Coming Soon

Today, in the warm LA sunshine at lunch, I discussed with a senior entertainment company executive what was going to be the next big thing in entertainment. Our conclusion was that it would undoubtedly combine the intuition and design elements of Apple’s sexy looking, but kind of techno chunky i Phone and a cut down, smaller even lighter version of their Mac Air, on which I’m composing this story. Married to this will be increased, enhanced flash memory, and “Tivo”, UK readers will be more familiar with the “Sky Plus” brand, type television adaptability.

Of course there will have to be quicker connectivity and even faster access. There won’t be a need for much hard memory as the years roll forward. The reason for this will probably turn out to be “The Grid” being currently finalized in Switzerland. This was developed to allow the processing of the incredibly large number of computations necessary to translate the huge atom smashing mechanism built into the mountains of Switzerland. This is so huge a computing project that it was necessary for The Grid to be created to free up the Internet. The result is that The Grid will create incredible spare capacity for all our information storage and moving needs. This, in turn will result in little or no need for the average user to store their information on their PC. We will all hold our information on the Grid, calling for it only when we need it. The Internet will be consigned to the dustbin of history as it simply will not have the capacity necessary to adapt to ever increasing demands.

The results will revolutionize the type of devices we use and carry with us. Super fast, super thin and light. They will all be very desirable but the winners will be those that have the best design elements. Content will eventually be freely available to everyone because advertising concerns will pay for you to have it as long as you carry their advertisements. Personally I will be the consumer who prefers the option to pay for what I want. I think many of my age group will choose the same path but it will be a progressively harder position to maintain.

I used to maintain that content is king but I believe that this position is no longer possible to maintain. This changed when the major distribution / production powerhouses in the entertainment factories decided to turn the creative industries into a paperback type industry. The idea used to be to get the maximum revenue from each area of the industry before it passed down the food chain. This kept the values optimized. Now, for reasons of market driven, short-term capitalism the idea is to get the biggest dollar figure as quickly as possible. It is comparable to harvesting all the trees in the forest and not re-planting because you want to move as much wood to the buyers as quickly as you can. Obviously, working this way you’ll bank a lot of money, but next year you won’t have any trees to sell.

As a consequence the strategic planning for and residual values of entertainment libraries are being very rapidly diminished on the questionable alter of this quarter’s figures. Even star driven, major company big pictures are being dumped into the discount bins so what chance do the little projects have in this economic model, none?

In a world in which you can compare shop in the very limited and finite linear shelf space of your supermarket, or surf the net to see what the universe has to offer, there will only be one winner. Everything in retail is migrating to the net because it’s cheaper, less labor intensive and easier to manage. This will result in even less city and town shopping centers turning some of our cities into progressively more shop and industry free places to live.

The question is can knowledge and creativity based economies such as those in the G7 club of the richest, old first world powerhouses, survive their transition from the old economic model to the new sufficiently to prosper enough to continue to consume from the new manufacturing and raw material supplying countries such as China, India and Russia? This is going to be essential to keep the world economy moving.