Technology often produces surprises that no one expected. But the biggest developments are often anticipated decades in advance. In 1945, Vannevar Bush described what he called the “ Memex ,” a single device that could store all books, records, and communications and link them together. This concept was then used to define the idea of “hypertext” a term coined 20 years later, which in turn guided the development of the World Wide Web developed 20 years later. The “streaming wars” have only just begun, but the first streaming video occurred more than 25 years ago. What’s more, many of the features of this so-called war have been hypothesized for decades, such as a nearly unlimited supply of content, on-demand, interactivity, dynamic and personalized advertising, and the value of fusing content with distribution.
In this sense, the rough outlines of the future are netherlands mobile database often known in advance, with agreement on the technological capabilities that will produce them. But we can’t usually predict how they will actually materialize, which features will be important, how they will be governed or driven by what competition, or what new experiences will result. When Netflix launched its streaming service, most of Hollywood knew that the future of television was online IP television had been deployed by the late 1990s. The challenge was timing and how to package such services it took Hollywood another decade to accept that all their channels, genres, and content needed to be merged into one appbrand. The popularity of video game broadcasting and YouTube still daunts many in the media industry, as the best way to monetize content may be to give it away for free and charge $0.99 for optional content. Internet giant AOL’s acquisition of media conglomerate Time Warner in 2000 was based on the idea that media and technologydistribution needed to converge, but failed to generate revenue beyond expectations and was dissolved in 2009. Nine years later, it was acquired by mobile internet giant AT&T on the same premise.