Internet of Everything
Nostalgia is so yesterday

In part two we’re looking at the winners and losers in the Internet of Everything (IoE).

Movie theaters will become as anachronistic as libraries are today.
Producers will cut out the supply chain and deliver direct to the consumer’s TV and Laptop and Tablet and Car and keep them synchronized across all platforms by viewer. The better-than-movie-theater-quality-TV-and-sound-system will recognize the user and bring all the content to the screen ready to resume from where it left off. The infrastructure provided by the movie studios is so commoditized already that producers and directors can assemble what they need without the studio.

House of Cards on Netflix never aired on broadcast TV: it went straight to streaming. And there is more to come. I am one of a rapidly increasing segment in the US who does not have a cable provider. What I want to see streams to my iPad/Roku/Apple TV/Chromecast/Amazon Fire. My kids stream to their Xboxes. Cable providers who bundle 300 channels you don’t want with the dozen you actually watch will also go the way of dodo.

National boundaries will become increasingly meaningless because ex-patriots want to see their home TV shows and sporting events live in the language of their home. Restrictions about transmission out of country will disappear as artists and performers realize they have access to a global community.

7 billion people paying 1 cent is the same as 70 million people paying 1 Euro.

Content providers will have more direct connection to content consumers and the networks will be the big losers. Just like the movie studios and theaters.

Content providers will have more direct connection to content consumers and the networks will be the big losers. Just like the movie studios and theaters.

Ereaders and iPads are already the paper of the future. Most people get there news by device already today. Look at any commuter train carriage. The people with the newspapers are the older generation. Everyone else is locked into their tablet reading, listening and watching the news. Even the cross-word puzzle and Sudoku are an interactive online experience.

Print media cannot compete with Internet’s ability to let us see what our friends and colleagues are reading, to cross-reference and correlate stories with live information, make a multi-media experience.

A colleague said to me only this morning, “I used to love to read the newspaper but, by the time I pick it up now, I already know how the story turned out from my Google news feed.”

Newspapers and books will also continue as a piece of yesteryear, a living incarnation of a distant memory. And there is something to be said for the feel of a book and smell of the newspaper but it is only nostalgia that keeps us going there.

I’m sure, a century ago, the horse and buggy were seen as a technology that would soon pass into memory as the technological wizardry of the automobile began to dominate. We still take horse and buggy rides, they are not gone completely, but it is for special occasions and for the nostalgia.