“Cable television subscriptions will experience noticeable percentage declines in the next three to five years.”

Last week it was announced that for the first time in history paid television subscriptions dropped 216,000 with cable taking the greatest hit.

The conventional wisdom of course is that this is due to the bad economic conditions of today.  Of course that is a factor, but the times have been bad for the past two years.  The new dynamic is what I touched upon in last year’s column; that the video viewing marketplace is fundamentally changing, that disintermediation is entering the living room with televisions with internet connectivity and that people have become increasingly comfortable with alternative screens.  In addition, people have come to accept paying for what they watch.  The cable television model is based upon having people pay for all the channels they don’t watch.  Why would people who willingly pay for what they watch any longer except paying for channels they don’t watch?

Of course, a decline of 216,000 subscribers is nowhere near a “noticeable percentage decline”, but I believe that this first ever downturn will be looked back upon as the early indicator of the trend I forecast last year.  As for the rest of that forecast from last years’ column:

“This decline will only be slowed if they [cable operators] accept unbundling and price per channel. This will cause a variety ...]]> Last November, I wrote a column here about the future of cable television.  In that column from last November I forecast:

“Cable television subscriptions will experience noticeable percentage declines in the next three to five years.”

Last week it was announced that for the first time in history paid television subscriptions dropped 216,000 with cable taking the greatest hit.

The conventional wisdom of course is that this is due to the bad economic conditions of today.  Of course that is a factor, but the times have been bad for the past two years.  The new dynamic is what I touched upon in last year’s column; that the video viewing marketplace is fundamentally changing, that disintermediation is entering the living room with televisions with internet connectivity and that people have become increasingly comfortable with alternative screens.  In addition, people have come to accept paying for what they watch.  The cable television model is based upon having people pay for all the channels they don’t watch.  Why would people who willingly pay for what they watch any longer except paying for channels they don’t watch?

Of course, a decline of 216,000 subscribers is nowhere near a “noticeable percentage decline”, but I believe that this first ever downturn will be looked back upon as the early indicator of the trend I forecast last year.  As for the rest of that forecast from last years’ column:

“This decline will only be slowed if they [cable operators] accept unbundling and price per channel. This will cause a variety of cascading problems for all those reliant upon cable television distribution.”

This part of the forecast will take a few years to become fully realized.

In conclusion, there might be an occasional uptick in cable television subscriptions ahead, but the long term trend of declining subscriptions has just begun.

When the first PCs came along in the 1970s, the keyboard was the method of interface. This was expanded with the introduction of the mouse. What followed was the obvious need to make the human-machine interface more appealing and accessible, so the graphic user interface (GUI) became the next development. Screens with letters and numbers and blinking dots gave way to icons, pictures and animation. This, along with rapidly dropping prices, made the PC and its subsequent family members the laptop and the notebook computers a consumer product with annual sales in the hundreds of millions.

We are now moving to touch and voice interface. This was what was so revolutionary about the iPhone as was discussed here. It points to the touch interface of computers now coming to market. Voice recognition software has now enabled us to speak names for automatic dialing on our phones or in our luxury cars. “Phone home”, famously spoken by ET is now spoken by hundreds of thousands of people every day in this country.

Humanity is now entering the voice and touch phase of interaction with all technology. In speeches I give ...]]> The human creation of content and the human interface with computers has, for a century, been based upon the use of keyboards. Typewriters, then electric typewriters were used for all forms of written documents be it letters or books. This was used as the data entry for computers in the early days of mainframes.

When the first PCs came along in the 1970s, the keyboard was the method of interface. This was expanded with the introduction of the mouse. What followed was the obvious need to make the human-machine interface more appealing and accessible, so the graphic user interface (GUI) became the next development. Screens with letters and numbers and blinking dots gave way to icons, pictures and animation. This, along with rapidly dropping prices, made the PC and its subsequent family members the laptop and the notebook computers a consumer product with annual sales in the hundreds of millions.

We are now moving to touch and voice interface. This was what was so revolutionary about the iPhone as was discussed here. It points to the touch interface of computers now coming to market. Voice recognition software has now enabled us to speak names for automatic dialing on our phones or in our luxury cars. “Phone home”, famously spoken by ET is now spoken by hundreds of thousands of people every day in this country.

Humanity is now entering the voice and touch phase of interaction with all technology. In speeches I give around the country I tell audiences that their grandchildren will look at them with incredulity and say “You actually used keyboards?” or even “Keyboards, what are those?” Today, there are many children who when they see an old typewriter don’t know what it is.

What will the next step be? It will be brainwaves, the electrical impulses of the brain that are the physical manifestation of thought. Thought will be the next and probably ultimate interface.

Look no further than a product that will come to market by the end of the year. A company called Emotiv will be introducing a headset that transfers thoughts to the computer screen. This headset, called the EPOC, has electrodes in strategic places that, when worn properly, will transmit the brainwaves of thoughts to the computer. The headset is customized to the user by the establishment of a baseline of response. The software asks the user to imagine 11 different cognitive actions such as “lift” “pull” and “push”, each for a few seconds. This teaches the system to better read such thoughts. The next step is to have the user look at a screen with an image, such as a cube. The computer program, in game form using an oriental sensei, asks the user to “lift” the cube, or “push” the cube. Evidently, with user concentration, there is a rapid ability to actually lift or push the cube on the screen. This of course creates a positive feedback loop, giving the user greater confidence and ability to concentrate.

The ultimate potential of this takes one into the area of brain to computer interface, and ultimately brain to brain communication. The closer-in potential in technology will be the ability to surf the net by concentrated thinking and the creation of video games that have only headsets with electrodes for gamers to use instead of a hand held controller.

The potential application for humans to focus their thinking, change their behavior and ultimately to tap into the unlimited potential of the human brain and its connection with emotion and intention is transformational and unlimited. What only the highest evolved gurus have been reportedly able to do will start to become common practice. In the year 2020, the Emotiv EPOC headset will be looked upon within this realm as the mid-1970s arcade game of Pong is now looked at within the context of video gaming. It is the beginning of a technological, social and cultural phenomenon.

As Thomas Watson the legendary CEO of IBM, and one of the most important figures in the creation of the computer market once famously said: “Think!”.

Seagate, the largest producer of hard drives recently announced that it had just shipped its’ one billionth hard drive. In 1979 the company was an early trailblazer in the manufacturing of hard drives small enough for the early PC’s that were just being produced. Their first product was the ST506 which held just 5MB of storage, was 5.5 inches wide and weighed 5 pounds. This was revolutionary compared to the 14 inch and 8 inch drives that were standard at the time. This first innovation of size reduction has, of course continued to this day. A similar sized external hard drive today would hold not 5MB of storage, but 500 Gigabytes of storage, an increase of 100,000% in terms of capacity to weight and size.

What is even more revolutionary is the reduction in cost of hard drive storage. The ST506 was priced at $1,500 for a cost of $300 per megabyte. The most recent Seagate hard ...]]> One of the technological innovations I have written about here and here in this column has been the reduction in size and cost of computer storage. It is one of the more significant developments in computing over the past two decades. It is part of the foundation that has allowed the explosion in mobile computing to occur. It is an integral part of the massive media files we can all now assemble and of course in the ability for all of us to become ever more productive as individuals.

Seagate, the largest producer of hard drives recently announced that it had just shipped its’ one billionth hard drive. In 1979 the company was an early trailblazer in the manufacturing of hard drives small enough for the early PC’s that were just being produced. Their first product was the ST506 which held just 5MB of storage, was 5.5 inches wide and weighed 5 pounds. This was revolutionary compared to the 14 inch and 8 inch drives that were standard at the time. This first innovation of size reduction has, of course continued to this day. A similar sized external hard drive today would hold not 5MB of storage, but 500 Gigabytes of storage, an increase of 100,000% in terms of capacity to weight and size.

What is even more revolutionary is the reduction in cost of hard drive storage. The ST506 was priced at $1,500 for a cost of $300 per megabyte. The most recent Seagate hard drive has 1TB (terabyte) of storage and cost just 1/50th of a cent, or $0,0002 per MB. So the cost of storage has dropped so that 1TB today costs less than 5MB did 29 years ago. That is simply astounding.

Seagate, in making its announcement of having sold one billion hard drives came up with some interesting statistics. What the company has shipped already amounts to 79 million terabytes of storage. That is enough for 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs. The ST506 would have held just one song. So, if you are reading this listening to music from your computer, praise this revolution of cost and size reduction.

Storage capacity will continue to dramatically grow as it will continue to cost less and shrink in physical size. It has been projected that all the books published in a given year, currently some 175,000 titles, will fit on an iPod or more appropriately a Kindle sized device by 2015. At that point we will no longer be talking about ebooks, we will be talking about elibraries that fit into ones’ pocket.

Much of the conversation in the world of technology and media is about the accelerating capacity of wireless broadband, of ever faster processor chips and the growing ability for all of us to access vast amounts of data with the touch of a finger or, increasingly the sound of our voice. All of this is true but one of the underlying factors allowing us to live in this new media rich broadband world is the exponential expansion of capacity, reduction in size and cost of storage.

High speed Internet connectivity and mobility will allow us to change the way we live in the new world of expensive energy affecting commuting and travel. Until we free ourselves from fossil fuels, this connectivity will serve as an essential lifestyle alternative for work, play and human interaction. The ever lower cost and size of storage will allow us to dispense with the destruction of natural resources to create things, whose €˜thing-ness’ will be increasingly unnecessary in the digital world. How many trees are killed every year for books, book shelves and all forms of paper products? How much environmentally unsound plastic products are used for packaging DVDs and CDs?

One of the unsung heroes of the digital technological transformation of the last 30 years has been the revolution in computer storage. It is one of the parents of the long tail economy.

Decades ago, the large main frame computers were housed in large refrigerated rooms.  Today server farms reside in similar cooled environments.  Heat can cause computing and networking equipment to malfunction, slow down operating speed and in extreme cases to simply fry.  Any of us who have actually put our laptops on our laps when working know how fast they can heat up.  Desktop PCs have more powerful fans built in to keep them cooler and therefore operating closer to the maximum speed of the installed processor chip.  We are, however living in a world of increasing mobility where the laptop is fast replacing the desk top.  This means that often the laptops we use are not operating at peak efficiency due to generated heat.

This is not something to which I had given much thought as I had accepted this as one of the accepted limitations of mobile computing.  Laptops provide mobility but must sometimes sacrifice performance due to heat generation because of the demands for compact computing.  Last week however I was given much to think about.  As mentioned in my prior column I had traveled to ...]]> Technology has been the defining force of the Information Age.  Technology has given us an appreciation for speed, global communications, connectivity, miniaturization and of course computing power.  We embrace new generations of computers, cell phones and digital content players.  Many of these innovations, as they increase in power, generate heat. As they decrease in size there is often a proportionate increase in generated heat.

Decades ago, the large main frame computers were housed in large refrigerated rooms.  Today server farms reside in similar cooled environments.  Heat can cause computing and networking equipment to malfunction, slow down operating speed and in extreme cases to simply fry.  Any of us who have actually put our laptops on our laps when working know how fast they can heat up.  Desktop PCs have more powerful fans built in to keep them cooler and therefore operating closer to the maximum speed of the installed processor chip.  We are, however living in a world of increasing mobility where the laptop is fast replacing the desk top.  This means that often the laptops we use are not operating at peak efficiency due to generated heat.

This is not something to which I had given much thought as I had accepted this as one of the accepted limitations of mobile computing.  Laptops provide mobility but must sometimes sacrifice performance due to heat generation because of the demands for compact computing.  Last week however I was given much to think about.  As mentioned in my prior column I had traveled to Brazil to deliver a keynote speech to Embraco, the largest producer of refrigeration compressors in the world.  Compressors are not something I had ever given much thought to, as I have never had much facility for machinery and how it works. As a futurist I do not spend much time dwelling on the machines of the Industrial Age except in the macro sense of history.  A tour of the factory only confirmed this impression as I watched heavy compressors, the size of 16 inch softballs being made with multi-ton machines.  Evidently this was being done well as the precision for such production is the best in the world.  These compressors go into refrigeration units for both home and business.

After my keynote address the next day I toured the technology fair of truly futuristic applications of compressor technology.  I then listened to the presentations of the Chief Technology Officer, Roberto Campos, and his incredibly sharp team of engineers.  These presentations gave me a new way to think about compressors and how innovations in cooling can not only enhance technology but also contribute solutions to the energy crisis in which we find ourselves.

Embraco committed itself to rethinking the use of compressors and ways that miniaturization could lead to new markets.  The result is that they are working with Intel to create a miniature compressor the size of a large magic marker that fits into a cooling docking station the use of which eliminates heat.  In numerous tests, the CPU performance of a high performance gaming laptop was greater than when undocked because heat generation is at a minimum.  The obvious next development stage in the years ahead would be to have this compressor be able to be plugged into the laptop like a large flash drive when in mobile use.  This would not only maintain the highest level of performance but would most likely extend the life of a laptop as there would no longer be heat generated wear and tear.

This innovation is, in and of itself, something to praise.  However, as someone who thinks a lot about large trends and forces that shape humanity it is the larger picture that intrigued me.  Here is a Brazilian company that is bringing innovation to its’ Industrial Age product of long standing, to help one of Silicon Valley’s technological giants of the Information Age generate better performance in the products it helps to create.  It is not just globalization, it is the cross Age collaboration that is interesting and that hopefully will become ever more prevalent in the coming Shift Age.