Pay and cable television - so what? Will it be different? Can it be different? To entice us to hand over our hard-earned dollars for something we've been given virtually free for nearly forty years there'll have to be something different about this new user-pays television.

To accomplish this, film, television, computer and telephone companies have been working overtime to come up with something special that our television doesn't yet provide. The easiest solution is to buy exclusive rights to high profile programs so viewers have no choice but to subscribe to see these shows, something Rupert Murdoch's various television empires here and overseas have proven masters at doing.

But ultimately, the real money is likely to be made tapping into interactive communications that allow viewers to personalise and interact with other viewers, information and entertainment. The internet, a low resolution and less expensive forerunner of interactive services, connecting people, computers, databanks, libraries and universities around the country and globe through the phone lines, is proving to be as popular as telephones when they were introduced at the beginning of this century.

To find out if the internet's success can be repeated and if we'll pay for movie-quality, more expensive television versions of these services, over thirty experiments in new television are planned or underway around the world. The largest, in terms of investment, is the Time Warner trial of interactive cable television in Orlando, Florida in southern USA, where around $100,000 is being spent on each of the 4,000 test households. Homes are to be fitted with a supercharged Set Top Unit (STU), the box that sits on the television set, which is actually a powerful computer enhancing what your television can do.

With a remote control that looks remarkably like a video game console, viewers will be able to access news, sport, games and other services. They can call up videos and pause, rewind and fast forward through them just as if they'd hired the tape from their local store, arrange news items in ways they prefer and buy goods from interactive shopping catalogues.

Some of the world's leading communications and media companies are involved in the test, led by Time Warner, and a partnership of computer animation and design industry leader, Silicon Graphics, and AT & T, the largest US telecommunications company, many other companies are also contributing their equipment and expertise to try to discover just what will work.

Because the truth is, no-one can be sure just what we will really want from such a system. Will we want to spend more time - and money - at home with our super television, and exactly how might we want to spend it? At this stage the outcome is anyone's guess.

But the answers to these questions might provide the key to making money in an unclear future where at least you can be sure of one thing - people will want to communicate with each other any way they can.