German magazine Screen.TV recently asked 7 prominent media figures for their views on the future of TV:
“What will you watch on television in ten years, and what do you imagine your TV will look like?”
Here are our responses – links are translated by Google from the German:
– Jane Barratt, President, Young & Rubicam
– Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia
– Chuck Deckeris, CEO, Mediacom
– Chuck Porter, CEO Crispin, Porter & Bogusky
– Samir Husni, “Mr. Magazine“
– Ross Dawson, Futurist (this link to the German version as the original English is below)
– Eric Day, Director Brand Strategy, Microsoft Advertising
Here is my contribution in the original English:
The future of television is really the future of video, in which moving images from existing broadcast and cable TV merge with thousands of new channels, all intermingling across a plethora of devices. The power of television and great programming has been evident for decades, and is becoming even more pronounced as we shift into an all-embracing media economy.
At the same time an extraordinary growth of video content, ranging in quality from the abysmal to the transcendent, will add to create a potent mix for users.
In the home space we will have screens in most rooms, with our main media space generating a fully immersive experience that includes 3D without glasses and the ability to act out our own roles in TV programming. When we are out of the home, video glasses will sometimes be used to create a full screen experience, with rollable screens allowing pocketable devices to generate a rich video view.
While much television and video content will be time-shifted, the best video content distributors (remember this is a post-channel world) will build communities of viewers around live programming. Much of the future of television, and especially its revenue models, will revolve around community.
See my post yesterday on The Future of TV is community for more details on the last point.
The boundaries of crowdsourcing and how it relates to open innovation
By Ross DawsonI was recently asked to do an interview for the Turkish version of CNBC eBusiness magazine on crowdsourcing. I’m not sure whether the article will appear online – I’ll share it if so. In any case here are the answers I gave the interviewer:
1) The term “crowdsourcing” first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wire Magazine article. Does “crowdsourcing” is a new way of saying “open innovation”? Do these two terms have the same meaning? Or does crowdsourcing differs from open innovation?
Crowdsourcing and open innovation are related but distinct concepts. Crowdsourcing covers many approaches, which I summarize as ‘tapping the minds of many’. These can include service marketplaces, competition platforms, idea platforms, and prediction markets. In fact, all of these approaches can be applied inside organizations as well as externally, helping to tap some of the ‘cognitive surplus’ of employees. Open innovation is about looking outside the organization for new ideas and products, in what can be any number of ways. Often this is done on crowdsourcing platforms, but sometimes, as Procter & Gamble does, it is largely about seeking the best existing unexploited products in the market and adapting them for its own marketing pipeline.
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Map of the Decade, ExaTrends of the Decade, and the Zeitgeist for 2011
By Ross DawsonIt is traditional at the turn of the year to look forward at what is to come.
We have crystallized our thinking on the year ahead and the decade of the 2010s in a new 3-page visual landscape.
Note on ExaTrends: Given the exponential pace of change of today we are far beyond a world of MegaTrends. Exa is the prefix meaning 10 to the power of 18, following Mega, Giga, Tera, and Peta. As such Exa is Mega cubed.
Download the pdf of the framework by clicking on any of the images. The full text of the ExaTrends and the Zeitgeist themes is below.
Map of the Decade: 2010s
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Transparency has long been driving business and society… but it’s only just begun
By Ross DawsonOne of the most surprising things about Wikileaks is that it took this long for the massive shift to transparency to have an impact on this scale. The trend to transparency has long been evident, and sites to facilitate leaks have been around for many years now. The inevitability of a transparent world has long shaped my thinking about the future.
In my 2002 book Living Networks, the final chapter was on the future of a networked world. The second of my ten predictions was: Transparency will drive business and society.
Even before the book came out I spoke at KMWorld in Silicon Valley on Creating the Transparent Corporation, and given my background in capital markets, I have been interested in and written and spoken about transparency in investor relations from the 1990s with the rise of intangibles reporting and beyond to the impact of the rise of social media.
One of the facets in my widely read 2006 article Six Facets of the Future of PR was Transparency is a given, while one of my Seven Megatrends of Professional Services was Transparency.
In both of these papers, as in a number of keynotes I gave earlier in the decade, I mentioning the now-defunct corporate leaks site internalmemos.com, which was launched in 2002, and had a significant impact for a number of companies (which are next target in line for Wikileaks and its peers).
The full text of my 2002 prediction on transparency from Living Networks is here, with the full book chapter embedded at the bottom of the post.
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ABC News: Interview on Wikileaks and the future
By Ross DawsonYesterday I did an interview on ABC News about Wikileaks and its implications.
A few of the points I discuss are:
* The extraordinary social polarization emerging from the Wikileaks debate
* How many people feel strongly enough about the issues to provide support to the cyber-attacks defending Wikileaks, a first for hacker attacks
* The existing long-term trends to transparency have finally crystallized in Wikileaks and the political and social response of today
* Wikileaks cannot be closed down and new platforms for distribution will emerge
* This broad dissemination of information is a reality that will not be reversed
I will write in more detail about the broad implications of Wikileaks soon.
The rise of mini-blogging in 2011: Tumblr will continue to soar
By Ross DawsonSmartCompany recently featured an excellent article on The next 10 social media trends, which received considerable attention and was syndicated through a number of other outlets.
I was quoted in the article talking about social shopping and mini-blogging.
Here are a few further thoughts on mini-blogs. I have written another post on the rise of social shopping, including 7 examples.
Here is an excerpt from the article on mini-blogging:
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The rise of social shopping in 2011: 7 examples of where it is going
By Ross DawsonSmartCompany recently featured an excellent article on The next 10 social media trends, which received considerable attention and was syndicated through a number of other outlets.
I was quoted in the article talking about social shopping and mini-blogs.
Here are a few further thoughts on social shopping. I have written another post on the rise of mini-blogs.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
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Video highlights of Regional TV Marketing conference
By Ross DawsonLast week I wrote that The Future of TV is community, reflecting on the content in my keynote from the ‘Commercial Break’ conference run by Regional TV Marketing conference held in Byron Bay a few weeks ago.
I have just found the videos released from the event – below is an 8 minute highlights video of the conference including from my opening keynote.
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What TV will be like in 10 years: 7 opinions from media leaders
By Ross DawsonGerman magazine Screen.TV recently asked 7 prominent media figures for their views on the future of TV:
“What will you watch on television in ten years, and what do you imagine your TV will look like?”
Here are our responses – links are translated by Google from the German:
– Jane Barratt, President, Young & Rubicam
– Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia
– Chuck Deckeris, CEO, Mediacom
– Chuck Porter, CEO Crispin, Porter & Bogusky
– Samir Husni, “Mr. Magazine“
– Ross Dawson, Futurist (this link to the German version as the original English is below)
– Eric Day, Director Brand Strategy, Microsoft Advertising
Here is my contribution in the original English:
The future of television is really the future of video, in which moving images from existing broadcast and cable TV merge with thousands of new channels, all intermingling across a plethora of devices. The power of television and great programming has been evident for decades, and is becoming even more pronounced as we shift into an all-embracing media economy.
At the same time an extraordinary growth of video content, ranging in quality from the abysmal to the transcendent, will add to create a potent mix for users.
In the home space we will have screens in most rooms, with our main media space generating a fully immersive experience that includes 3D without glasses and the ability to act out our own roles in TV programming. When we are out of the home, video glasses will sometimes be used to create a full screen experience, with rollable screens allowing pocketable devices to generate a rich video view.
While much television and video content will be time-shifted, the best video content distributors (remember this is a post-channel world) will build communities of viewers around live programming. Much of the future of television, and especially its revenue models, will revolve around community.
See my post yesterday on The Future of TV is community for more details on the last point.
Australian government releases Government 2.0 Primer
By Ross DawsonThe Australian government is gaining momentum in its Government 2.0 initiatives, marked today by the launch by the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) of a handy Government 2.0 Primer.
The Report of the Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce was submitted in December 2009. Although the Taskforce chairman Nicholas Gruen had earlier noted that Australian Government 2.0 initiatives were significantly behind countries such as the US and UK, the report and the government response impressed Gartner sufficiently to say “if the Aussies walk the talk, they have a very good chance to be the real leaders in the Gov 2.0 / Open Government race.”
Since then, the Declaration of Open Government by the Finance Minister (with comments enabled!) has pushed the ante up.
The primer is exactly what it says, a compact guide to Government 2.0 for neophytes, in the spirit of Gov 2 released early to be subsequently refined.
Source: Department of Finance and Deregulation
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The Future of TV is community: linking social media with big screens
By Ross DawsonA few weeks ago I gave the opening keynote at the annual conference of the Regional TV Marketing association, held in Byron Bay, Australia, on the topic of Creating the Future of Media.
As I started preparing my keynote I realized that many of my usual messages about media fragmentation and re-aggregation weren’t the most relevant to this audience, and certainly not what they wanted to hear. As I spent time looking into and considering regional televsion, the more I realized that this is an extraordinarily promising media sector.
The first thing to consider is the power of big budget video production and big screens.
“Television” is close to a legacy concept, in a similar way to how “newspapers” are becoming news-on-paper and then simply news over multiple channels. However even while broadcast and cable TV erode and we shift to a world of multi-channel video, big productions and big screens will remain compelling.
This chart from Ofcom’s communication survey shows how big screens are becoming increasingly important, most of all to young people.
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