DirecTV and Don Draper in a ‘Life After Television’ world

[Commentary] Nearly 25 years ago, George Gilder wrote a book called “Life After Television.” Moore’s law of microchips and similarly powerful forces in fiber optics, digital storage, and wireless radio transmission, Gilder said, would enable the construction of new networks of computers that would end the stultifying era of mass media.

George famously got rid of the rarely used televisions in his home to support the thesis of his book -- that the coming “worldwide web of glass and light” would blow up the lowest-common-denominator world of dumb terminals, dumb content, and even dumber mass advertising and replace it with a network of choice, quality, interactivity, and intelligence.

So, is ours a life after television world? Whatever we call it, broadband computer networks have dramatically boosted choice and quality (better quality at the top end and overall, although there’s more worthless stuff, too). Instead of a mainframe, we’ve got 1.4 billion PCs, 5 billion mobile phones, 2 billion smartphones, and the immense resources of the cloud. We’ve got more networks -- broadcast, cable, broadband, mobile, satellite, Wi-Fi.

More distribution channels -- cable, telecommunications, mobile, satellite, Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, YouTube. More content aggregators. More content producers. And it’s often difficult to tell which is which. The upshot for policymakers is that choice and competition are proliferating, often at a dizzying pace. Every effort to regulate this space runs into the most basic definitional problems because no one knows what’s what, or what will happen next week. Better to let everyone keep enjoying this golden age of life after television.

[Swanson is president of Entropy Economics]