Entertaining the Future

As viewers vote with their eyeballs and take control of the content they consume, the media, entertainment and information landscape is bein^ turned on its head. Welcome to the future. Oh, and by the way, you're in charge

^^ f ou're at a Cubs game. Ahmet Assan is at bat, and you wonder how often he has hit against left-handed forkballers in

the past two years. After a short mumble into your headset, the stat pops up. projected by your glasses above left field.

The flashing arrow next to it offers video of Asson's last five at-bats. They're still scratching and spitting down on the

diamond, so why not? Hey. what song is playing behind that clip? Oh right. It's that jock White track where he mixes

Stravinsky and the Sex Pistols, then slices in with his guitar on top of it all. Interesting stuff, but you Ve kind of been over

—1. him since he married Madonna. Still, that track has been popping up a lot lately; everyone you know must have added it

to their lists at once. Actually, you heard it last night when you were playing Fifth Life and finally nailed that sick jump off the Golden

Cate Bridge and onto the deck of a ferryboat with your Ferrari. When you uploaded footage of your stunt to the feeds, you knew it was

good; you just didn't know it would be good enough to win free Cubs tickets. Oh wait, the Cubs-who's at bat again?

From Gutenberg to the advent of television, on through the Walkman and up to our flat-screen, broadband present, the influ­ence of media and technology on one another has driven an astonishing level of innovation, with innumerable unexpected consequences. The next 10 years will make the past 50 look as if they were stuck on idle. Let's take a look at some of the interesting paradigms that will govern our lives in the future and the people and technologies that are creating them.

•EVERYTHING PLAYS EVERYTHING The basic types of content we consume today are the same ones we've been taking in for the past 100 years: audio, video, still pictures and text. What's radically changing is our access to them.

both in terms of how they're delivered and how we choose what to watch. If your current MP3 player doesn't play video, your next one will. The one you get after that will deliver news and other information in real time. You'll know it by its nickname: "my phone." It will deliver information through a screen on your desk or through head­phones when you're on a treadmill, accepting your voice commands to retrieve more content. Your televi-

sion will offer a different slice of this pie, tilted toward your entertainment needs. All of this will also be available on your game system, not to men­tion your PC-which, to reiterate, may also be your phone. In short, no longer will it be a question of which device is needed to play which types of con­tent. The question will be which one is most convenient. Think of all your media, communications and data as a persistent cloud of information that

accretes around you based on various rules and choices. Different devices will tap into this cloud at any given moment to retrieve any number of relevant cross-sections from it.

•YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU (NOR DO YOU WANT TO) First we have to stop carrying our houses on our back. Twenty years ago portable CD players looked sexy next to clunky tape players. Today, a wallet full of CDs looks Stone Age next to an iPod. Ubiquitous high-speed wire­less Internet connections to our gadgets will end our foolish desire to tote large amounts of data around with us. The sooner we accept that we'll never carry it all, the sooner we'll be able to actu­ally have it all. Some small amount of storage (undeMO gigabytes) will remain onboard our devices, but the days of physically carting around 80 gigabytes of music are numbered. High-speed wire­less networking will allow us to access whatever we like on demand, whether it's paid-for content we've stored in a digital locker or ad-supported content we can browse at will. Hard-drive maker Seagate already offers online stor­age along with its traditional hardware products, and companies like Media-Max specialize in online lockers for your

media files, which you can access from anywhere with a Net connection.

With wireless broadband, the subscription-based music systems (a la Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music and the new Nap­ster) start to look far more attractive. Simi­lar models for video content are bound to

follow. Once these systems go ad-supported and wire­less, they take on an eerie resemblance to old-school radio and television. Only this time, instead of the networks, we are in the programmer's seat. And Jon Stewart is our Milton Berle.

•CRADE-A CHOICE Con­sider the options you have today if you want to watch Comedy Central's Daily Show. You can watch a new episode when the net­work airs it or view reruns of last night's show at other times of the day. If you have TiVo, maybe you record the show to watch at a convenient time. Or perhaps you transfer that file to a video-enabled portable media device like an iRiver Clix, a Creative Zen Vision or a PlaySta­tion Portable. If that's too much trouble, you can buy individual episodes through the iTunes Store for $2 a show (or $10 for 16). You can watch those files on a computer or an iPod, or you can use an Apple TV box to put them up on your big screen. If big screen is your goal, though, maybe you want to buy through the Xbox Live account on your 360. Finally, depending on your carrier and where you live, you can catch it on your cell phone in surprisingly high-quality streaming video. Truly, we live in a golden age for fake news. The real news here,

however, is not the number of choices but what these choices mean. For Com­edy Central, having all these different distribution streams means consumers have more chances to watch its shows, a key concern in an age when the program's target demographic could be doing any number of things-studying, playing video games, updating a MySpace page,

having sex-at 11 o'clock at night. "When distribution becomes democratized, your brand has to talk with a thousand voices," says Ron Bloom, CEO of the Internet media company PodShow Inc. "You have to show up everywhere people are, instead of people showing up where

you are.

The advantages for content creators are sub­stantial. Meeting con­sumers on their own terms strengthens consumers' relationship to the brand, making the company's content more valuable in advertising terms. At the same time, the channel can directly charge those purists who don't want their art tainted by com­merce and prefer to pay for commercial-free con­tent. But every silver lining comes wrapped in a dark cloud. For Comedy Cen­tral it's the looming ques­tion of how it can justify its marketplace position as gatekeeper between Jon Stewart and his fans. With the new distribution models offering entertain­ers like Stewart shockingly simple access to their audience, soon the Com­edy Centrals of the world will need to prove they can do something for the Stewarts rather than the other way around.

•HAIL, KING CONSUMER!

With these technologies in place, the stage is set for a complete transition to user control. If you like the current model of TV just fine, ABC would love to plan a couch-bound Thursday evening for you (though on that Thursday you could watch shows originally aired on Sun­day, Tuesday or any other nieht of the week). If

the only person who understands your media needs is you, you can customize your intake to an extremely fine degree, choosing from among hundreds of chan­nels and a gazillion programs and pod-casts. (Us? We'll take a little John From Cincinnati, add some vintage Knight Rider and some cricket from Mumbai and top it off with Jake Shimabukuro's

ukulele version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" from Google Video.)

Or you could use what may be the most compelling model and let friends and experts whose taste you trust fig­ure it out for you. This comes thanks to a technology called RSS. or Really Simple Syndication. As the name implies. RSS is a simple system for packaging a piece of content. It allows you to order what amounts to a subscription to a site. a critic, a series of videos or a general topic. It could be the posts at your favor­ite blog. a single writer at your favorite site or anything anywhere that mentions your name. The infinite malleability of RSS feeds means you can subscribe to content selected by other people in the aggregate (say. everything all the guys in your bowling league or poker club are looking at) or individually (everything a critic you admire recommends). In the future, some playboy subscribers may read our reviews pages each month to see which movies. TV shows, books and games we like, while others may simply have those recommendations delivered to them automatically. Using such rec­ommendations means you spend far less time aimlessly channel and web surfing and consume far less aimless program­ming. All of which makes you a far more effective content director of Radio Free You (not to mention Movie Free You, Newspaper Free You, etc.).

•MASS CULTURE IS DEAD, LONG LIVE MASS CULTURE When consumers are in the driver's seat, mass culture undergoes a fundamental shift. In the old TV and radio model, content was created at the top and spoon-fed to consumers through limited access points. Aaron Spelling would say to Fred Silverman, "Three girl detectives work for an invisible guy named Charlie, see?" and the next thing you knew, every 17-year-old girl in Amer­ica had a Farrah Fawcett haircut. Now, however, content can be created any­where by anybody and succeeds based on its value to consumers, not just because it's the only game in town. Spelling may have been the last of his kind.

"This is going to be looked back on 100 years from now as the golden age of media," says Neal Tiles, president of G4. A tech-oriented cable channel, G4 has been aggressive in its efforts to both podcast its television shows and feature up-to-the-minute Internet content in its on-air programming. When rated solely by cable viewers, G4 probably ranks somewhere deep in the 40s against other stations. Online, however, G4 had half a billion views of its content in 2006.

Looking only at online. Tiles estimates this makes C4 third among cable chan­nels online, after ESPN and MTV.

Of course, when scrappy upstarts get a seat at the table, other companies fall out of the loop. For example, once NBC distributes its prime-time pro­gramming predominantly through the Internet, how will the network's local affiliates survive?

•EVERYONE'S AN AUTEUR The democ­ratization of content creation and delivery means the professionals will be competing not just with each other but with every schmuck who thinks he's Steven Spielberg (or Lenny Bruce or Lou Reed). Many will be morons who light themselves on fire on a dare, but for every thousand boneheads, we'll get

a Blair Witch or a Borat. And the most sophisti­cated content filter ever seen by mankind-mil­lions of individual human minds, each with an opin­ion about what's compel­ling-will push the good stuff to the surface. New voices will have to rely far less on luck than on tal­ent, which will lead to an explosion of quality con­tent a network executive

could never have come up with. Combine that with a system that lets you retrieve and view any of this content anywhere at any time and you end up with a remarkable new era of leisure and self-expression. We couldn't be happier.

As you're leaving the game, you catch a beautiful bru­nette in the corner of your eye. Your gaze lingers, and the profiler in your glasses takes note, running a facial scan and searching for con­nections, Too bad they 're not so strong. You both ployed soccer in high school and belong to three of the same level-three friend networks, but you can't work with any of that-you 'II just look like a

stalker. Then, when she turns her head and catches you storing, your eyes meet for a moment. You've already thought better of pushing the connection, but she speaks first. "Hey, aren't you the guy who jumped his Fer­rari off the Colden Gate Bridge?"

For every thousand

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pain Blair Witch m

a Borat. Millions of

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out the good stuff.