TechArchive

Original article date: January 1998

Did you know that in the USA they have cameras in nurseries that transmit live pictures over the Internet so that concerned parents can view their kids with Netscape from their desks in work?

One day in the not too distant future, (as a result of compression technology and available bandwidth finally meeting) you’ll be able to view decent real time video on the World Wide Web. At that moment, you will suddenly have (in effect) an unlimited number of TV channels. The entry cost for being a TV broadcaster will plummet (in the same way home pages are very cheap to put out compared with other advertsing media). It’s already happening with radio: using a web browser with Real Audio and a 28.8 modem, you can hear many FM radio stations coming out of your PC speakers. At Christmas, I visited the web site for a conference and listened to one of the speakers while the browser scrolled the slides!

Now there are a lot of obvious predictions to be made here. Conventional TV will die out, all TVs will be ‘Internet Ready’, every sort of minority group will have a TV channel, and Bill Gates’ earnings from pay-to-view TV will make his 1997 wealth look tiny (make no mistake, he’s already well placed to benefit from this technology when it finally arrives).

But then you think “what else is implied?” TV ads which are only beamed to appropriate viewers (like targeted direct mail). Adverts where you only have to watch the bare minimum ‘bait’ line, and you can then choose to “click here to see more about the product” (just like a link on a web page) rather than continue to the next ad. Which means more ads (as bait lines only) will fit in the schedule. And because broadcast costs are lower, TV ads will be far cheaper. All businesses will advertise on ‘TV’. Advertising will be two-way: marketing info will be flowing whenever you respond.

This will inevitably extend to having a camera on your TV, turning your phone into a videophone (Yes, Noel Edmonds’ NTV was ahead of its time!). GPs will carry out home visits remotely. Financial advisers and the like will all have chats with punters in their own homes. And because it’s on the net, and encryption will have been outlawed by techno-ignorant Governments, who want to seem tough on crime, people will be able to hack into your videophone.

Do you remember before Christmas when a TV programme caused 600 kids to be admitted to hospital in Japan with symptoms ranging from fits to throwing up blood? Take the mentality that creates computer viruses and give them that sort of power …plus the facility to hack into the TV and target one particular viewer. Or screen a mild version, and watch on the bugged set top camera to see who it affects before broadcasting the serious stuff. And I haven’t even mentioned hypnosis yet.

But that’s just TV. I just read about a technique for fusing a narrow jet of metal powder into solid with a scanning laser (for rapid prototyping in metal), which we’ll see more of soon, no doubt. Soon we’ll be able to fax metal objects to each other! One day the only car spares shop in town will feature a huge modem and one of these ‘printers’, and vintage car enthusiasts will get their parts from the ‘owners club website’. Owners of these printers will come in on a Monday and find the workshop full of junk objects (metal spam, in effect). These printers will be so cheap we all have one in the home. We’ll buy everything from garden chairs to sculptures via the modem. Imagine the Ann Summers ftp site! No I’d better stop now, because the logical next topic is virtual reality suits…

January 1998