by Keith Richardson
Thanks to Keith W-B for his feedback on last month’s missive on phone scammers. He offered a tidbit I’m looking into that might provide some satisfaction to the offended…. More later if we can verify it. If you know what I’m alluding to, please get in touch.
How often do we look back on how much the intrusion of computers and related technology has changed our world over the last 20 years and the past decade in particular? The Internet stands out, but it’s only part of the total package exploding around us. Digital cameras, smart phones, tablets (computers), talking blood sugar monitors: what’s next? And note that in this column I’m not even daring to cast a sideways glance at Facebook and Twitter and other social media!
TechRepublic.com is an useful website for all kinds of computer-related info and advice to IT specialists (It’s fun for us end users to see what these pros think of us!). Last month TR featured a report by Jason Hiner entitled “Four industries about to be transformed by the Internet.” Its thrust is that over the “15 years since the Internet began revolutionizing modern life — from how we find information to how we communicate with other people to how we consume news to to how we buy books and music to how we find a compatible life partner— the Internet has completely upended entire industries, killing off or reducing many of the existing power brokers, removing the middle men, and ushering in new leaders — the digital powerhouses of the 21st century.”
Hiner identifies four industries he believes “are destined to be caught in the eye of the storm [of change]”: movies, healthcare, book publishing, and financial payments.”
How much are we seniors going to be affected in these areas? First, there’s no guarantee that the changes Hiner foresees will happen as soon as or in the ways he lays out. Second, it’s conceivable that many of us may choose to work around them, just like those who refuse to use a credit card online or to own a cell phone or even to move up from high speed LItE (with its silent “t”) Internet to true High Speed. Does anyone still use dial-up? (There are a handful of us who still don’t understand what this paragraph is about—just as our grandkids don’t, but for different reasons.)
But some seniors will be urging the powers that be to get on with it before we “slip the surly bonds of Earth”! My wife frequently remarks how glad she is to live in the age of the Internet and to be able to immerse herself in modern music in ways not possible with radio and TV. On the other hand, I look forward to being able to watch new movies on my large screen HDTV instead of being having my ear drums assaulted just before the feature movie begins (No more screaming at the top of my lungs just for the sheer irony of it, because no one can hear me anyway, “TURN IT UP!”) No more paying a king’s ransom for a bag of popcorn and a drink. At home, I can sit in comfort and view, listen, eat and drink the way I want to.
But I can’t watch the latest releases at home when they first pop up in the theatre. Not yet, anyway. Hiner claims that’s “likely to change soon. Hollywood is experimenting with the idea of selling movies directly to consumers at home (streamed over the Internet) at the same time the movies arrive in theatres. Of course, studios will charge a higher fee (possibly $30).”
“There is definitely consumer demand for direct delivery. Thirty dollars may be too high, but this will happen eventually, and will likely result in more people watching movies from home than traveling to a theatre. Theatres won’t go away, but they will likely decrease in number and turn into much more of a premium experience.”
Combined with the decline of DVDs as BlockBuster and Rogers Video outlets are dismantled, does this mean we’ll all subscribe to Netflix or iTunes or Shaw-on-demand or OptikTV? Who knows? I doubt it. We may not have even imagined the system and format of delivery. I’ll bet, however, that five and ten years from now, our grandkids will look back on our present concerns with the same bemusement as those who can’t remember five or six years ago when most of us still hadn’t heard or watched an iPod and the iPad had yet to be invented.
Many of us will prefer the new ways of enjoying current flicks over “what we had way back then.”
More on the other three industries next month. If you don’t want to wait, give TechRepublic.com a look. Check out Five future technologies I can’t wait for, which, with suggested possible implementation timeframes, examines wireless docking of mobile devices, inexpensive mobile broadband everywhere, three dimensional printing, HTML5 to make the web an app, and flexible OLED displays (your computer as thin as plastic wrap!).