Last time VideoAge‘s Water Cooler featured a prediction article was in its February 8, 2024 edition. And like every respectable prediction, it reported all the good things expected in the future.
A comparison can be made with the weather forecast, which tends to be partially sunny or partially cloudy, maintaining a positive attitude. But predicting the weather is relatively simple because, as it has been said, tomorrow’s weather is already here today, it’s just temporarily a little farther away.
Nowadays, however, predictions are like guessing the intentions of dictators, which are always bad, and those of economists, which oscillate between geopolitical tumult, inflation, and recession.
We have tons of doomers, naysayers, and contrarians, who love nothing more than to wax poetic about the television business and the entertainment industry in general. Nowadays, we have billionaires like Elon Musk who entertain us with a failing X (called Twitter when it was successful), with postings like “Legacy media is dead.”
We have general expressions like “The future is not like it used to be,” or “It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.”
Then there are those for whom the future arrived too soon, like in the case with AI, which is finding the world unprepared for what it can offer or do.
For others, the future arrived too late, like in the case of the GLP-1 drug (for diabetes and weight loss) that was popularized 37 years after its discovery when 40 percent of American adults had already been declared obese (up from one in five in 1987 when the drug was created), and 35 million had already been diagnosed with diabetes. Thus, it could be called one of the biggest medical breakthroughs of the century.
For these naysayers the business model of streaming is not sustainable, broadcast television is doomed, theatrical release is a thing of the past, drama series are being replaced by reality shows and live sports. And yet, entertainment is what makes the world go around — even more than politics. If something doesn’t live on television, it’s not considered reality by many.
The curious aspect of these predictions is that they’re most likely made by people who forgot all the things that happened in 2024! Fortunately for us all, the news, which used to disappear soon after it was printed, now lasts longer online, even though most folks still have short attention spans.
Some of us have the tendency to say that there is nothing else left to invent, and that the flying car is still a chimera (or pie in the sky). However, history tells us that even things unimaginable in the early 1900s (like the videoconference envisioned in 1920, depicted above), were later realized. It’s just a matter of having the unusual fantasy that legacy media will also be reinvented on a day soon to come by a future billionaire.
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