VOD or Local Video Store in Singapore

SingTel announced today that subscribers to SingTel's mioTV platform would be able to watch VOD blockbusters the same day they are released for the home video market by Sony Pictures Television International (SPTI). Soon, Singaporeans will not have to leave their house or their office desk to hit the cinemas if these kinds of developments keep happening. I kid, I kid.The most interesting thing to me about multiple screen VOD is the possibility of where it might lead consumers/viewers/media-watching people.

Portability and fluidity of use is crucial to Asian consumers in well-developed broadband cities. Lacking space sometimes, and usually always on the go, most people want to engage with media content in brief spots or in the geography of their choice, since leisure time does not always happen regularly and conveniently. That means a person with the opportunity to watch something when they want to watch it is going to be super happy about watching the newest thing on a PC or a TV screen at home. That's right now. What about the distant future?

I predict that we will very soon see a day when the type of content that is made available to us for mobile and portable electronic devices is vastly different than what we are used to seeing. And that the increased mobility of content will change our perceptions about what makes us comfortable to engage with media and when and where we want to engage with it. We may even see traditional types of media being displayed in areas we would not even think of seeing it broadcast or narrowcast. In fact, I would like to see modern TV series or serials broadcast not on my mobile phone or on my laptop at home, but in the movie theatres, which will have to be built like an interactive social city, providing me not only the snacks and drinks I've come to associate with movies but also the computer screens and electronics for sale that I've long associated with my home office or my walks around city malls, where I shop for new techno gadgets.

Imagine that. TV becomes rationalized, less costly to prodce and efficient to make, because it is digitally produced and it may even be the increasingly popular animation or anime found in parts of North Asia, or the cartoons springing up in India and northern China. It may be produced so fast that we might be able to travel to the techno/game cinema and watch a one hour segment of a popular series the way we would watch a movie.

Then think about the different moods you experience when you take the ferry in Hong Kong, or if you ride the Shinkansen in Tokyo on your way home to visit your parents in Nagoya. Mobility brings the mind into contemplation. I know people who travel three or four hours every weekend in Japan to visit their homes in distant parts of the country. Those people may not want to watch TV. They may want to watch a movie. So, those people should get VOD on their handsets and be able to choose from a library of thousands of titles.

This is the kind of future that deals like the above begin to form. They unhinge the t raditional from the linear space. They offer us creative ways of interpreting delivery. And that eventually turns our concepts and perceptions of media on their heads. Soon, we won't think linearly. Or, the world we live in will no longer force us to live linearly when all this time we've been thinking in a chaotic molecular confusion (delightful though it is).

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