Dan Gillmor has a report on amazing technology in Hong Kong that allows TV over broadband, real broadband, not the poky nonsense we have here in the U.S., but the system is also autocratic. Is this our future as well?

If the future of television is taking shape here, our choices of programming appear to be nearly infinite. But whether we have flexibility and freedom in how we use those choices will be someone else's decision.

If a new digital age of television is emerging, it may look a lot like "Now Broadband TV," a service launched earlier this fall by PCCW, Hong Kong's dominant telecommunications company. By year's end, it should have more than 200,000 subscribers, and could have as many as half a million in 2004.

Hong Kong is probably the world's most competitive telecommunications market, and Now Broadband TV is one of several television operations here looking to compete in the pay-TV arena. But this service has some distinct advantages, not least its backing by PCCW, which sees it as an add-on more than a stand-alone offering.

The PCCW broadband-TV service, one of the first in the world , doesn't use cable-television lines. It uses the copper phone lines in people's homes, most of which are capable of truly high-speed digital subscriber line (DSL) data connections. Unlike the United States, where DSL customers are limited to speeds well below a megabit per second, the vast majority of Hong Kong's DSL subscribers have connections at 6 megabits per second.

That's fast enough to devote 4.5 megabits to a TV channel and still leave ample Web-surfing capacity. That's just what PCCW has done, guaranteeing TV-quality service for the channels it offers. The company reconfigured its own central offices and is requiring broadband-TV customers to install special set-top boxes.

In most of the world, cable systems have large numbers of customers and negotiate with programmers on an all-or-nothing basis. They've trained viewers to believe the best way to get programming is to pay a flat fee for a grab bag of channels chosen by the company.

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