Five years ago one of the golden trends in the high-tech and telecom industries was the convergence revolution that would soon take place in our living rooms, our kitchens, and other parts of our sacred homes. Convergence meant that different appliances, such as the TV, PC, and even refrigerator, that in the past knew only one trick would marry and give birth to a generation of versatile machines capable of handling all our media and most of our needs.
No longer would the TV sit in the corner of your living room like a dumb receiver; TV 2.0 would allow you to control all the functions of your future smart home including climate control and security cameras. You would be able to download from the internet the movies that you wanted, when you wanted them. The viewing experience would become "interactive," which meant that you would, for example, be able to get on-the-spot information regarding a show or a director, or even play a role in the unfolding of a show's plot. And you would be able to directly purchase any of the products hawked by the marketers now looking for ways to exploit convergence. You, the consumer, would play an active role in your entertainment--and in the conversion of your viewing habits into purchases.
Today, as with many of the dot-com era's promises, only some aspects of this vision have even been partially fulfilled. The concept of a souped up VCR, the Personal Video Recorder (PVR) as implemented by TiVo and satellite TV providers and as found in future versions of Microsoft Windows, has given home viewers a small dose of interactivity at the remote control. Also, the endless improvement of PCs and the advent of Napster-like file sharing has turned our home computers into music jukeboxes, CD printing machines, and even video entertainment centers as well as game boxes. But I do not yet know anyone who can immediately order any movie he would like, or purchase any product seen on TV with the push of a button, or control any of the other appliances in the home.
Convergence might not yet have taken shape as Bill Gates had anticipated and demonstrated with his Microsoft Home prototype, but there has been a quiet and significant revolution in media and entertainment: the convergence of creative means. While the high-tech journals have written innumerable pages on isolated phenomena such the growth of online video games or weblogs, they have largely ignored the explosion in the number and forms of creative avenues available to the wired individual for entertainment.
Who can ignore the amount of time the average online teenage spends downloading MP3 music tracks and "burning" new mix CDs? Or the time he or she spends thinking out loud into his or her weblog? Or the time Dad spends uploading and publishing digital photos of the last vacation for the family on the East Coast to browse?
The information, the know-how, the tools, and the help are all available online now to jump from remixing to photo retouching to creative writing to video editing to songwriting. In the early days of the internet, it was the programmers and the web designers who led the charge in creating works purely for fun or self-expression; now everyone is learning or about to learn how to make web sites, make music, and make films; to inform, teach, and entertain.
Would it be ridiculous to think that in the not-so-distant future Hollywood movies will cease to be the main source of movie entertainment? You might be thinking of the independent films that are predicted to flood the online distribution model of the future. But imagine even beyond that. For a growing portion of the population, all these works will serve as well-produced examples from which to nourish one's ideas and skills for screenwriting, filming, and producing one's own films. It is through creative action that entertainment will become more interactive for many of us. This will be true of the other traditional media, e.g. music, art, literature, and radio, as well as it already is for web sites, weblogs, and software programs.
Watching TV on the computer and downloading listings onto our PVRs are not the only promises of technology. More importantly, the new media revolution is blurring the lines between producer and consumer of not just information but entertainment. And creating entertainment is itself entertainment.
The techs, the media companies, and marketers should strive to understand these new demands and work to produce for the mainstream consumer integrated easy-to-use packages for nurturing and satisfying the creative urge.
