Every day we seem to get more signals that the complex market we call “the Internet” is getting more complex. All markets are ecosystems, all ecosystems are symbiotic relationships among elements, and what’s happening is that the number of elements in the ecosystem of the Internet is exploding. Not every organism survives a sudden broadening of ecological space, and that’s probably going to be true here too.
A good place to start is with the whole notion of visual experiences. Up to now we’ve had a simple taxonomy; video is real-time or canned, delivered on demand or linear channelized, and using RF or IP. Microsoft and Sony seem to be working to change this, and it’s possible that these changes will fundamentally change video entertainment.
The Microsoft strategy (“SmartGlass”) is on the surface a mechanism for linking Windows 8 devices and Xbox consoles to create a more interactive video experience. With the new system, application developers can orchestrate how video components are interlinked to create something, and users can do things like use a tablet to see other films an actor who’s appearing in their current content might have been in. They can even (in theory) index to the scenes of these additional films and view them.
The Sony strategy, Wonderbook, is embodied in the notion that a video camera can be used to inject a virtual reader into a story, and also read gestures that would then determine the story line itself. Sony talks less about the developers, about the platform, and more about the current thrust, which seems aimed at the Harry Potter type of reader.
Underneath the early positioning, both these approaches seem to be aiming at a common target, which is an orchestrated version of augmented reality. The Microsoft approach is described in more detail so it’s a more convenient example. The idea is a timeline that divides content into scenes and is associated with metadata. A collection of content so structured can be “played” to allow the user to hop around at will. You could add a gaming element to this, or live video, and orchestrate it along with canned content. In all, you could compose experiences and include a high level of interactivity.
I think both Microsoft and Sony are also seeing this increasingly as a cloud process. Whether the elements of a composed experience are entirely in the living room (owned assets), delivered (rented) or hosted in the cloud, and whether the elements are devices or content elements, they’re still a distributed collection, and that’s what a cloud is. I also think that if this sort of model of orchestration of experiences catches on, it could be a real threat to channelized viewing.
So far, despite media hype, the fact is that streaming video has been more directed at making video available where channelized TV isn’t available than about replacing the latter with the former. However, if users become accustomed to a model of viewing that relies on high interactivity, then either channelized viewing has to adapt to support it, or there’s a good chance that in the channelized-viewing bastion of the living room, changes may really start to occur, and of course it’s new appliances that are the proximate driver of all of this.
Appliances are already impacting productivity, and Google’s buy of QuickOffice may illustrate this. Tablets, as we know, are overwhelmingly used with WiFi only, and so they aren’t always on. They have become a poster child for the limits of the cloud, in fact, because when they’re not able to connect they turn into a brick from a business productivity support perspective. So Google looks at this, looks at how its strategy for cloud productivity might wreck on the tablet reef, and decides to grab a product that would allow the tablet to work on documents locally when no connection is available.
The challenge this poses for “the Internet” and all its players is that we have a usage revolution that’s decoupled from the business model of some of the players. There is a definite shift toward data-driven appliances, and yet the mobile carrier revenue model is still voice-dominated. No wonder AT&T says that in two years it’s likely operators will be offering data-only plans for appliances and relying on OTT forms of voice to support any voice needs of the owner. If everyone is shifting toward texting or video, and if everyone expects voice to be a composed media in a complex experience, then you can’t be messing with PSTN stuff. Including, of course, IMS. I’ve said for years that IMS needs to focus on what it’s really needed for, because trying to compete with Web 2.0 in data apps is never going to work, and will only create a lot of bath water to toss the baby (registration and mobility management) out with.