2006 Predictions — The Review

It’s been a tra­di­tion on TNL.net to have pre­dic­tions for the com­ing year and I will soon have a set out for 2007 but before I move on to that, I need to ful­fill the other tra­di­tion on TNL.net, which is to look at the pre­vi­ous year’s pre­dic­tions and rate how suc­cess­ful (or not) I was in pre­dict­ing the year ahead. So, with­out fur­ther ado, here is a review of the pre­dic­tions I made last year about 2006:

Broad­band Penetration

It wasn’t much going out on a limb to esti­mate that broad­band pen­e­tra­tion would increase. How­ever, the impli­ca­tions are gen­er­ally harder to extri­cate. The rise of VoIP has been real­ized, with my pre­dic­tions about large-scale oper­a­tors adopt­ing VoIP as their own only par­tially real­ized. All the major oper­a­tors do have a spe­cific VoIP offer­ing but few are using it as a total replace­ment of their back­end so I guess I was overly opti­mistic in my assessment.

In terms of other impli­ca­tions of broad­band, though, my pre­dic­tions about video where cor­rect: Apple did announce (or is that pre-announce) a liv­ing room strat­egy with the iTV (new name to be announced at Mac­World). My assump­tion that they would not mar­ket it as a com­puter are cor­rect and that direct access to the media store and empha­sis on HDTV seem to be cor­rect. Also in video, Google did offer a pay per view sys­tem (on Google video) but not in part­ner­ship with AOL… and my assump­tion of this gen­er­at­ing good buzz for AOL, allow­ing it to do an IPO, was way off base.

TV sta­tions increas­ing their online posi­tion with adver­tis­ing sup­ported media was also cor­rect. I was, how­ever, early in my pre­dic­tions about ad inser­tion mech­a­nisms being bet­ter tar­geted than tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing. Cur­rently, online video adver­tis­ing is still about equiv­a­lent to TV adver­tis­ing (minus the large audi­ence size) so bet­ter tar­get­ing is some­thing that will prob­a­bly come in the future.

YouTube could eas­ily be con­sid­ered a new type of video aggre­ga­tor, and its acqui­si­tion by Google fits into my think­ing about major por­tals acquir­ing those new aggre­ga­tors. I was also (I must admit my own sur­prise here) par­tially cor­rect in pre­dict­ing that Tivo would open up and start posi­tion­ing itself as a new aggre­ga­tor for con­tent online and offline. I was dead wrong, how­ever, on it being acquired, as I was about Yahoo! acquir­ing NetFlix.

TV sta­tions going fully online was also overly opti­mistic. While a few efforts, like Tri­oTV, were launched as a way to keep flag­ging brands alive, no small sta­tion went com­pletely online in 2006. What hap­pened, how­ever, was that large sta­tions put pop­u­lar shows online, rankling some of their affil­i­ates in the process. The idea of putting local news online is what I would con­sider one of the big missed oppor­tu­ni­ties for tra­di­tional media. It’s con­tent that could be repo­si­tioned online eas­ily and could be sold on a net­work basis in terms of adver­tis­ing so I’m sur­prised that it hasn’t been done yet. Maybe in 2007.

My pre­dic­tions about the tra­jec­tory of vid­cast­ing seemed to be pretty dead on. Amanda Con­g­don sign­ing up with ABC can be seen as the begin­ning of a trend, in terms of vid­caster mov­ing to tra­di­tional media. Tra­di­tional media are still see­ing this phe­nom­e­non as small and largely to be ignored but the rise of cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists has got­ten them to pay a lit­tle more notice (ref­er­ence Sen­a­tor Allen and the Macaca inci­dent and you start under­stand­ing the power of cit­i­zen pow­ered video).

On the infra­struc­ture end, my pre­dic­tions about out­cries relat­ing to the secu­rity of the net­work were wrong but incum­bent line oper­a­tors ask­ing for more con­trol was not: the fight over Net Neu­tral­ity is the bat­tle­ground pit­ting oper­a­tors who want to close up the net vs. peo­ple who believe that the Inter­net has been suc­cess­ful because of that open­ness. I sit in the lat­ter camp and I think this fight will con­tinue through 2007 and prob­a­bly beyond.

Growth and Scalability

My pre­dic­tions about 2.0 sites being unable to cope with explo­sive growth proved wrong. Looks like there are a lot of peo­ple out there who are doing great work mak­ing sure that those sites stay up and kudos to them for that.

My fears about main­stream media hedg­ing out the tra­di­tional blogs also appeared wrong. Tra­di­tional media did attempt to co-opt blog­ging but, apart from a few excep­tions (Busi­ness Week comes to mind), few have achieved any major trac­tion in the space. It appears that estab­lished blog­gers are now the new gate­keep­ers of the blo­gos­phere and tra­di­tional media will not be able to dis­place them (I sus­pect that the next move by tra­di­tional media orga­ni­za­tions will be to co-opt those blog­gers now).

Radio sta­tions did offer more shows via pod­cast, which is a very wel­comed improve­ment I had pre­dicted. How­ever, very few TV sta­tions are offer­ing shows via vid­cast. Host­ing ser­vices offer­ing a share of adver­tis­ing rev­enue did start to appear but few pod­cast­ers signed on, as it turns out that my pre­dic­tions about esca­lat­ing band­width cost con­strain­ing pod­cast­ers were wrong.

On the crash and burn side, few com­pa­nies actu­ally did so lit­tle talk of bub­ble burst 2.0 have hap­pened. Sto­ries about Google hubris have started appear­ing and as I write this, Google has lost 10 per­cent from its high­est price this year (the stock is trad­ing at US$461 while its high was US$513) so I guess I got this one right too.

My bets on con­sol­i­da­tion were wrong and LinkedIn was not acquired. Oh, and tag­ging as a mar­ket hasn’t really been dec­i­mated. Instead, it appears that Yahoo! loves the con­cept and has gone out to buy most of the play­ers in the space.

My pre­dic­tion of a mas­sive Google back­lash also proved incor­rect. While rum­blings are start­ing to hap­pen among tech lumi­nar­ies, those have had lit­tle effect on how busi­ness oper­ates and inter­acts with Google, and thus has had lit­tle effect on Google itself so far.

While new com­pa­nies emerged in the ana­lyt­ics space, none of them really pro­vided any­thing rev­o­lu­tion­ary I can think of so my guess on this space being a great new area of activ­ity was wrong. How­ever, I think it’s a space that does need more work.

Trust did not become as hot a topic as I thought it would. While there were a few dis­cus­sions around trust-related issues in the blo­gos­phere (the most recent exam­ples to come to mind are the payper­post débâ­cle and the recent Microsoft lap­top deliv­ery dis­cus­sion), trust itself did not become a major topic. My pre­dic­tion about anony­mous edit­ing of Wikipedia was par­tially cor­rect, though, as Wikipedia is work­ing on a tighter pol­icy and bet­ter con­trols. My pre­dic­tions regard­ing a major hack of Wikipedia were wrong (thank­fully) but I’m glad that they are tak­ing the appro­pri­ate steps to deal with minor prob­lems before they became major.

Con­clu­sion

I have to say I’m pleas­antly sur­prised with how accu­rate a num­ber of my pre­dic­tions were. This year was a pretty amaz­ing one and my suc­cess rate on this effort makes it that much harder in terms of pre­dict­ing 2007 as I now have to keep up with a good rate of suc­cess. We’ll see next year when I review the 2007 pre­dic­tions I should be mak­ing soon.