There is a rumor floated by the media gossip site Gawker that Wired magazine and its editor Chris Anderson are poised to run a cover story declaring that the "Web is Dead." The
murderer? Apparently mobile platforms and their apps. If the rumor is true (and I hope it is), then expect a lively debate in which defenders of the inevitable dominance of the Web start sounding like
old fogies bolstering a digital media status quo. It will be fun and weird to see.
Personally, I have been waiting for this migration of content off of the Desktop to occur since the late
1990s. I think that for most of the interactive activities that we are passionately tied to, from social networking to video snacking and even to email triaging, the desk is among the most
uncomfortable locations in which to consumer content we have invented. The Desktop Web as a content delivery vehicle is the bastard child of the office PC that the engineers and marketing dweebs of
IBM foisted on us years ago. The modern PC or Mac operating system, cluttered with distractions and open windows is not conducive to immersion in much of anything, I contend.
eMarketer mobile
analyst Noah Elkin just projected that by 2014 the share of mobile phone users who watch mobile video will climb from a 23.9 million this year generating $548 million in revenue to 56.7 million in
2014 producing $1.3 billion.
Elkin cites the move to higher quality devices and networks as well as the separation of content from carrier control as accelerants in this adoption. The free
ad-supported model will drive much of the revenue growth, but both pay-per-view and subscription models will more than double.
Can't happen fast enough for me and good riddance to the
Desktop. Let me use myself as a focus group of one. With both Netflix and hulu plus now humming across my TV, iPad and (for hulu) iPhone, I will be damned if I am going to lean back at my desk to
watch a film on TV episode on my PC. In the last weeks and months I have watched multiples more content from both of these media sources on my off-Desktop devices than I have on the PC. The point is
not that the Web is totally unpalatable as a long form video consumption device, but having these much more comfortable alternatives makes the Desktop environment simply a last resort. Right now I use
the Web interfaces mainly to manage my account and queue of content.
The same behavior, a preference for watching video content in a more relaxed off-desk mode, is starting to inform my
choices with other media. I like the clips that HuffPo and Daily Beast aggregate, so I save the experience for my evening iPad/iPhone browsing via their apps. I probably watch more CNN news video on
my iPhone than on the Web. And the video browsing experience in the AMC iPhone app is so good I would just as soon use mobile to watch those Mad Men extras.
Maybe it's just me and the
pent up frustration of spending a decade and half watching rich media experiences try to squeeze their way onto an interface and environment that was designed for spreadsheets and word processing. If
media content is going to migrate from the desktop apps and post-desk devices it can't happen soon enough for me. In twenty years I would love to look back on the desktop, the Windows and Apple
OSes and the damn browser window as all interim technologies, a holding maneuver in the digital revolution, before better ideas came along.
