Television magic and a vision of the future in 1978
When clearing through some of my old books recently I stumbled across this little charity shop find I’d got a few years ago. At the time I was just fascinated with old books, but stumbling across it now this book has a new resonance for me. Having worked with Channel 4 for the last couple of years and more recently the BBC, television and the development of technology are subjects that are at the forefront of my mind everyday. The most fascinating section of this book is a double-page spread at the end, which gives us a vision of the future as it was at 1978:
Lets take a closer look and see how accurate we were back then…
1. Videos & DVDs… and today, Sky+
‘Videotapes and cassettes’ reared their tangly-ribboned heads as VHS and ‘Videodiscs’ revealed themselves as DVDs. So this little prediction was pretty spot on. But they hadn’t yet seen a future where we wouldn’t necessarily need physical media containers to hold and record onto, now we can simply record TV onto our Sky+ boxes and there’s no need for physical video libraries.
2. Video games and flatscreen TVs
A large flatscreen? Spot on. Although perhaps not quite so large in the average household. And ‘telegames’? Again, pretty accurate, but without the whizzy futuristic name of telegames.
3. Pay-per-view and VoD
“Thousands of programmes are stored at a central video library. To select one, a viewer drops a coin in a slot and dials a code”
Nice. And pretty accurate, but without the physical coin slot. Think pay-per-view on your digital TV service, micropayments for shows on itunes and even free VoD services we have now such as 4oD and iPlayer. I particularly like this lady’s outfit too.
4. Multi-platform content
“…a viewer presses a button on the TV and it prints out a recipe for a dish which has just been shown on screen.”
The functionality here makes me think of cross platform content – we don’t need to print out recipes for Jamie Oliver’s programme, we can just go to 4food on the Channel 4 website for recipes that accompany the series. Or even pressing the red dot on digital TV to get more content surrounding what you’re watching.
5. iPhone
Look at matey lugging around all that equipment to take to a carnival. Nowadays, he can do all of that with an iPhone. As for the girl leaving a message on a TV screen when everyone is out, not really sure where we’d see this nowadays. Perhaps at a footballers Cheshire mansion?
Beth tells me she has another book from this series somewhere at home, so expect a similar blogpost from her sometime soon…
Anna wrote this on 08.07.10 – 13 comments
It's filed in the future, television box
On July 8th, 2010 at 1:52 pm, Tweets that mention Television magic and a vision of the future in 1978 @ NixonMcInnes: Social media goodness. Translated. Created. Delivered. -- Topsy.com responded:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Anna Carlson. Anna Carlson said: New blog post: Television Magic and a vision of the future from 1978 – http://bit.ly/9aYn9Z [...]
On July 8th, 2010 at 2:26 pm, Paul Hutchings responded:
Love this! Pretty good on the tech predictions, apart from the coin slot. Not so good on the fashion though – astronaut jumpsuits?
On July 8th, 2010 at 3:02 pm, Alick Mighall responded:
I’ve got a similar one in my attic too – been meaning to do this sort of thing for a while. Also makes me think about how accurate the predictions we make now will be seen to have been in 30 years time.
The big enabler has obviously been the fattening of bandwidth and satellite distribution and positioning – none of these things would have got to this stage without that – and in terms of the future, surely most of that has just got to be driven by these things improving further – which might lull us all into the false sense of security of thinking future predictions are easier to make. Of course it isn’t though – other drivers will impact it, some of which aren’t as easy to predict as others.
You only really have to watch something like an Inspector Morse from the mid-90’s to see how quickly the fabric of everything we do in the UK has changed so completely by IP enabled technologies and other advances. I sometimes wonder if, in this big seismic shift, we haven’t somehow got caught in a wave. If things carry on like they are now, what in 30 years time will we miss about the lives we have today – or that we had 10-15 years ago which technology took from us. Don’t get me wrong. I love this all, it’s great and it makes me a living. Is it all good though? Nice post anyway – takes me back…
On July 8th, 2010 at 8:57 pm, Tom Nixon responded:
Does anyone else get a weird wibbly feeling in their stomach when they see stuff like this? A bit like knowing that the future Marty McFly travels to is now only 5 years away. Somehow makes me feel a bit giddy at the speed the world is turning. (And it’s getting faster too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change)
I love the flatscreen TV with the almost throw-away afterthought “…displaying all sorts of instant information.”
We laugh at how much smaller the iPhone is than the lumbering collection of kit that the lad carts off to the carnival, just like the iPhone will be laughed at in the future when all the technology sits invisibly in a contact lense.
http://www.gizmag.com/electronic-contact-lens-promises-bionic-capabilities-for-everyone/8689/
What’s next, eh? Cor, progress, innit.
On July 8th, 2010 at 9:05 pm, Clive Andrews responded:
This is great. So much fun and so much that, as you point out, is not far off what we have now.
The highlight for me is a fairly subtle one. In number 2, there is a suggestion that the large screen could be used to show “all sorts of instant information”.
All sorts of instant information.
There it is. The internet.
It’ll never catch on…
On July 8th, 2010 at 9:12 pm, Clive Andrews responded:
Gah! Tom beat me to it…
On July 8th, 2010 at 10:32 pm, Tom responded:
Great minds, Clive. Great minds :)
On July 9th, 2010 at 9:21 am, Jasmine Wilkinson responded:
Nice one! Love these kinds of things. Would love to see what people’s predictions of the future of today are.
It’s amazing how bang on this is .. including ( cc @ Paul Hutchings) futuristic JUMPSUITS being in fashion :-)
http://nymag.com/daily/fashion/2008/09/suit_up.html
On July 12th, 2010 at 3:46 pm, Ross responded:
@tom – somebody already made the hoverboard – http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/28/artist-creates-back-to-the-future-hoverboard-that-actually-ho/
And the self-lacing Nikes! – http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/06/auto-lacing-sneaker-laces-itself-is-looking-for-a-friend/
Proof that:
a) I spend too much time on Engadget
b) films/books/songs give geeks valuable inspiration. Art + tech = win.
On July 12th, 2010 at 7:03 pm, Clive Andrews responded:
Anna, I’ve got it.
It’s dawned on me. That part you didn’t recognise:
“…an outside telephone caller can use push-button codes to leave a message on a [] screen which is part of the telephone system.”
We have this. It’s everywhere. And it’s not in a Cheshire footballer’s mansion. It’s in your pocket.
It’s text messaging.
Funny that your book’s author predicted so much but missed out on arguably the biggest one of all – the mobile phone.
On July 13th, 2010 at 10:26 pm, Anna responded:
Clive – ha that’s it! So obvious it didn’t even occur to me! It’s funny to think how hard it is for us to conceptualise life without mobile phones now, when it was so beyond our imagining back then.
On July 17th, 2010 at 9:18 am, Clive Andrews responded:
Alt/1977: We are not time travellers:
http://www.alexvaranese.com/work/alt1977
On July 17th, 2010 at 9:46 am, Alx Klive responded:
I’ve been trying to track down this book for 30 years. It was hugely inspiring to me and along with ‘See Inside a Television Studio’ by RJ Unstead and the Ladbybird book ‘Television – How it Works’, comprised almost my entire education in TV!
Thank you for revealing the name to me of the last piece in a multi-decade puzzle!
From the book I recall a flying ‘arena camera’ that hovered over the players. Was that in there? Guess we got that too ;)
Alx Klive – The WorldTV Blog
worldtv.com/blog