When you buy a can of Coke, you are paying a few cents for the drink and the can, and nanodollars for television advertising. No doubt, the means of financing the bits will look strange to our great-great grandchildren. But for today, it’s what makes television work. Eventually, we’ll find new economic models, probably based on advertising and transactions. Television will become more and more digital, no matter what. These are givens. So it makes no sense to think of the TV and the PC as anything but one and the same. It’s time TV manufacturers invested in the future, not the past – by making PCs, not TVs.
Predictor: Negroponte, Nicholas
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s Media Lab, writes: ”When people talk about 500-channel TV, they mean 500 parallel streams. They don’t mean one program after another, broadcast in one five-hundredth of real time. You don’t download TV, you join an ongoing program. That’s why commercial TV stations and cable operators are delivering as many eyeballs as possible to advertisers – so they can afford to bring the programs to the people in the first place. When you buy a can of Coke, you are paying a few cents for the drink and the can, and nanodollars for television advertising. No doubt, the means of financing the bits will look strange to our great-great grandchildren. But for today, it’s what makes television work. Eventually, we’ll find new economic models, probably based on advertising and transactions. Television will become more and more digital, no matter what. These are givens. So it makes no sense to think of the TV and the PC as anything but one and the same. It’s time TV manufacturers invested in the future, not the past – by making PCs, not TVs.”
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, 1995
Topic of prediction: Economic structures
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Bit By Bit, PCs Are Becoming TVs. Or is it the Other Way Around?
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.08/negroponte_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney