THE POSSIBILITIES are endless, but the end of mass programming is inevitable. When viewers take control of when and what they watch, television programming becomes more personalized, customized, and participatory. Broadcast networks like ABS-CBN and GMA-7 won't have to go the way of analog television; as content companies first and foremost, their programs and products will adapt easily to the new multiple platforms created by digital compression and delivery.

Networks and telecommunications companies will form content and distribution conglomerates just like Time/Warner AOL in the United States already has. These alliances make sure they can still control, or at least influence, and ultimately, profit from what viewers in their territories are watching or downloading. The only problem is, territoriality becomes problematic when anyone can access anything anywhere. New business models and National Telecommunications Commission regulations will determine how Philippine media conglomerates survive the chaotic new media environment. They will have to compete not just among themselves, but increasingly with global media and telco players eager for a piece of the action.

Analog, sometimes called free television, remains profitable because it delivers a mass audience to advertisers. Digital television changes all that. Once content is downloaded, viewers will be able to skip through commercials, rendering the 30-second spot — the bread and butter of networks and ad agencies alike — inefficient.

Ironically, commercial-free television penalizes the viewer as well. Without advertising revenue to recover the overhead of producers and networks, the burden shifts to the audience through higher subscription fees and pay-per-view rates that threaten to bring down viewership levels and could kill the technology altogether. Advertising agencies and producers will need to introduce innovative forms of promotions such as product placements, program and product co-branding, the five-second spot, commercial crawls, and advertainments (advertorials with high entertainment value) to grab attention in an extremely crowded air space.

Because the stakes have never been this high for industry players, serious discussion on the future of television is already taking place. Broadcast networks, film studios, advertising agencies, telecommunication companies, and financial institutions are all preparing themselves for the radical shifts in the lucrative media environment, but few are talking about the equally radical transformations that will happen to media saturated societies like ours.

HERE'S A sneak peek of things to come: Institutions will be transformed. Not immediately, but eventually. For one, the idea of the nation as we know it will begin to erode. As more viewers turn to customized entertainment and personalized news, the more they will retreat from the larger public life and national discussion. Instead, they will turn to virtual communities of like-minded individuals inhabiting the global digital network. People will gravitate toward the networks or media spaces that share and reinforce their political beliefs and social biases just as conservatives in the United States have turned to FOX News and Arabs to Al Jazeera TV to validate their views of the world.

If mass media were largely responsible for imagining our current nation-states, niche media, narrowcasted to tightly defined networks, will create alternative virtual and temporal communities based on closely shared worldviews and lifestyles. But it does so at the expense of fragmenting the larger body politic and social organization. "To each his own bubble," the social philosopher Jean Baudrillard once predicted. The more we retreat into spheres of familiarity, the more our world shrinks to a point where it resembles a bubble or echo chamber where the only voice we hear is that of our own and the only view we see is that immediately around us.

Those who lament a deeply divided Philippine nation can expect the cracks to widen as the segmentation of the news market into exclusive networks for the masa and the elite, the Muslims and the Christians, even the young and the old, continue.

Like society, the family will also be under assault. The convenience and privacy of mobile viewing and video-on-demand will kill the daily ritual of living room TV viewing — one of the last remaining traditions of our already atomized families. There will be fewer opportunities for families to interact about the news or express feelings about commonly loved programs. Conversations will lack shared symbolic meaning and identities will be fleeting.

Like the disjointed society around them, generational divisions within the family will be intensified by new loyalties and identities with peers across the network. The family unit will remain as they have for millennia, but they will expand to include new members brought in from alliances formed on the digital network.

Political life, fragmented by increasingly narrow publics, will be mediated absolutely by television. Instantaneous polling and voting on policy and candidates will seem empowering on the surface, but the digital feedback loops will threaten to commodify politics and turn viewers into consumers who tune in and out when they wish or pick and choose who and what they prefer to listen to. Image and simulation will overcome substance and all political life may just as well resemble show business.