The Internet’s ability to untether people has really changed the whole dynamic around what is entertainment and what is necessary and what is not.
While the TV Everywhere initiative pushes video entertainment out of the living room and into roving devices like laptops, PCs and mobile phones, it expands the video entertainment experience. To take it one step further, with what I’ll call People Everywhere, today’s technology, with slight modifications, can push content out to users everywhere and at the same time pull user information that can be used later.
The idea behind People Everywhere is to place existing technology—or stuff yet to be developed—into a device that is carried everywhere. While that sounds like a smartphone, to paraphrase Brian Roberts, it should be a smartphone on steroids. This always-on device would not only keep track of the user’s location but would store that information in a cloud-based file for later retrieval. If the user went to the local mall, the device would know what store and even what department; a sports store and the tennis department, for instance.
On the surface this whole thing does sound somewhat intrusive and creepy. What makes People Everywhere a winning concept is that the user can take that same device and control how information retrieved during the day is presented in its most useful fashion all accessed from a device that might have its own screen but also might, through the wonders of technology, transform into a remote control or mouse that connects to yet another screen. Turn on the TV at home or in the hotel and get an ad not for Slazenger golf balls but rather for Slazenger tennis equipment because you’d been searching the tennis department. Turn on the PC and find not an annoying ribbon for the local car dealer but a more pleasing visage of the latest line of Izod tennis shorts.
People Everywhere is a concept that’s a ways out—but it’s not science fiction. People like Intel are working feverishly on smart remote controls that recognize and sense consumers; cable operators are TV Everywhere outside the normal home entertainment center; every mobile phone knows where you are; and motion detection is a video game must. Put them all together in one small package, connected, of course, to the cloud and you have People Everywhere; an idea waiting to be born.
