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Are you entertained?

Posted by Jon Peddie on December 8th 2010 | Discuss
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We continue to be fascinated with moving pictures that come to us through the ether. When TV was first conceived either as a scientific idea or a science fiction idea is debated (and Mark Schubin has a great discussion about it at Schubin Café.

Names like Téléphonoscopique telectroscope, and telephonoscope were used in the late 1870s to describe the concept because the word television wouldn’t be introduced until 1900.

Our current fascination with TV is the Internet, and small mobile devices. I share the same fascination about TV and its ubiquity, rivaling now books and recorded music as an old method of media delivery.

But we have other means of sedentary entertainment beside TV, radio, music players, and book – paper or electronic, we have movies, 3D movies, PC and console games, some also in stereovision, and simulators. And for the folks willing to actually move their limbs and body we have a new class of gesture and motion-sensing games.

If a movie or game is too time consuming we have snacks of entertainment, from the dozen or so Internet choices like facebook, YouTube, and Shutterfly. Snack sites are modern day versions of machines found in penny arcades in the late 1920s and 30s where you dropped a penny or a nickel and got a couple of minutes of entertainment. Those devices evolved to electronic poker, slot, and pachinko machines.

Our quest for entertainment has created the consumer electronics industry, with electronic games being a subset of it, and a bastard step-child the electronic gambling industry. Airplane simulators preceded what we know today as computer games, and computers games have lead to unmanned aerial vehicles that send TV pictures through the ether to remote operators.

Another sprout from the consumer electronics entertainment family tree is augmented reality which is quickly finding its way into everyday applications. In AR we send TV images from our phone through the either to a digital database of 3D models.

Our little mobile entertainment devices can also bring us TV, and locations, and games.

Our little mobile entertainment devices can also bring us TV, and games and knows where we are so we can use it to go find other sources of entertainment like sports bars with giant screen TVs.

And our bigger mobile devices, like Samsung’s 7-inch tablet, Apple’s iPad, and the dozen or so Netbooks also touch the ether and bring us entertainment, or act as a media server for our home TV.

So are we entertained yet?

Can we stand any more entertainment?

And how come, if we’re in the midst of the greatest recession since the 1920s, we have the time and money for the consumption of so much entertainment – aren’t we supposed to be working, or looking for a job?

Entertainment doesn’t have to just come through the ether and light up some kind of a screen, board games – you know the kind where there’s no batteries, you toss a dice and move a piece or pick up a card, board games are selling at an all time high.

Board games became popular in late 1920s and early 1930s as a distraction from the great depression. That’s when the ever popular game Monopoly was introduced – pretend rich.

So maybe that’s what’s going on today – a modern electronic versions of distraction from the back-biting politics, and unimaginable and unmanageable mega deficits. Who can envision a trillion dollars, and how could you possibly manage that or mitigate it? You can’t, and so to keep from going crazy or finding the answer in a bottle or other substance we watch TV and play games, read books, listen to music, and pretend we’re bowling.

Nielsen’s research seems to agree. That firm reports that the tanking economy may also have played a role in the uptick in television watching, as Americans looked for low-cost ways to entertain themselves.

And as for escaping all the bad news from Afghanistan or the Federal Reserve, Nielson just reported that this season’s new comedies (in the U.S.) are showing a significant uptick in viewer engagement with a 5 percent increase over last year. On average, new comedies are also out-performing new dramas in program engagement by 7 percent.

So not only do we want moving pictures sent to us through the ether, we want happy pictures. We might even need them.

Now that’s entertainment.