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Television Reloaded
theodp writes "The TV times, they are a-changing. Over at Newsweek, Steven Levy offers a serious tome on the future of television, including time-shifting ("people will follow schedules only for real-time events like sports and election night"), space-shifting ("Now that you've stored your show on a TiVo, it's only logical to take it with you on your laptop, hand-held viewer or PSP game player") and the move from broadcast TV to broadband TV. Meanwhile, Conan O'Brien lightens things up with his own vision of the TV future ("Toddlers' bowls will have a television at the bottom, and children will be encouraged to eat all of their mush so they can see Morley Safer.")."
Will they bring back the cookie monster?
Why did I immediately think he meant toilet bowls? -- and that it had already happened?
you had me at #!
What I'm surprised about is that there aren't yet televisions in car dashboards so we can watch our favorite programs during the boring drives on the road. C'mon, what do the car manufacturers expect us to do when we aren't talking on our cell phones, drinking coffee, eating, reading a newspaper, or sleeping in the car? Drive?
If you're reading this, stop it.
Oh, you mean the screen to which we connect the game systems?
Circumcision is child abuse.
An employee suggested to me that we load Television on a few offices here as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of using it for our employee's day-to-day channel surfing. So I decided to let him install the TV into 5 offices to see how the users got on. Besides, our IT manager had been using one in his office and it seemed to work fine, why not try it on the client offices?
Once he'd got the machines up and running with TV we let the users try it out. It all seemed fine to start with: TV was a pretty good replacement for radio and the users could still do their work as normal.
Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints received from users who could not find things they were used to or tasks they could not perform that they previously could with the radio. The final straw came when one employee lost several hours work when TV suddenly had an error reading from our intranet site and corrupted his project.
Needless to say, the Television team offered no support whatsoever. I made the employee remove Television from the machines and lets just say he's not with us anymore.
... just like Rupert Murdoch.
> ... and then the sh*t will really hit the fan ... literally!" - My Boss (1992-1996)
He said that constantly for 4 years? man i coulnd't have taken it for so long.
Kids aren't dumb. If they want to see what's at the bottom of the bowl, they're not going to wait to eat the food, they'll just dump it over and watch. Heck, they do that now without anything at the bottom to watch.
We saw such things in Minority Report. I'd become a Cereal Killer if I had to walk through a supermarket with live animations playing on the surface of every box of cereal, never mind all the other packages.
(in fifty-four part harmony in the appliance section) "I'm George Forman and this is my lean mean fat reducing grilling machine."
Wander over to the macaroni aisle and really cheese Italian accented pitchmen are waiting, vying for your attention, and thanks to the AI of the times, arguing with each other. "Your pasta is sh*t! They need to try my macaroni." "Your noodle is limp you bastard!"
And then you wander next door to the news agent where a nice selection of adult magazines await. So maybe animated video everything isn't that bad after all...
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
"[...] and the move from broadcast TV to broadband TV."
I predict that one day, we will be able to stream TV shows through our existing cable lines in real time. And when that day comes, just remember you heard it here first.