VIDEO ENTERTAINMENT AS THE AGENT OF CHANGE FOR TELEVISION

The third dimension of change is occurring within the TV system itself. Here, change will be rapid, with major consequences for culture and politics. The first generation of tel­evision was analog broadcast television, emerging just before and after World War II.

Television has been around since the late 1930s as a consumer medium. In those 75 years, it moved from an analog black and white technology to color digital multicasting at a sharper resolution. Its bit rate per distribution channel has increased, if one is generous, by a technological compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 4 percent per year. In honor of the guiding spirit of the first decades of mass market TV, the leader of the US company RCA, which dominated TV technology for its first generation, this rate should be described as ‘Sarnoff’s Rate’. In contrast, ‘Moore’s Law’ - referring to the doubling of performance every two years - describes technological change in the IT sector based on advances in the underlying semiconductors. This translates to about 40 percent a year, ten times as fast as TV technology.

But now TV is migrating to distribution over the Internet (Arendse et al., 2014; Cisco, 2014; Sherman et al., 2014).

From the Internet of Science to the Internet of Entertainment 561 on the widening of content options and providers. This is important, of course, but argu­ably even more fundamental in the long run is the breakdown of the system of (almost) uniform TV technology in favor of a system of multiple parallel types of TV. As the video system migrates onto the Internet and as TV sets become computer-like devices, differ­ent technologies can be offered. Competing providers of various technology modules, distribution systems, and content technology will emerge, and their rivalries will move TV from a system of technical uniformity to one much more resembling that of mobile devices, games, and apps.

This type of TV will include some of the following elements, in various combinations:

• 4K and 8K resolution, which sharpens the picture for large screens;

• 3-D quality;

• peer interactivity;

• person-to-computer interactivity (artificial intelligence);

• computer-enhanced reality;

• user-generated content;

• asynchronous viewing and individualization of content;

• branching plot lines and user participation;

• multi-platform distribution;

• distance-insensitive distribution.

Putting together these and other elements enables TV as a high-resolution, immersive, participatory, personalized, social, world-wide experience (see Carey, 2003; Mayer- Schonberger 2003; Werbach, 2003; Madden, 2009; Cesar and Geerts, 2011).

Some of the emerging television will continue to be linear, traditional, classic television of a 22-minute format - a half-hour show minus advertising and promos - surviving in the same way as newspapers, books, and magazines have remained alive. But they will decline in their economic and cultural role. The leading edge of creativity, both techno­logically and culturally, will be in those new media. The kind of television emerging will be partly a widening - more of everything. But more interesting is the deepening: more impulses, more information, more sensory impressions, and more richness. This contin­ues a historic process of greater information intensity going back 450 years to Gutenberg.

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