A report entitled 2020 Future Vision, compiled by U.K. cable TV company NTL Telewest is predicting the death of the traditional TV, with television screens occupying an entire wall by 2020, and people watching news reports on the side of a cereal packet.
Based on the views of "futurologists, consumer technology experts and design gurus", the report also suggests that Internet access "will be available through connected displays embedded in magazine pages" and the traditional method of television broadcast scheduling will be fully replaced by on-demand services.
The last part is the bit that caught my eye, "by 2020 there will be only one television channel, yours."
Of all the bug-eyed predictions in the report, this is the one that strikes me as the most likely to come to fruition, but it'll probably happen within the next five to ten years, not 14.
The growth of PVRs and IPTV is picking up pace, and pretty soon the concept of scheduling is going to be irrelevant as people become more accustomed to time-shifting (and place-shifting), cutting out the crap and concentrating on the things they like, and not the things the networks want them to watch.
You can read the entire report here.
1. Wow they have predicted some amazing stuff except that if you watch the film back to the future II, all there predicted images have been protrayed in the mid 80's film. All they had to do is watch that film and say what they saw. Their 2020 imagesmay occur but they did not predict them it's been portrayes in films.
Posted at 12:58PM on Aug 16th 2006 by lise