AI is the latest technology that is threatening to overwhelm the television industry, with the purported ability to crank out scripts and create realistic looking and sounding actors to then bring those scripts to life.
Or at least it will.
That is not meant sarcastically. AI’s current powers are pretty awe-inspiring, and I have no doubt that it will be able to crank out decent enough scripts for non-fiction shows soon enough.
But AI is, oddly enough, the exception.
The allegedly disruptive technologies of the past decade have all gone belly up, in a way that proved the skeptics among us correct.
The Metaverse: aka Second Life 2.0. This is probably the most egregious example. There were conferences, start-ups, books and substacks devoted to the upcoming Metaverse, a sort of alternative online universe populated by avatars. Political pundits fumed about it. And those of us who wondered, in The Emperor Has No Clothes mode, why anyone would actually want to do this were derided as small-minded simpletons with no imagination.
Now, of course, the metaverse is in full retreat. People who abandoned their former gigs to become Metaverse experts are hightailing it back to whence they came. The Wall Street Journal, which cranked out multiverses of Metaverse pieces, is now asking “Why The Metaverse Buzz Is Cooling.” And there’s a growing consensus among a certain type of terminally online person that it was all just a ruse to distract from Facebook’s troubles, anyway.
Regardless, it seems that, like COVID itself, the Metaverse is destined to be remembered as a relic of the pandemic era.
Audio Chatrooms: Speaking of relics of the pandemic era, there’s live audio chatrooms, Clubhouse in particular.
There was a time when people, and by “people” I mean “venture capitalists with large checkbooks,” thought that live audio chat was going to be the new, new thing. There were celebrities jumping in to live chats, even Drake and Mark Zuckerberg. Invite codes were almost as hard to get as BlueSky invite codes are today. Even Vogue wrote a puff piece about it. Vogue!
And then, of course, the lockdown ended, we could all leave the house. Everyone realized that podcasts were better and well, when you Google “Clubhouse” one of the first hits asks, “Is anyone still using Clubhouse?”
And when Google search results are dissing you …
Live Social Video: This was, if you recall, what Zuckerberg was into before the Metaverse. He dubbed it “Facebook Live” and live video was going to be the OG “Netflix killer.”
There were articles like 2016’s Is Facebook Live The New Big Thing For Publishers?. And Facebook Live was not even the OG live video platform. That was Meerkat, which briefly lit up SXSW in 2015 in a way that the tech world assumed would mimic the way that Twitter lit up SXSW back in 2007. (And speaking of Twitter, they even launched their own live video platform, called Periscope, to compete with Facebook Live and Meerkat.)
Alas, online live video never really made it beyond 2016. There was the low production-value factor. The “I can’t really drop what I’m doing to log on to your random show at exactly 3:15 p.m. factor,” and the “actually, no one really does want to read the comments of dozens of random strangers" factor.
Little known factoid: Cheddar News was actually launched as a Facebook Live channel and managed to pivot away and become a streaming and cable stalwart that uses charismatic and knowledgeable guests to discuss the future of television.
But back to AI.
While the Metaverse, audio chatrooms and live social video all had a lot of buzz, they also had obvious flaws, reasons why someone from outside The Bubble would scratch their heads and wonder, “Why would anyone want this?”
The Metaverse in particular.
AI is another story.
Tell your non-industry friends that these things (OK, large language learning modules) can write emails, plan trips and even offer relationship advice and they immediately get why that is a good thing and what the possibilities are.
And while chatbots may indeed write scripts one day, a more immediately realized benefit seems to be around personalization and figuring out what shows you might like to watch and presenting them in a way that is far more intuitive than current systems.
This might be as basic as issuing a voice command that ,“I want a movie that the whole family can watch, a comedy released after 1970 that has a holiday theme.” And the system, having learned the ages of everyone in your family and their viewing habits, will be able to winnow down your selection for four possibilities including the eventual winner, Home Alone.
That’s a trend that is not going away.
