BigShinyThing

A report by Booz Allen Hamilton has predicted that more than half of European homes will be plugged into ‘triple play’ services of TV, broadband internet and telephony from the same provider by the end of the decade.

The study also suggested that these digital homes will trigger more than €100bn (£60bn) in investment and generate more than 100,000 jobs, mainly among infrastructure providers such as cable and telecoms operators. A further €35bn is expected to be invested by content providers. However, the consultants warned that heavy-handed regulation, blocking competition, could cut the cumulative investments by 40% and wipe out 90% of job creation.

The report comes days after France Telecom confirmed that it had lost 600,000 fixed-line subscribers last year, mainly to ‘triple play’ competitors such as Neuf Cegetel and Alice in France, Europe’s third largest economy. Issuing a profits and sales warning, the group’s finance director said that Internet based telephony (VoIP) would account for 40% of fixed line traffic by the end of the year, compared with 15% in 2005 and 1-2% in 2004.

Full details of the report are available via Mediaguardian.

It’s a contemporary truism that at the turn-of the century, TV drama has high ambitions. After the HBO-led watershed heralded by The Sopranos, no new series feels complete without an epic sweep, massively interlinked story arcs, and intricate character development over multiple series. The freedom given to the writers of these prime-time operas is of course due as much to the opportunity for long-term revenue from DVD sales and repeat screenings, as it is about exploring the possibilities of TV as a genuinely cinematic medium. But it doesn’t hurt that high-def widescreen, and digital surround sound give at least a veneer of ‘going to the movies’ to the actual viewing experience as well.

But are we the only ones wondering about the current crop of high-budget, eye-candy series — Lost and Invasion come to mind — where a new formula seems to be being applied: borrowing the lushness and high-concept from the groundbreaking early HBO series, but slowing the action and story arcs down into an ultimately narcotic dream state, where even the mandatory end-of-episode cliff-hangers only stir the viewer enough to take notice of the preview for the next episode. And with plots that really could have been squeezed into a single prime-time slot, rather than stretched languidly over a whole season.

So what’s going on? There’s a body of theory which suggests that the lure of TV is the passivity of the viewing experience: that a tuned in, chilled out, lean-back theta state is at the heart of televisual pleasure. If so, then the creators of these series have distilled the essence of that state into dealer-grade opiate.

We’re wondering if this is a sign of things to come: that as home entertainment technologies offer increasingly immersive experiences – and let’s face it, Lost on a 42″ HD plasma screen in Dolby Digital is one hell of a step jump from Land of the Giants on a wobbly old 12″ TV — then content creators will exploit this immersion to deliberately induce ever-more dream-like states in the audience. And just maybe there will be an unexpected pay-off for those still peddling interruptive advertising…You are feeling… sleepy… do NOT fast forward through the following commercial messages…

Rewind: fifteen years can define an era. Think 1945-1960, or 1960-1975: everything changes. 1990-2005 brought the Internet (a revolution still work-in-progress), and a New New World Order.

Fast forward: the world the children of 2020 inherit will, even in the absence of plague or war, be slowly tilting in new ways which will seem, as always, destabilising to their parents — today’s cohort of 30-40 year-olds, who in 2020 will still be the largest single population group^[1]. China will on its way to global economic dominance and nuclear power may well be back with a vengeance in an attempt to break the geopolitical shackles of fossil fuel dependence. And it’s safe to assume that the kids will be off playing with fringe technologies that their parents simply don’t understand. Substitute Japan for China, and the early PCs for whatever is new and cool in 2015, and culturally we think much will be a rerun of the late 80s.

Technological and social revolution are paralleled by changes in entertainment and media consumption. So what of life at home, a decade and a half hence. What of the living room?

The living room: a place for the family to collectively chill out. A place where money gets spent on entertainment in the home, and where, generally, the biggest investment is made on the slowest moving tech — who wants to have to replace their ‘TV’ every year as tech advances? The fast moving changes in tech will be at the other end of the cable: technologies for the recommendation and provision of content, for networking people and services in profitable ways. And in cheap throwaway devices which are fashionable for a year or a season, the descendents of ‘this year’s must have’ mobile handset.

The next decade will see sufficient bandwidth into homes to play multiple uncompressed high-definition video streams, ePaper enabling any smooth surface (including product packaging — check Minority Report) to display static or full-motion content; and devices which can repurpose themselves almost instantly by downloading application software on demand, and which (finally) work seamlessly together. Imagine the living room (or any other suitably prepared) wall as a display with content chosen via mobile ‘phone’ working as a remote^[2].

Picture a living room that physically isn’t that much different to today’s — replace the TV with an active wall for those with money and a tiny projector for those who don’t. And with much intelligence behind the scenes which decides what to display, to what device and in what format. A final end to physical media — DVDs, CDs and the like: everything will be streamed on demand and locked down with Digital Rights Management. Purchase a song and it’s yours wherever you go: buy a movie and you can access it anywhere instantly — on a mobile device, at home, or visiting friends: everyone has an ephemeral portfolio of media content, either on subscription or leased for a fixed time. Imagine pub ‘jukeboxes’ which offer for selection all the music owned by everyone in the room at that moment. Content will be finally separated from the vessels which carry it. ‘Nude media‘, as Kenny Goldsmith calls it.

And what will people be watching and experiencing? Will effectively infinite bandwidth out to devices (mobile and at home) lead to a zillion channels of cheap filler, the triumph of the long tail, or the collapse of content as we know it? Take some cues from now: expect archival content to be repackaged in ever more creative ways — think today’s interminable ‘top 50′ shows with hyperlinks into the full-length films or albums being rated, with commentary tracks, options to purchase, and so on. Look out for more radical-but-in-retrospect-inspired reinventions of tried and tested genres like Saturday-night light entertainment and the documentary such as those that led to X-Factor and Wife Swap in the noughties.

For all the fuss about interactive, keep in mind the essential truth that the living room is a place to zone out. People want lean back content at home — they want entertainment that entertains, not challenges or requires endless involvement^[3]. The core of successful content franchises will still be big shiny shows: the interactive bits will splinter off onto mobile services and other delivery mechanisms. Witness the current spate of ‘mobisodes’ for thrillers such as 24 and CSI.

Likewise, access to such a vastness of content could rapidly lead to choice fatigue, unless intelligent systems support our behaviour as creatures of habit and use personal and demographic profiling to build channels-of-me and channels-of-we based on viewing and other behavioural patterns. This isn’t rocket science: given consent, it’s only a very small step from programming your Sky+ box to timeshift every episode of Will and Grace to putting it on autopilot and having a manageably small media pool in front of which to lean back and enjoy the show. Channels based around content franchise brands, celebrity recommendations, channels-of-we shared with friends and family, all published out, searchable and available for subscription to interested strangers surfing for new entertainment^[4].

Much of this will work automagically: the systems which dice, slice and select to programme your Saturday evening entertainment will — if permitted — connect to all the other digital tools you use: the mobile phone which knows who your friends are and when you call them, your Internet search engine which knows your interests and working schedule. The degree to which you allow these systems to share their information will directly affect the degree to which you need to choose what to watch — although you will always be able to select content manually if you desire^[5].

For media creators, the challenge as always will be to create franchisable content brands with wide appeal, and which will reward repeated viewing over time: TV as the new classic cinema. And for those wanting something a bit different, long-tail content for every taste. Switch off the autopilot and tune into niche channels created from automatically aggregated content streams on every topic imaginable: from specialty porn to the Cat Channel.

And of course, marketing is an essential part of the mix: there is no such thing as free content! Expect ubiquitous product placement, expect tailored ads where you least expect them — the interruptive 30 second ad spot will vanish from the screen in your living room, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t get the same brand messages presented to you on another device some other time the same day, at an identity-sensitive billboard site or on your personalised digital radio channel on the way to work. Your electronic identity will be known wherever you go, and increasingly creative methods of brand communication will follow you throughout your life. Brand owners will be able to buy a lot of identity-sensitive marketing for the production cost of today’s 60 second films. Even paying to opt-out will probably tag you as a high-earner and result in other interventions in your life — possibly involving indirect PR interventions in the social networks of which you are a part, in attempts to influence your opinions and purchasing decisions.

What will be the media brands of 2020? Tough call. Expect the Chinese to repeat the Japanese 80s sudden-wealth experience and to go on a buying spree of archival content and production expertise. Likewise Google-AOL or similar 2^nd generation Franken.com, flexing its muscles in both profiling and service provision. Sport will remain the safest route to assured eyeballs — bidding wars over broadcast rights will continue long in to the 21^st century. Sport, nostalgia and endlessly-extendable franchises. And of course ‘adult content’ — the ultimately profitable and re-purposable content — in all its forms: where porn goes, the rest will follow.