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Friday, 7 October 2011

What happened to convergence?

Idei, N. 2001. Speech to Pacific Telecommunications Council. Honolunu: Sony Corporation. Quoted in: Rice, J. and McKernan, B. 2001. Creating Digital Content. USA: McGraw Hill

Idei of the Sony Corp has made this claim in his speech to the Pacific Telecommunications Council:



Google books Snippet

His claims are partly true when it comes to the "30 Degree Principle" but vastly wrong when we consider media convergence. Not only are many people playing PC games but PC and internet access via TVs is on the rise. It's true that even though a majority of UK and other audiences watch shows on demand or stream content online, there is still a number of people watching live TV. It is comparable with the music industry. Although there is a high rate of piracy, the same type of people are still buying CDs. Which is why I believe live TV will be around for a long time, despite the fact that media convergence is taking over. Sometimes people don't want to search for what they want to watch but have the TV programme dictate the schedule. Like Idei says "lean back about 30 degrees and relax".
This being said, convergence is definitely happening. Ideis statement might have been made 10 years ago, addressing statements made by people, including Bill Gates, for four years prior to that and it might not have happened then but it turns out that Bill Gates and those people were right. Convergence is definitely happening now. In the case of internet/on demand on TV set-top boxes it is still a long way away from being perfect. Ideis prediction that "most of us would be happy when our Internet searches produces a result within 10 seconds, no one would tolerate such slowness when TV channel surfing" is true and built in on-demand services are still clunky and slow. They don't compare to the instant viewing of live TV that we are used to but if we want on-demand instead of live, is it worth the wait?

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