4 ms·

We will be entertained by the same sorts of media that entertain us today. The economics will be a bit more worked out and the players a bit more entrenched. An

by chasing 13y ago

We will be entertained by the same sorts of media that entertain us today. The economics will be a bit more worked out and the players a bit more entrenched. And we'll probably simply have more options as the tools of production fall into more hands. This'll mean a lot more crap is produced, but we'll also have more weird out-of-left-field sorts of media hits. Television isn't being cannibalized by the internet. The "traditional" means of distributing it are (cable, broadcast TV, etc). It's more like the internet is being cannibalized by television programming as more people use services like Netflix and Hulu -- and as more people pirate TV shows. More people use the internet to watch television than ever before.

zanny 13y ago
It is also important to distill what television is as an entertainment medium. The market for short-duration consumable video content is not going away. It is larger than ever. The medium by which you transmitted it via frequency over dumb cable is going away, because it is more convenient to watch what you want when you want. But people still watch tons of video. One thing to remember is that entertainment is always sensual stimulation. Digital information is consumed audibly and visually, and physical information is consumed by all the senses (maybe not taste as much). We have already seen a marked decline in physical information consumption as entertainment, because physical activity is hard. We saw a lot of that be distilled into gaming, where you can have an interactive experience with a lot of sensual feedback without the extertion and strain. We will probably see the transfer medium shift - in decades, probably to brain-machine interfaces with direct electrical signaling our brains can interpret rather than using photons and molecular vibration over translation layers (ie, over the optic nerve and ear drum). Maybe we will have a happy compromise, where we just replace our eyes with bionics that can either display recieved photons or other pixel based media over a connected nerve cluster. Replace the ear with bionics and either playback the microphone input or whatever music we want to perceive. Though I guess just an embedded system hooked into the brain is less convoluted, if we can learn to properly generate and interpret the electrical signaling of the mind. (ie, the way we can read a cats memories as images, or command a mouse with electrical signaling).

by chasing 13y ago

zanny 13y ago

It is also important to distill what television is as an entertainment medium. The market for short-duration consumable video content is not going away. It is larger than ever. The medium by which you transmitted it via frequency over dumb cable is going away, because it is more convenient to watch what you want when you want. But people still watch tons of video. One thing to remember is that entertainment is always sensual stimulation. Digital information is consumed audibly and visually, and physical information is consumed by all the senses (maybe not taste as much). We have already seen a marked decline in physical information consumption as entertainment, because physical activity is hard. We saw a lot of that be distilled into gaming, where you can have an interactive experience with a lot of sensual feedback without the extertion and strain. We will probably see the transfer medium shift - in decades, probably to brain-machine interfaces with direct electrical signaling our brains can interpret rather than using photons and molecular vibration over translation layers (ie, over the optic nerve and ear drum). Maybe we will have a happy compromise, where we just replace our eyes with bionics that can either display recieved photons or other pixel based media over a connected nerve cluster. Replace the ear with bionics and either playback the microphone input or whatever music we want to perceive. Though I guess just an embedded system hooked into the brain is less convoluted, if we can learn to properly generate and interpret the electrical signaling of the mind. (ie, the way we can read a cats memories as images, or command a mouse with electrical signaling).