Evolution Shift
A Future Look at Today
history of media
July 26th, 2020

Let’s Go to the Video Tape!

  As any aging boomer sports fan knows – particularly if you lived in NYC – that was the signature phrase used by Warner Wolf to go to the sports highlights of the day. It is perhaps as iconic a sports phrase as “Goooooooaaaaaaaal!!!” and “going, going, going… gone!” It’s a historic phrase from back […]

 

 

April 5th, 2017

A Review of Past Forecasts – Media

Starting with this column and for the next few weeks, I will revisit forecasts I have made over the last ten years. As far as I know, I am the only futurist who posts most of my forecasts – what I forecast and when I did so- on my web site.  All of the forecasts […]

 

 

November 5th, 2009

“Raise Your Hand if You Love Your Cable Company:”

In the past three months I had delivered around 35 speeches and presentations.  During about 25 of them I have asked the audience the question that is the title of this column (why I will explain later). .Whether it is a confidential gathering of 10-15 CEOs or a hotel ballroom of 400-500 people, when I […]

 

 

October 21st, 2009

Magazine Publishers Find They No Longer Live in Kansas.

To many, the absolute collapse of the magazine industry in 2009 may seem stunning.  What is stunning to me is that the industry didn’t see it coming and take steps to avert this collapse.  Once again, another industry can only see a year ahead and thinks that a down year – 2008 – would be […]

 

 

February 10th, 2009

The Next Wave of Creative Destruction in Media is Underway

We have all lived through a lifetime of technology changing the media and content landscape.  Satellites allowed cable television and later satellite television to erode and then eviscerate the traditional broadcast network business model.  Then the analog to digital transition eliminated the physicality of the product in the music industry.  Then the universal, immediate and […]

 

 

February 3rd, 2009

This Great Recession Will Restructure Advertising

The current media and advertising recession will be more severe and more transformative than any one of the last 80 years.  This will be a time when it won’t be just about how far down ad spending goes, but also about what media entities and even business sectors will survive. Historically, advertising recessions have been […]

 

 

July 28th, 2008

Accelerating Electronic Connectedness – Internet Usage in China and the United States

It was just reported that, as expected, there are now more Internet users in China than in the U.S. As of last month there were 253 million Internet users in China as compared to 220 million in the U.S. What is striking is that in just the last year, the number of new users in […]

 

 

July 22nd, 2008

Future Forecast – Media and Network Television

In the column “2007/2008” published on January 1, 2008 I made a prediction concerning media that is worth revisiting. At the beginning of the year the entertainment industry was in the middle of the writer’s strike.  I wrote:   “The writers’ strike in the entertainment business is now two months old. Its’ length, the animosity it […]

 

 

May 4th, 2008

The Migration from Mass to Micro Media is Now Complete

Growing up as part of the baby boom generation, a distinct memory is the air raid siren tests.  Every Tuesday, if I recall correctly, at 10a there was the test of the air raid siren blaring across the entire city of Chicago.  This was to prepare us for the possibility of a nuclear attack from […]

 

 

June 4th, 2007

A Book Convention – Part One: Is it a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood?

Book Expo America is the large annual convention of the book publishing industry.  For the past few days, thousands of people descended on the Javits Center in New York for the annual ritualistic gathering of the tribes of this 500 year old business.  As regular readers know, this year I have attended the Consumer Electronic […]

 

 

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David Houle has been called “the CEOs futurist, having spoken to or advised more than 4,000 CEOs in the last 15 years.

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