Michael Jones spends a lot of his time reading the proverbial technology tea leaves.
As the chief technology advocate for Google Inc., it's up to Mr. Jones to think big and help keep the world's most powerful Internet company on the cutting edge. He helped design Google Earth. When Google's executives need to explain the importance of the Internet or the company's message to a CEO, prime minister or a king, they send Mr. Jones.
So it's no surprise that even as he looks back on a decade that saw the personal computer and the Internet reshape the worlds of business, culture and media, Mr. Jones can already see the winds of change stirring up a new digital reality.
"The mobile phone is for the next decade what the computer has been for the last two or three," Mr. Jones said in an interview with The Globe and Mail. "The whole experience of the Internet is becoming not a desktop computer experience, but a personal experience. It's something you're going to grow up with and you're going to live with all your life and I think every handheld device will have all of those experiences."
The ability to transform media into ones and zeroes and pass it seamlessly across the Internet fundamentally changed how consumers get their news, listen to their music and watch videos. Digital media transformed the PC from a typewriting tool into a media hub, one that provides users with a means of not just consuming media, but also of publishing their own content to previously unreachable audiences.
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Today anyone can be a musician, a video star or a writer, and can distribute their efforts to a global audience.
Indeed, the amount of new data added to the Internet this year was more than 487 billion gigabytes, according to a new study from market research firm IDC. If you consider the average two-hour movie downloaded from a BitTorrent site is approximately 700 megabytes, that's the equivalent of about 696 billion copies of The Dark Knight being added to the Internet in 2008.
And by 2012, the study says the amount of new data added to the Internet will be five times that much.
"It's pretty clear that the Internet is something special," Mr. Jones said. "The Internet is sort of like the connective tissue of the global mind. It brings the thoughts of everybody around the world into your home and to your person just because you want to learn."
Although it has been 10 years since the birth of Napster - the music sharing software that kick-started mainstream digital media consumption - many industries have yet to come to grips with the digital reality. They are struggling to make money and to adapt old world business models to the new world of the Internet.
Physical media formats are under threat. Books, CDs, DVDs and newspapers all have digital competitors that offer the same content without taking up shelf or closet space. How media companies produce and deliver content that once came in a physical format, while still generating revenue, will separate the winners from the losers in the coming decade.
CDs are fighting a losing battle against iTunes and piracy. Although DVDs are tougher to copy than CDs, it's only a matter of time before on-demand and over-the-Internet services become the primary mode of home video viewing. Amazon.com's Kindle book readers could be the beginning of the end of the publishing world and newspapers are finding it harder and harder to convince subscribers to keep paying for a physical product containing information that is freely available online.
A look at the future of digital media raises two fundamental questions: how are consumers going to get their content, and who is going to pay for it?
Many people still don't pay for content they can get free elsewhere. Even with 5 billion songs sold over iTunes, the music industry says 95 per cent of the music downloaded from the Internet is not paid for. Movie studios claim to be losing billions of dollars in lost ticket and DVD sales every year as a result of piracy. Some newspapers are being forced to close because users are getting their news online.
Free is the new reality for media, says Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson, who is the author of the book Free! Why $0.00 is The Future of Business.
"Sooner or later your product is going to be free or is going to compete with free," Mr. Anderson said in an interview with The Globe. "It is an inevitability and the only question is which one your product is going to be."
With consumers reluctant to foot the bill for online content, many industries are turning to advertising, shifting the cost from the user to a third party. This approach allows content owners to provide a free service to consumers in a manner similar to broadcast television, with advertisers footing the bill in return for reaching the consumer audience.
Unfortunately, online advertising remains a nascent market and the efficacy of such services remains difficult to determine in the face of a recession that has hammered advertising budgets around the world. As the economy recovers and marketers begin to open their wallets again, expect the number of advertising-supported media services to increase.
If the past 10 years ends up being remembered as the Download Decade, the next 10 might very well come to be known as the mobile decade. Just as the PC brought media into the home in new and exciting ways, Web-enabled smart phones such as Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry devices and Apple Inc.'s iPhone are now enabling users to skip the PC experience and get that content whenever they want, wherever they want.
"If you want to see the next 10 years, just look at the next 10 months," RIM's co-chief executive officer Jim Balsillie said in an interview with The Globe. "You can only see so far ahead, but you're just seeing a revolution happening right now and it's just so fast, you almost don't notice - if that doesn't sound like a paradox."
While the Internet will remain an important distribution method for digital media, the range of devices consumers will be able to use to access the Web will enable a host of new ways to enjoy music, movies and other information. Faster devices with larger screens and more storage capacity are already opening up new doors for consumers.
However, it's not just the smart phones themselves which will enable this new reality. That's where the applications come in.
When Apple launched the iPhone 3G last summer, it also launched a new era in how users can control what's on their cellphones with the release of the App Store, an online marketplace for games and other software that can be downloaded through iTunes and used to customize their devices. Developers were crafting applications for other devices long before the iPhone came along, but Apple was the first to consolidate them in one place.
Since then, every major player in the smart phone world has either launched or is preparing to launch their own application storefront, including RIM, Nokia Corp., Palm Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
Some of these apps are already starting to change the way people consume media. Internet radio applications such as Slacker Radio offer music fans a new way to discover emerging artists. And with the shifting tastes of today's teens, Nettwerk Records founder Terry McBride sees the smart phone as a second chance for the music industry to capitalize on the digital revolution.
"Phones roll over about every 18 months, so within the next two years every kid is going to have a smart phone," Mr. McBride said. "Kids don't feel the need to own, they feel the need to access and on these smart phones are going to be brilliant apps … however they want to consume media is all going to be on their smart phones."
Video will be next. Already Bell Canada offers its customers the ability to watch live NHL games on their handsets, while RIM and Toronto's QuickPlay media are teaming up to offer users the power to download television shows to their mobile devices.
But smart phones don't simply offer a new medium to experience content. By combining various functions - linking social networking with GPS or marrying music services with the ability to buy concert tickets, for example - these devices are changing the way people communicate and interact with media.
"The best parallel that I use is when they first came out with motion picture projectors, the whole thought of those was 'Hey, now I can do a stage play and play it at a different location at a different time,' " Mr. Balsillie said. "The concept of a 'movie' wasn't in anybody's mind at the time because they couldn't see how the media could change the nature of the entertainment, it was just time and place shifting the pre-existing entertainment."
"In the case of smart phones, we're just time and place shifting some of the applications. Will it actually change the nature of the application? Absolutely. Do we know exactly how it's going to change it? I don't think so."
Despite the rapid growth of technology over the past decade, only about one in six human beings on Earth has access to the Internet. When the next billion come online, many of them will not experience the Web through a PC, but rather through smart phones and handheld devices. That new influx of ideas and perspectives is bound to have a profound impact on the next decade of Internet innovation and change how information is disseminated and consumed.
For Mr. Jones, the Internet is about something more than technology.
"It's very hard when you're enmeshed in a system to actually look at the system," he said. "It's hard for humans to think about air and breathing and it's hard for fish, I would imagine, to think about water. So if you step back about the Internet and understand that in only 10 years, one billion people have started depending on the Internet for continuous flow of information, communications with their loved ones, information about elections, almost everything, people look to the Internet for that.
"That makes it very important. It makes it more important than Google, it makes it more important than the telephone. It's really part of being human, just to have access to this information."