Let’s continue the discussion on where the Internet is headed… An important paradigm to keep in mind is the concept of the Three Screens. These being the television, the computer and the handheld. In the earliest thinking about these devices, we have known that the Internet would be delivered on all three, and for the most part, we are already there. We do not have seamless Internet delivery on the television yet in that we cannot just hit a button and go to a browser on all boxes, but we can on some of the newer models, and there are 3^rd party devices that get us there. At the same time, we have known that the content traditionally delivered on a television would be streamed to the PC’s and handhelds on demand as a way to provide new methods of distribution of that content. Hence the concept of the Three Screens, where all content gets delivered to all screens natively.

Lately, I have been thinking about another step past this concept where the devices literally have the same electronics and just come in different sizes. So a television and PC would use the same keyboard, and voice commands with the only difference being the size of the screen and the room they are in. Both would have a hard drive, both have processing power, and the same connection to the Internet. In fact both devices are connected within the home and settings on one, can transfer to the other. You handheld is just a smaller version of the larger devices with less storage and a smaller screen, but other than that, the same capabilities. Mix this vision with the concept of cloud computing and you really end up with devices that are simply screens with input methods. All of the real storage, applications, and processing is done in server farms thousands of miles away.

I am just leaving Las Vegas and was being told about the new gaming machines that are not dedicated to any one type of game. These boxes allow the user to pick what game they want to play, and then use a card to place bets, and then the lucky ones get to gather the winnings if there are any. This allows the casinos to provide a much more sophisticated ability to let users pick games, change games on the same box, and be cashless. All of the odds, updates, and alterations can be changed on all the boxes with a click of a key at headquarters. No more slot mechanics and quarter girls walking the floors. Since they are really just pushing a piece of software to a screen, they can push the same capability to any screen in the world over the Internet. The only things stopping this are the regulations that are relaxing all the time. I share this example only to show that the next phase of the Internet will be a world where we have many different sized screens that are appropriate for the location we are in, and the content that goes to them will be generic in that it can go to any one of the three screens, anywhere those screens exist.

Scott