MGEITF 2007: Internet ‘Godfather’ Looks To The Future
Vint Cerf, one of the creators of the internet and currently Google’s chief internet evangelist, made some bold predictions at the recent MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival (MGEITF), conjuring up visions of a Martian internet and super-fast downloads.
Presenting the Alternative McTaggart lecture at the festival, Cerf’s speech was quite different from Jeremy Paxman’s lament for traditional broadcasting values given in the McTaggart lecture two days earlier.
Cerf said: “85% of all video we watch is pre-recorded, so you can set your system to download it all the time. You’re still going to need live television for certain things, like news, sporting events and emergencies, but increasingly it’s going to be almost like the iPod, where you download content to look at later.”
Whilst noting the popularity of streaming video on sites such as YouTube, Cerf said that in the future, the majority of people will download video to watch at a later date.
He dismissed the notion that with everyone downloading data such as TV programmes the network might grind to a halt, calling these suggestions “scare tactics” and pointing out how much the internet has grown in the past 30 years and its possibilities for future growth.
Moving even further into the future, Cerf revealed that he is currently working on a project which could see the internet go interplanetary, unveiling a little of the theory behind getting the internet to work on Mars.
In the realm of cold hard facts, Cerf added that Asia now has the most internet users at 398.7 million, followed by Europe with 314.8 million and North America with 233.3 million.
Cerf said: “I want every one of the six billion people on the planet to be able to connect to the internet – I think they will add things to it that will really benefit us all.”
Recent figures released by the BMRB for the second quarter of 2007 revealed that the number of UK internet users now stands at nearly 30.2 million (see Online Usage Round-Up Q2 2007: Internet Usage Breaks 30 Million Mark).
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