Some of this is a little dry, but it’s a very interesting insight into the future of cable television.
The folks at Comcast, Adelphia, Cox, Time-Warner, etc aren’t just dropping by and setting up cable boxes anymore. Very soon, if not already in some locations, your cable service will be enabled to handle DVR functionality (a real threat to Tivo) and your cable modem will also serve to provide you with voice-over-internet service, which basically means you make all your calls using the same bandwidth that provides your high-speed internet connection. Traditional “phone lines” will most likely be a thing of the past very soon. Personally, I’m looking forward to having all this added functionality and I see a day, maybe sooner than later, when there’s one single device in your house that has the pipe to handle it all – music, television, phone, internet access, etc.
It’s not a crazy vision or anything, it’s a reality. In fact, back in 1998 or thereabouts, we were looking for people to fund our record label and ended up in Camden, Maine, talking to an old-school record business honcho who was absoloutely loaded. Lived right on the ocean, but still had an indoor pool. Anyway, even back then, he was talking about the single-device technology and had claimed to have already seen it in some labs.
So anyway, at one point in the coming years, you’ll have a single device in your pad with a main screen and you’ll just choose which form of media you want to use – then off to the races. Meet the Jetsons…….
In much more important news, especially for you people of Portland, Oregon, it is more than safe to take a crap, perhaps the safest place in the nation, or maybe the world. They really ought to work this into their Chamber of Commerce brochures somehow, wouldn’t you think:
“Portland – Come Take A Crap!”
“No Shit – We’re The Cleanest!”
“You Could Drink Our Sewage!”
Okay, that’s enough…..
Song now playing: The Who – “Young Man Blues”