What's on the Box?
While exploring possible future trends in radio broadcasting at this week's Radio Festival, Bob Worcester recommended that we all carefully reflect on by Roger Parry, published in Monday's Financial Times. Parry writes:
Our homes are to be the site of a revolution as dramatic to the economics of entertainment as the arrival of the gramophone, radio, 鈥渢alkies鈥 or television itself. The Box of the second decade of the 21st century will not be colloquial UK shorthand for the television set but the description of a ubiquitous bit of kit 鈥 central to every home.
A multi-platform, mult-media revolution won't come cheap. Will people be prepared to pay for it, or will they be willing to live with regular advertising pop-ups?
Comments
Its good but it's not that visionary an article - a simple search on Google will pull up a million articles on similar themes going back quite some time. It is nice to see something like that in the FT though.
It's been very clear for some time now that we are moving inexorably to an age where most content will be on demand and context aware. We are of course already doing this when we use our phones for something more than calls or texts...every time we access the latest scores on a mobile or a clip of a goal we are inside this new world.
Regarding the article, I am not sure that there will actually be such a box...If each device we have can interact directly with a wireless network to access the internet and everything is available on demand then there is little need to have such a box, only a router. You can already buy a portable radio that does this - accesses all radio streams online via the internet and wireless network and plays them out as if they were radio (in the traditioanl sense)
What is even more interesting is the stuff he mentions about social software that understands users and their behaviour and that will lead to content being actively delivered to us in anticipation of our possible requirements i.e. we don't have to even look for something....its just there when we want it, by magic...TV you dont have to think about... now there's a novel idea!
It is a very interesting article. We are already in such an age. One problem is the price. The other problem is that [at least where I live in Florida] when a Hurricane strikes Florida, all of the computers and electronics do not work because of lack of electricity. [In fact many people here in Florida are actually buying Crank Up Short Wave/Middle Wave/ Weather Band Radios at this time].