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The Revolution is Being Televised
Everybody’s a Producer All of this is happening as North Americans flock to the so-called high-speed Internet. I say “so-called” because today’s high-speed is pathetic. A more appropriate name would be faux broadband since it’s usually five megabits per second or slower. True broadband would be more like 50 megabits per second, giving us full-motion, full-screen streaming video, so we wouldn’t have to download programs in the first place and plug up our hard drive. When this happens, video will get really exciting. Instead of watching television programs, we will become consumers of new digital interactive multimedia experience and information events. If you’ve played an interactive video game in an arcade where you sit astride a motorcycle or inside a Formula 1 race car, you have a sense of what’s coming. The video experience will become immersive. 3-D will move from the movie theatre to your living room. Without the funny glasses. And if you want, soon you will be able to go from observing a television program to actually participating in it. You will play a character in a program, and the outcome of the plot will hinge on your behaviour. You and – why not? – Kiefer Sutherland will thwart the terrorists on 24 because of insight you provide. So you’ll be not only programmer but producer as well. When “TV” programs become mere bits, no program is an island. Just as you now read an online newspaper or blog that has hotlinks sprinkled throughout the text to give more information about issues, tomorrow’s video experience will have the same features. You can stop the hero’s thrilling car chase scene to ask for details about the limited edition Mustang GT she is driving. You can take it for a realistic test drive and see if any dealership within 100 kilometres has the car in stock. You will skip from one program to the next, just as you surf the Internet today. All programs will become part of a global multimedia database, and personalized software will scour the tens of thousands of new videos added to the database every hour to alert you when there’s new content of interest to you. If your cousin posts video from his graduation ceremony, you’ll know immediately. Just like people add content and hotlinks to Wikipedia, they’ll add content and video hotlinks to the multimedia universe. Call it Wikimedia! Television “networks” will no longer make sense as each of us will have our own channel, bringing us audio and video entertainment and information to whatever delivery mechanism we choose, from the tiny screen on our iPod or multimedia eyeglasses to our home theatre system. This promise comes with some peril. It always does. If all we see and hear is what is interesting to us, then our view of the world could become increasingly narrow (not that this isn’t happening now, at least to a certain degree). And what if all your words and actions as you interact with your video fantasy world could be introduced as evidence in divorce court or made known to your employer? Just as the old TV changed the human experience and introduced a new world of challenges, so will interactive multimedia. But I think that the new TV – a communications medium that turns us from passive to active – will be worth it. TV is dead. Long live TV. Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net |
