This is the first of a two-part feature. Part two will appear Monday.

"The media must be liberated, must be removed from private ownership and commercial sponsorship, must be placed in the service of all humanity. We must make the media believable. We must assume conscious control over the videosphere. We must wrench the intermedia network free from the archaic and corrupt intelligence that now dominates it."

-Gene Youngblood in Radical Software, a journal of new developments and possibilities for the alternate television movement.

IF YOU compare the first two issues of Radical Software with the January 6 issue of Variety, you will get two very different views of the same phenomenon. Radical Software calls it the alternate television movement and Variety calls it the cassette revolution. The names the magazines use and the way they talk about it betray the diametrically opposed positions they take regarding its development.

What the two are talking about are technological advances which will make possible-indeed inevitable-the first major restricting of the commercial television industry since its inception. If the alternate television movement succeeds, television will not be broadcast, it will be narrowest: that is, television will no longer originate solely from the highly centralized monolithic structure the networks now form. The networks will be decentralized, removed from private ownership and commercial sponsorship, free from censorship of any kind. Television will become the center of a revolutionary communications system which could provide the public with instant access to any and all information that can be recorded either visually or by sound. Moreover, everyone will have equal access to the airwaves.

Such a system is technologically possible in the near future-in his book Expanded Cinema, Gene Youngblood says it is possible by 1978. But if Youngblood's prediction is to come true, it will be in spite of the current communications industry.

Whether the alternate television movement succeeds or not television as we know it is in for some radical changes in the next few years. Video-cassettes and videocartridges will be marketed. Cable television (CATV), heretofore providing only network programming to areas outside the range of broadcast TV, will move into the major urban areas, offering a wider selection and, hopefully, better programming. The larger concern of the alternate television movement is, of course, that a medium with such potential not be limited to televising live home games of the New York Knickerbockers or offering instant access to the Best of Ed Sullivan. But if the eight-page section on TV cassettes in Variety is any indication of how the industry views the new developments, then the power wielded by the corporate giants of the communications industry can only slow down the impending communications revolution.

In order to give an idea of the discrepancy between the communications system television could become and the direction the industry is headed, let me list some of the possibilities as predicted in Radical Software:

10 by 6-foot wall screens;

video telephones capable of transmitting and receiving;

regional video telecommand library systems by 1978. This system would allow the individual to telephone regional video library switchboards ordering programs from among thousands listed in catalogs. The program could then be transmitted by cable to the home television set;

videofax or homofax process of facsimile replications and distributions by which one could receive newspapers, mail, data from libraries over home receivers;

one-hour video tape cartridges and cassettes are now available with 180,000 frames, each of which can be screened individually or sequentially. If two pages of a book were photographed on each frame, 360,000 pages of printed information could be stored on a small, cheap cartridge.

In terms of what can be done with the above hardware-all of which is within the grasp of today's technology-the goals of the cassette industry can only be seen as reactionary. Rather than try to develop a revolutionary communications system, the cassette industry has chosen to try to set up a system by which each piece of information is sold bit by bit. And they have not even been able to do that successfully; at present there are at least thirteen different video cartridge/ cassette type systems, all of which are incompatible (see chart). All manufacturers seem to echo the voice of Gerald Citro, Marketing Manager of North American Philips, who says in Variety, "Standardization will help avoid confusion on the part of the consumer, reduce the price, and encourage the development of new markets." But while all manufacturers agree that standardization is the key to marketing videocassettes, they continue to stick by their own products.

MOREOVER, by charging about $10 per half hour of video recording, the industry is imposing marketing limitations on itself that will preclude any possibility of liberating television in any real sense. Even industry people themselves question how many people are going to be willing to pay $20 to $30 to see the same feature film over and over again, or even $5 to $10 to rent a cartridge of their favorite film. As A.N. Feldzamen of the Encyclopedia Britannica Corporation says in Variety, "People will probably not want to see the same film over and over again unless it is a particularly unusual 'sensation' type of film, viewed to turn on, or another special type. Pornography will probably be an exception to this rule." Indeed Feldzamen and others marketing videocassettes might well be forced to take an interest in pornography-how many people will continue to buy bulky, expensive encyclopedias when they realize that the entire contents of the Britannica can easily be stored on a small $10 videocassette.