Monthly Archives: November 2016


Self-driving cars will change our TV/Media watching habits and reshape our world

tesla

 

Self-driving ready cars are about to shock our economy. Many cars sold in recent years are fully capable of driving autonomously with only a simple software update to activate various dormant features.

 

This is very important because this would mean that our transition to self-driven transport could happen literally overnight. There has been extensive ongoing testing of the technologies and they are being refined on a daily basis with some claiming that they will be ready for mass market within 1-5 years.

 

Whenever this switch happens, we will have a revolution of time management like we have never seen before. The average American drives over 1 hour per day. Imagine if the driver no longer needs to drive his car but can sit back and relax during this hour. Imagine that this person will most likely want to either surf the Internet or watch some TV or News, or even get some work done. This shift in time available during a commute will open a new window of opportunity for TV viewing and very interesting technologies to go with it.

 

Imagine that when we enter our car, we state our desired destination and sit back and relax till we get there. We are thus providing very important and specific information about our route, estimated time traveled and our ultimate end destination. This would be like a gold mine to TV or electronic media than can use this information to tailor make viewing content during your commute.

 

For example, lets assume your destination is 45 minutes away. You are going to work as usual, driving by a very large mall on the way. Thus the TV provider or more like targeted new Media can estimate that you have only 45 minutes total and thus decide to give you an early morning news broadcast of only 15 minutes of the subject matter that you may have selected as important to you. It might also add on some local news for your destination as well, just to keep you up to date on local information. Then as you are driving by the mall, a few ads may pop up to remind you to finish up your Christmas shopping, informing you about the latest deals and sales neerby. All these super targeted news and advertisements will be available due to the accuracy of the metadata that can be collected by your driver less car.

 

Of coarse, this metadata may also be a very important revenue stream to car manufacturers like Tesla where they can sell it and provide it to media companies at a price. This would in effect create a new monopolistic revenue stream for car manufacturers that was unheard of a few years ago. Which in effect, might bring about a lowering of car prices to entice more users to use the service and having a car manufacturer subsidize the vehicle price to capture the recurring revenue stream. (Wishful thinking here, but who knows maybe someone will bite the bullet and do it.)

 

All this technology will revolutionize how we spend our time and how we consume media and information.

 

In my personal opinion, this revolution of driverless cars will come about very suddenly and almost overnight. It will have far reaching effects on our economy and may catch millions of Americans by surprise.