Moore's Law is interesting. Working in a field affected by technology you see its effects almost weekly. Media is bordering on being free (in one sense or another) and I've become interested in what happens to people's experiences with media (and its consumption) when the hardware gets so cheap is virtually free as well. How does the (almost) free hardware affect the delivery of the (almost) free media?
I've been buying up old iPod Shuffles. Partially because they're great and also partially because they're so cheap on eBay. I've really grown into the idea of only carrying certain artists around again, like we did with minidiscs / tapes. I like the idea that you make a (musical) choice and stick with it. Choice does pollute so.
It echos the idea of the distributed phone, where a modular style phone is split into fucntionally specific parts. Sometimes you don't need all the functionality a smart phone provides, while running, for example. Just as with a music player you don't need to carry a 60Gb hard drive for a 20 min stroll to the post office.
As kids we used to give out tapes to friends to play on their tape players. When the player is almost free like the media, you can give someone a 'mix' and a player in one. Isn't that pretty great. I suspect a lot of people saw this idea recently, which is exactly what I'm taking about.
Now I'm probably the only human alive that doesn't like badges much, but the premise is fabulous.
Where does this go from here? DVD boxes that have screens on them, that are players too. Or perhaps simply projectors. Player and media combined as a single usage item. Experiments like this have been around for ages but are mainly novelty items. I think we need more of this silliness, relating to what I said recently about dreaming and being experimental. We need seemingly crazy ideas like stickers that are screens. That's how we create the new stuff, from the random throw-away ideas.
Temporary hardware, controlled, conditioned or formatted by a parent device, like a smart phone or tablet, which increasingly, many of us have.
When stuff like this gets cheap we can really start playing with it. When all these little tiny things connect together easily through blue-tooth, NFC or WIFI then we'll see a wealth of new experiences and delivery mechanisms.
Media experience ecosystems that span titanium to paper, I like that idea. Transmedia hardware. Let's go.
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