This poem by Bing Gordon was presented at SXSW 2013, 3/12/13
Who will be left at the altar, who’ll be the happy groom In the race to dominate the business of the new living room? Who will be the best and most innovative to adapt To couch potatoes with a second screen on their lap?
Will tablets and phones play such a significant role That wives will finally get to hold the family remote control? If content is still king who will be the distribution pawn To get paid lower and lower monthlies to put Game of Thrones on?
You’d have to be a Luddite or quite a bullshitter Not to give the inside track to the inventors at Twitter. Beyonce knocked the power out, brought Super Bowl fans to their feet, And, instead of watching commercials, viewers sent 22 million tweets.
Xbox Live is a great business, worthy of at least honorable mention, It’s as big as a minivan, but with amazing customer engagement and retention! It’s the new place to watch Netflix, its user interface is clean, And, when they launch the next Xbox, they’ll actually show the machine.
The cable oligarchs have dug in, making big upstream bets; Is that why we haven’t seen a real Apple TV yet? TV Everywhere is a big idea, could make Jeff Bewkes the Man! But I also kind of like the simplicity of tagging with Shazam.
How about Nintendo’s Wii U? They are marketing it busily, But, imho, it depends on Shigeru Miyamoto, the game industry’s Walt Disney. The dongle providers like Onlive and Gaikai have their defenders But will it be “HDMI-don’t care” to all the add on pretenders?
All these Glass products kind of make me nervous! And does anyone actually use Windows phones or Surface? Will YouTube be a layer, a network or just a CDN? When we drive Google cars, will we still feel like real men?
This will drive mansion prices; where will they rise most? For Hollywood, the Valley, or the money people of the East Coast? Will the future be won by code, contracts or creative — That new grapple? Or, in the end, will we all just be vassals of Apple?
Don’t expect neutrality from me, or an answer too formal, I am one of those people who see games as the “new normal.” Whether it’s a swipe, a click, or a Kinect move, I’ll do whatever I must do, As long as TV content is as good as World of Warcraft, Madden Football or Farmville 2.
