Bing Gordon’s resume reads like a who’s who of major players in the last 20 years of digital media. Amongst other things, he’s a former chief creative officer at Electronic Arts and a current board member at Amazon and Zynga. At his SXSW panel on Tuesday, Gordon played the role of prognosticator and, surprisingly, poet.
Prompted by his interviewer, CNBC’s Julia Boorstin, to share some of his literary dabblings at the start of the panel, Gordon read a piece outlining some of his predictions for the future of streaming media, game consoles, and TV. Whether he turns out to be right or wrong, you have to at least give credit to a man who rhymes “invention” with “Xbox Live has amazing customer retention.”
Gordon sees consoles — particularly the Xbox — as the ascendant portals through which consumers will consume video programming, and that gamers’ inherent desire for interactivity will drive innovations in streaming video technology.
Right now, Gordon said streaming video isn’t “clickable”– in that the TV remote control sense of clicking. It’s not organized by chapters like a DVD, or subdivided into specialized channels as is television or even annotated in the way it could be. Content holders, Gordon said, “want more people to pay money for the same thing,” and their unmodified, pre-existing content served as is. Gordon added that gamers have the expectation that their console hardware should actually do something to add to the experience while they’re watching. For that reason, Gordon is particularly high on the Xbox in the console wars.
“I think Xbox Live is one of the great consumer miracles of the last decade,” he said and declared the Xbox the only fully-integrated gaming and media platform on the market.
When streaming media reaches an equal level of clickability with traditional TV, Gordon sees a tipping point in the battle between traditional content providers like cable companies and devices that allow users to access whatever content they want, whenever they want.
“The losers are going to be the people who control the access points [to content.],” Gordon said. “The winners will be the customers and creators.”
In other words, soon, it may become a bad time to be a cable company.
“You’ll have cable company gendarmes trying to pull their content back off of Apple TV,” Gordon said. “The middlemen are gonna get creamed.”
And what about Apple TV, exactly? Is that in a position to compete with Microsoft and the Xbox?
“Anything Apple is a threat to anybody, about anything,” Gordon said, half- joking. “Apple is a threat to Mars.”
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