The Portable Entertainment Age

The 20th century garnered many monikers - The Nuclear Age, The Technology Age and The Information Age but encompassing all of those was… The Entertainment Age. With a shift towards more disposable time, we sought out more entertainment. Conversely, as we did, entertainment began coming to us.

Anyone lucky enough to live the entire 100 years of the 20th century would have seen the arrival of the radio, the movies, the television, the video recorder, the CD player and the first non-mechanical digital audio player on the American market, the Eiger Labs MPMan F10, a 32MB player that appeared in the summer of 1998 (source: WikiPedia).

No longer did we have to go to the theatre to see a play, instead we could go and see a movie. Later in the century, the movie came to us via television and towards the end, we could rent or buy the movie on a DVD. Thus we saw the progression from the stage to the silver screen to the small screen.

If you didn’t want to go out for your entertainment at the dawn of the 20th century, entertainment in the household was self generated. Someone might play an instrument, or tell a story or read a book aloud. Given though the absence of labor saving devices we have today, there was not as much free time for entertainment anyway. (Paradoxically of course, the more time saving devices we create, the less time we seem to have.)

But by the end of the 20th century, we all gathered around the electronic entertainer and were fed our entertainment in the comfort of our homes. The opera, the theatre, the movies would all come to us. And sport too - which was even coordinated to fit into TV schedules.

So we’ve come from either going out or providing our own entertainment, to being able to receive all our entertainment from a box in the corner of our lounge rooms.

But another “entertainer” entered our lives late in the 20th century. The personal computer. Unlike a television which is one device with one or many users at one time, the computer is somewhat limited with usually one user at a time only. This single-user entertainment device trend is another development of the late 20th century which is a whole other discussion on its social implications.

Theatre and sports events involved large audiences, radio and television much smaller, and computers and personal music players just one person. Kids of today should be branded “The Pod Generation” as their lives revolve around these single-user pod like entertainment devices.

Just as radio was invented in dusk of the 19th century but is remembered for its impact in the 20th century, the development of media-less portable entertainment devices in the shadows of the 20th century is changing the world of the 21st century.

You can throw games in there to - kids have gone from kicking footballs in the street to kicking them around a television screen courtesy of PlayStation and football games such as AFL Premiership 2005. And again, in the 21st century, this has gone portable too.

The Portable Entertainment Age
As the 20th century was The Entertainment Age, the 21st is fast becoming The Portable Entertainment Age. On devices no bigger than out hands we can carry wherever we go, every song we’ve ever owned (or even rented now), hours of our favorite video or movies, our favorite games, our photo collection and more.

Gone are the days of a young fella’s portable entertainment being a slingshot carefully crafted out of a forked stick and some hefty rubber bands with a good supply of pebbles in his pocket. Nowadays in his pocket you’re more likely to find a Gameboy of some description.

And where does Apple fit in all of this? We may have one more answer by the time you read this given strong rumors that Steve will announce Apple have entered the portable video market with an iPod video.

As an editorial on goplayav.com - one of many sites now dedicated to this growing trend of portable entertainment - suggests, no one owns the portable video market space yet:

If (or when) Apple release an iPod video sooner or later as widely expected, the reality is there’s no established player that owns the portable video player (also referred to as the personal video player) market for them to compete with. They could find domination of that market even easier than the mp3 player market.

Throw in Steve’s links to the movie industry, and the portable video player market could be a shoe-in. It’s one down (the digital audio player market) two to go for Apple (portable video and portable gaming).

Although I’m not personally convinced about the usability of portable video devices, their proliferation and the trend to towards single-user entertainment devices indicates that they may have a big future.

Apple are still the junior player in the entertainment industry but before this first decade of the 21st century is over, they could quite possibly be to portable entertainment what Microsoft are to the desktop PC.