Musings from the Final Hangover: Some Out-There Predictions for 2011
• 3D TV will continue to NOT happen
• Content deals and cord-cutting that would otherwise have been rampant in this time of austerity will be held back by a flare of privacy and net neutrality issues, kicked off by the sparks of Wikileaks. That will drag much of the focus of the netizen and big business in the sector away from the swell of on-the-cusp OTT and online services that were finally seeing their stars align at the end of 2010.
• World Wide Web War 3 will draw little, if any, blood but will give the politicians something to do, and will suck in much of the hypermedia for this reason. Many of the major content publishers will join the fray too in a huge argument about...well anything and nothing at all, in fact...and it will all seem very serious at the time....
However, it will in actuality result in a short return of publishers to the bizarre notion that pay-walled OTT services are a good idea and can be forced upon internet users by loving manipulation of policy and coercion of a variety of old duffers who can barely send an email....
....Followed by a re-realisation that freeconomics is the mass rule, and frankly if its good enough to see then someone will do it for free anyway... just to big themselves up, and the privacy arguments will then only apply to those who want to pretend that they never took part in the argument in the first place, and the technologists will rule the known universe.
Bwah-ha-ha ha...(pauses to stroke white cat)
• Mobile will "get there" as ABR technologies enable consistent streaming almost everywhere.
• Apple will realise that its Achilles heel is iTunes and will do something about it—possibly like buying Microsoft's entertainment division and leaving Steve Ballmer to gracefully retire without running the whole company into the ground. And then Microsoft will buy Skype to integrate it into their Xbox for video conferencing.
• Oh and Adobe will launch an OS, and a tablet machine, and try to buy Amazon, only to end up buying Red Bee in a fit of direction finding, probably ending the year being subsumed by Oracle—just to make Larry look cool in a fit of midlife crisis.
• AOL and Yahoo will fall in love and make little Aloyhas, perhaps a leading the OTT pay-walled garden combination affair mentioned above.
• 2011 will be the ‘year of discovery' in streaming media—by which i mean "search" and not "puberty."
• And finally, I will win something from one of Dan Rayburn's survey-giveaways and make it to Streaming Media East AND West!