As Bill Gates, geeky as ever, opened the just-concluded Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, he said something that bodes ill for the news media but was completely missed by the techno-booster journalists that made up the bulk of the CES press corps.
Gates was talking about the wildly popular success of the recently introduced online version of Microsoft’s new Xbox video game that lets players compete against each other over the Internet.
Gates said the average participant in the online game -– and Microsoft flacks say tens of thousands of people have signed up since November, with hundreds more coming online daily -– spends two hours a day playing Xbox on the Internet.
Now before you dismiss that as an audience of irreverent young teens, understand that the average video game enthusiast playing these games is in their 20s or 30s, college-educated, has an upwardly mobile job and is exactly the demographic most sought by broadcast stations and newspaper publishers.
And they are spending two hours a day playing video games online.
As if television viewing audiences and newspaper subscriptions haven’t enough competition, now it’s Internet video games.
The annual showing of the latest gadgets and gizmos this year made it clear that while the convergence trend between news media outlets may be stalled, it’s thriving when it comes to home entertainment devices.
And it’s all made possible because of “The Network.”
Don’t think Internet here, though that is surely the underlying technology that enabled it. This network, as sketched out in keynote speeches and in interviews by tech titans like Gates, Intel Corp. CEO Craig Barrett., Sony CEO Kunitake Ando, and Dell Computer founder Michael Dell, is much more.
This network is about using a variety of technologies -– broadband high speed Internet, short range Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radio-based signals, even a subcarrier on the FM radio band that Gates plans to tap into to beam messages to watches and “glanceable information devices.”
We really need to be innovating new ways to be relevant, to be a part of this “digital lifestyle” that is stealing away the most valuable asset our audience has: time. These technologies will all intermix and mingle to allow refrigerators, microwave ovens, home stereos and television sets to talk with each other and share information, as well as connect to the ‘Net, all without wires.
The amazing success of the Internet is making all this possible. Even though dot-com businesses have crumbled and high-tech companies have stumbled, high-speed broadband Internet subscriptions have been increasing by more than 100,000 households a month, with more than 20 million homes expected to be wired to broadband by year’s end.
With an average of three people per home using a broadband connection, that’s an estimated market of 60 million consumers — enough to spur demand for new services and products.
And of those new services I heard at CES last week, all were entertainment and service centered.
All of which has vast implications for the news business. We really need to be innovating new ways to be relevant, to be a part of this “digital lifestyle” that is stealing away the most valuable asset our audience has: time.
As the Xbox Internet audience is demonstrating, if we’re to be more than “glanceable information,” we better start figuring out how to reach these new networked consumers.
Mike Wendland is a Poynter Fellow and frequent guest faculty member. He is the technology columnist for The Detroit Free Press and an Internet Correspondent for the 215 NBC-TV News Channel affiliates.
