Phoning In the Future of Television

Fast-forward 18 years: Web 0.1 has matured into Web 2.0 and Gilder's epochal shift no longer sounds like the wishful thinking of a digital Hegelian. Today, we are all teetering on the precipice of life after television -- our media habits being radically transformed by devices like the notebook PC, the video mobile phone and the high-resolution iPod touch. New platforms like the Internet and mobile are breaking television's monopoly on the distribution of home entertainment. Even today's television -- with its set-top box, its pay-per-view programming and Web-browsing functionality -- no longer resembles the old telly that we grew up with.

No TV? What Now?

However, even if Gilder was right, and television is toast, it's still hard to figure out what exactly comes after it. The future, naturally, lies in the eye of the beholder. Ask a conventional TV executive to predict the future, and they will probably put you to sleep with indigestible jargon about "interactive" television. Ask an Internet entrepreneur, and they will promise you that the Web is the future of broadcasting technology. Ask a wireless operator and they'll whip out their mobile handset and play some grainy, user- generated content for you.

The most lucid explanation of life after TV I've ever heard came from a 9-year-old. "After TV," the boy said, "comes bedtime."

You may laugh, but life after television may well mean bedtime for the careers of many TV executives. That's why there is such a frenzied rush to create product that will become the standard -- the platform, if you like -- for the post-television age. This is the new new-media gold rush. Everyone -- from Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) Steve Jobs to News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch to NBC's Jeff Zucker to the BBC's Mark Thompson -- is scrambling to ascend this summit first and get their hands on the digital holy grail.

How Do, Hulu

Take Hulu, for example. Launched last December, it is a joint venture of Murdoch's News Corp. and Zucker's NBC Universal. This is a beautifully designed Web site that not only allows viewers to stream popular American TV shows like "The Simpsons" and "Saturday Night Live" for free, but also to edit and share that content with friends. In this way, Hulu transforms old-media television into new-media social networking. However, the problem with Hulu is that its content is threadbare -- many of the shows are clips rather than full-length versions of the original. Hulu's other problem is that it doesn't work on portable devices, which makes it an anachronism in an iPod-centric world.

Last Christmas also saw the launch of the BBC iPlayer -- an innovatively designed software device that allows viewers to access BBC shows via their computer. The iPlayer doubles as a free version of a personal video recorder, thus liberating viewers from the corset of traditional "Radio Times" scheduled TV. Like Hulu, the iPlayer -- on which a stunning 3.5 million programs were downloaded in the first two weeks -- has made television personal by allowing us to watch whatever we like, whenever we like. The iPlayer goes beyond its News Corp./NBC rival by offering a richer and more flexible catalog of the BBC's content library. Unlike Hulu, the BBC has just announced that the iPlayer will work with the iPhone.

Where Jobs Fits In

That leads us to the great prophet of Silicon Valley: Steve Jobs. Not content having revolutionized the recorded-music industry with his original iPod jukebox, Jobs has now turned his fertile imagination toward life after television. He's doing it with what most of us still think of as a telephone -- the touchscreen iPhone. A couple of weeks ago, Jobs announced that he was opening up his iPhone platform to third-party software developers. The venture fund of Kleiner Perkins has just announced a US$100 million fund to support software makers, with the fund's vice chairman, John Doerr, describing Apple's software plan as the "third great platform" after the PC and the Internet. Think of it as the broadband Web plus a touchscreen TV in your pocket -- powered by the latest mobile TV entertainment software. Add all this to the growing library of professionally produced video content in the iTunes store and you might well have glimpsed a sneak preview of life after television.

So perhaps the age of the telecomputer will be shaped by a telephone. Not even futuristic George Gilder had the prescience to predict something so backward-looking in 1990.

15 Minutes of Fame

Back in 1968, another American futurist, the wealthy conceptual artist Andy Warhol, suggested that in the future "everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes." What Warhol forgot to add was that in the Internet age, this fame would not be accompanied with any pecuniary profit . Fame in the digital age is valueless; it can't be cashed at the bank.

This month, a 22-year-old aspiring musician called Ashley Alexandra Dupre outed herself as the prostitute who, for an hourly rate of $1,000, sold her services to the-then governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer. For 15 minutes, Dupre became world famous. On the day of her confession, the young woman's MySpace page got 7 million hits, with 3 million people listening to her song, "What We Want." However, this ephemeral notoriety hasn't translated into sales for the unsigned artist, and it's doubtful that her 15 minutes of global fame earned the amateur musician any more cash than 15 minutes of professional work that she did for Eliot Spitzer.

It's getting pretty desperate out on the mergers and acquisitions social network dance floor. First, belle of the ball MySpace got snapped up for $650 million by News Corp. Then, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) radically overpaid for its investment in Facebook , valuing the social- networking site at an absurd $15 billion. Now AOL -- the ugliest of all the media suitors at the dance -- has grabbed innocent Bebo for $850 million.

Poor Bebo. The popular English social network doesn't deserve such a cruel fate. While the $850 million is good return on investment for the company's owners, the deal with AOL is anything but a marriage made in heaven, and you have to fear for Bebo's future.