Dana Blankenhorn

Why Clouds Will Win the Streaming Wars

Since long before the streaming crash began, I predicted its Big Three would end up being Apple, Google, and Amazon.Com.

Not Netflix. Not Disney. Not Comcast or Paramount or Warner Brothers.

The Cloud Czars.

As usual, I was early to the story. But it has long been clear that, when push comes to shove in streaming, money talks. The coming result was easy for me to see and the story was easy to do.

Of the three Cloud Czars, Amazon is the best-positioned. They have the front-end technology with the Fire Stick, which has one-third of the U.S. market. They have Prime Video, which becomes a huge value if you use the Amazon store. They can re-sell every other streamer’s stuff and make money. They’re also global, something only Netflix and Disney among their competitors can lay claim to.

ChatGPT

Hate to rain on y’all’s parade but…ChatGPT is not the best thing since sliced bread. It’s not the Macintosh. It’s not the iPhone.

It’s software that translates search requests and results into what seems like plain English. Whether it’s useful depends on the input it gets. Garbage in, garbage out.

That doesn’t mean ChatGPT is Bitcoin or blockchain. It makes search accessible again. But it also makes search messy again. It creates imprecision in a world of 1s and 0s. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Humans are imprecise. We’re messy. And it is fun to see computer output seem as imprecise and messy as we are.

It’s very easy to get a lie out of ChatGPT. Ask it about a subject where there are lots of lies on the Internet. They will appear in your answer. ChatGPT doesn’t have a filter. Yet.

Where Computing Happens

I met my first computer in 1976, in the basement of Herman Brown Hall, on the campus of Rice University in Houston.

The computing happened in a big room, separated from me by a window. I passed a stack of punch cards, tied with a rubber band, through the window. They came back along with my output. Which usually said the program had died on Line 3.

By the time I got out of journalism school, two years later, computing was moving to desktops. A neighbor bought a $20,000 Cromemco machine that could run 3 terminals. She hired friends to work at the terminals, transcribing court records. I think they got 50 cents a page. Computing had come home.

The Limits of Senior Power

If I were around 100 years ago, I would be dead. Instead, I’m rich. (Pictured are my grandparents, May and Edmund O'Donnell, in 1918.)

It’s a demographic and economic transformation that is destroying hope for change in America and (perhaps) making us the last generation.

Until recently, people lived their first 20 years dependent on parents, the next 20 as parents, the next (if they were lucky) 20 as grandparents and anything past that dependent on the children. Most of the world still lives this way.

But starting with Social Security in 1934, and continuing through general prosperity to today, America has turned this on its head. Seniors aren’t just living to an average age of 83, we’re doing it with money. I’m just a 68-year old journalist but, thanks in large part to a wife who works in tech, I’m a millionaire. We own our house. We have enough invested to guarantee a fine retirement, God willing. There may even be something left when we’re gone.

This has changed political incentives. There’s no better example than Florida where The Villages, a huge retirement town of 150,000 (almost all of whom vote), has turned the state’s politics on its head. Add them to those already living up-and-down the state’s east, west and south coasts, and you get a huge state entirely devoted to short term thinking. Education, the environment? Fuck ‘em. We’ll be gone.