THE INTERNET OF ENTERTAINMENT AS A DRIVER FOR ACADEMIC RESEARCH

It was the philosopher of communication theory, Marshall McLuhan, who famously said that the medium is the message, meaning that the underlying media technology shapes the content.

As the underlying field of study has been changing at an accelerating rate, the research community has been falling behind. In factual knowledge, young students are often ahead of their professors. In teaching, universities are being challenged by new types of disin­termediation, that of ‘MOOC’ (massive open online courses), which establish different models of instruction and different academic economics. In methodology, data used to be the scarce and slow resource. But now we are being overwhelmed by it. Accordingly, our research and data analysis needs to accelerate, too.

Here are some important questions for research on Internet-based TV, for various academic disciplines:

Industrial economics What is the market structure of online television? Will it be open and competitive, with everyone entering and providing content? Clouds will be central organizations, and there might therefore not be many of them, for reasons of scale and scope. If so, the media of the future will be more concentrated than those of the past. The conventional wisdom is that the new online media system is less concentrated than the old. But this is probably incorrect. The Internet industries were believed to be wide open and competitive and would open things up for the rest. But they exhibit strong concentration trends.

Another economic research question is how to assure the financial viability of the infrastructure. The financial balance between infrastructure, services, and users is a criti­cal issue. The infrastructure is expensive and wants to be paid.

These trends and the resulting market equilibria and media structure will therefore favor higher concentration. Current or foreseeable technology and entrepreneurship will not easily overcome that structure in a long-term sustained way.

Competition may also be affected by vertical integration. For example, if an ISP also owns a cloud service provider, that cloud might realistically have advantaged access to and by the ISPs’ customers, whether ‘net neutrality’ rules exist or not. And with a strong customer base from a large ISP, it gains economies of scale and network effects. This also makes it attractive to the suppliers of content and of advertising. Conversely, the owner­ship of a successful cloud with access to content makes an ISP more valuable to end users, in comparison to an ISP without such vertical integration.

Already we are seeing some of these developments such as the creation and distribu­tion of original content by the companies who will play a large part in the next generation of video, such as Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu.

Policy studies What are some of the implications for policy of such an Internet system? How does one keep that system open, competitive, and pluralistic? How does one ensure the interoperability of clouds, so a user or content provider is not locked into one cloud, but can operate across multiple clouds? These are questions of next-generation policy analysis that researchers have to tackle. Additional pertinent policy questions were pre­sented in section 27.7 above.

Political sciences For political science, what are research questions? How does the emerging system of online, cloud-based TV and the federated Internet affect democracy and political participation? Does it strengthen or weaken central authority, or localism? Does it strengthen political parties? Does it enable change?

Where will this take us? The optimistic idea is that people will not be passive recipients of news and analysis anymore but will engage in an interactive, collaborative community, a smart political crowd on a smart media cloud with citizen journalists making news into a conversation.

But the reality will likely disappoint. There will be some horizontal news collabora­tion by citizens. But the complexity of informational interaction, of visual images, of technology, all of them in the face of rising user expectations, is expensive and requires a combination of skills, organization, and capital. This actually raises the scale of news operations.

What about political participation? Of course, the Internet makes some political activ­ity easier and cheaper. But it does so for everyone. Any effectiveness of early users will soon be matched by their rivals and simply lead to an expensive and mutually stalemating political arms race of investment in customization techniques and new-media marketing technologies.

On top of that, the low cost of online political participation exists primarily for the traditional narrowband Internet, which is largely text based. But the broadband Internet will first permit and soon require fancy video and multimedia messages. Politics will be customized to be most effective. Extensive databases and data mining techniques will be needed. None of this will be cheap. All of it is likely to favor private expert consultancies at the expense of political parties.

Will this cloud media system result in better policies? The idea that ‘smart crowds’ overcome the inefficiencies of governmental processes is unrealistic. Such hopes have accompanied almost every new generation of technology. This is a question truly waiting for detached research.

Similarly, there is a need to study the accelerating globalization of culture and the future of localism. For legal scholars, there are new questions on the nature of property in information, especially when it is interactive and created jointly.

For scholars of culture, there are hugely interesting questions to explore. What are the effects of ‘enhanced reality’, integrating virtual information into the real as we walk and drive, merging reality with heads-up unreality/virtuality?

One of the really interesting questions is what happens when the virtual media experi­ence becomes stronger than real life. This is already happening with video games. It leads to disconnectedness from physical community, and it will accelerate.

Educational studies The new online video environment will also be a major online plat­form for education. This is likely to be one of its most bit-intensive non-entertainment uses. It therefore also raises questions for researchers of education on the nature of the emerging educational system. How can research be supported when students out-migrate to online courses and credentialing that are priced at marginal cost of provision or less? How would quality controls function? What is the effectiveness of education provided to multi-tasking students on the go?

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