Bing Gordon\u2019s resume reads like a who\u2019s who of major players in the last 20 years of digital media. Amongst other things, he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Prompted by his interviewer, CNBC\u2019s 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 \u201cinvention\u201d with \u201cXbox Live has amazing customer retention.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Right now, Gordon said streaming video isn\u2019t \u201cclickable\u201d– in that the TV remote control sense of clicking. It\u2019s 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, \u201cwant more people to pay money for the same thing,\u201d 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\u2019re watching. For that reason, Gordon is particularly high on the Xbox in the console wars.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think Xbox Live is one of the great consumer miracles of the last decade,\u201d he said and declared the Xbox the only fully-integrated gaming and media platform on the market.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe losers are going to be the people who control the access points [to content.],\u201d Gordon said. \u201cThe winners will be the customers and creators.”<\/p>\n
In other words, soon, it may become a bad time to be a cable company.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ll have cable company gendarmes trying to pull their content back off of Apple TV,\u201d Gordon said. \u201cThe middlemen are gonna get creamed.\u201d<\/p>\n
And what about Apple TV, exactly? Is that in a position to compete with Microsoft and the Xbox?<\/p>\n
\u201cAnything Apple is a threat to anybody, about anything,\u201d Gordon said, half- joking. \u201cApple is a threat to Mars.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bing Gordon\u2019s resume reads like a who\u2019s who of major players in the last 20 years of digital media. Amongst other things, he\u2019s 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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":17861,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3062,125,2221,3063,26],"tags":[16,4240,9,2313,4113,2746,2046,29,5226],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17856"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17856"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17859,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17856\/revisions\/17859"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}