Most equipment and network providers believe that entertainment will finance the superhighway and that video-on-demand, VOD, is the driving force or killer app of our wired future. I do not disagree with this view, but I marvel at the short-sighted, incomplete, and outright misleading conclusion drawn from it … Videocassette-rental stores will go out of business within a decade.
Predictor: Negroponte, Nicholas
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 essay for Wired magazine, Nicholas Negroponte, of MIT’s Media Lab, writes:”Most equipment and network providers believe that entertainment will finance the superhighway and that video-on-demand, VOD, is the driving force or killer app of our wired future. I do not disagree with this view, but I marvel at the short-sighted, incomplete, and outright misleading conclusion drawn from it. The case for VOD goes as follows: Let’s say a videocassette-rental store has a selection of 2,000 tapes. Suppose it finds that 5 percent of those tapes result in 90 percent of all rentals. Most likely, a good portion of that 5 percent would be new releases and would represent an even larger proportion of the store’s rentals if the available number of copies were larger. Videocassette-rental stores will go out of business within a decade. (It makes no sense to ship atoms when you can ship bits.) The easy conclusion is that the way to build an electronic Blockbuster is to offer only those top 5 percent, those primarily new releases. Not only would this be convenient, it would provide tangible and convincing evidence for what some still consider an experiment. It would take too much time and money to digitize all 29,000 movies made in America by 1990. It would take even more time to digitize the 30,000 TV programs stored in the Museum of Television & Radio in New York, and I’m not even considering the movies made in Europe, the tens of thousands from India, or the 12,000 hours per year of soaps made in Mexico by Televisa. The question remains: Do most of us really want to see just that top 5 percent? Or, is this herd phenomenon driven by the old technologies of distribution?”
Biography:Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of MIT’s Media Lab and a popular speaker and writer about technologies of the future, wrote one of the 1990s’ best-selling books about the new future of communications, “Being Digital.” (Pioneer/Originator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: TV/Films/Video
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Prime Time is My Time: The Blockbuster Myth
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.08/negroponte_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney