Charlie Brooker, who produced "Black Mirrors" for Netflix, speculates in the British television series about the future of technology, including contact lenses that contain all the world's
information.
Original content like "Black Mirrors" has become one of the streaming company's crown jewels, which now boasts about half of U.S. households as subscribers.
"If virtual
reality takes off, we’ll adapt to that," said Reed Hastings, CEO and co-founder of
Netflix, during an interview at Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona. "If it becomes contact lenses that have amazing powers, we’ll adapt to that."
In addition to contact lenses that
could stream content, Hastings spoke about binge viewing, artificial intelligence (AI), the availability of original content in most countries except for China, and Internet television that requires a
strong bandwidth signal.
"Ten or 20 years from now, all the video you view will be on the Internet and one slice will be from Netflix," he said."In 20 years, you're starting to get into some
serious AI," Hastings said. "Over 20 to 50 years, there's a lot of debate about what happens to humanity. Do we get augmented? Does pure AI take on humans?"
The idea behind the original
content is to give local producers a global audience of nearly 100 million members, more than half are international.
In 2015, Google announced its ambitions to make "smart" contact lenses. Shortly after the U.S. Patent
& Trademark Office granted Google a patent describing a method for manufacturing the lenses.
The lenses aren’t being used to stream entertainment content, but rather monitor glucose
levels. But who can predict the variety of application for Google's smart content lenses.