to capture the millennial feel of Silicon Valley in the same sense that his former best-seller, Liar's Poker, evoked the ethos of Wall Street in the 1980s.

In his preface, Lewis writes: "The new new thing is a notion that is a tiny push away from general acceptance and, when it gets that push, will change the world."

As Lewis sees it, that could be a radically different way of delivering medical services to millions of Americans, one that could shake up the nation's $1.3 trillion health care industry. Or perhaps it could be Me-TV's vision of delivering razor-sharp movies into millions of homes with a mouse click or two.

To be sure, we haven't progressed much in making better movies than This Is the Army. But then again, as Lewis notes, "progress does not march forward like an army on parade; it crawls on its belly like a guerrilla."

Andrew J. Glass is a Washington-based columnist for Cox Newspapers. His e-mail address is aglass

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