Within the broadcast world, things are changing rapidly. The world as a whole is changing from analog to digital delivery. Audio and video now originate in digital formats and are stored in many types of digital media, from memory chips to giant servers.

This revolution is affecting many unrelated industries. Factories, for instance, now commonly perform visual inspection with digital cameras running 1GbaseT (gigabit) images, and those images are compared electronically to a template. Major motion pictures are now shot in high-resolution ultra-high definition. They are edited, special effects added, and distributed electronically. Surveillance cameras, such as in a casino, are now networked together. Not only can they be recorded and played back from a server, but the head of security can watch a clip of someone cheating from a beach in Malta. All he needs is access for his laptop.

It does not take a genius to realize that our technology is progressing so fast that not only is it unstoppable, but its direction is also unpredictable. The futurist Ray Kurzweil said, over a decade ago, in this century (of which we are rapidly approaching Year 2009) we will make more technological progress than in the last 20,000 years.

Therefore, anything I say about the future, even in the near future, will be reproduced in a decade or so as a source of humor. Look at this silly person in 2008 trying to predict the future. If only he could have seen what was right in front of him. Still, there are some obvious directions and changes we will see in broadcast. Allow me to make some educated guesses. The first is the undeniable fact that Ethernet has won the race for the ubiquitous delivery system of the future. Note that in the United States, over 1000 radio stations now use Axia, a system that sends multi-channel audio on Ethernet. Redundant rings offer unparalleled reliability, and the network architecture allows audio to be manipulated, duplicated, processed, and distributed with unparalleled ease. And that's only 100baseT Ethernet, the same network architecture you are probably using today.

With the arrival and industry approval of 10 gigabit (10GbaseT) copper networks, next to existing 10G fiber networks, these high speed networks now allow users to do virtually anything in an Ethernet fashion. The fact that a few boxes are missing, such as a box to convert HD-SDI or 1080p/60 video into 10G data, is just a minor hurdle (and minor price-point) which would be soon approved. Just imagine that a 10GbaseT network will be able to handle six HD-SDI bit streams simultaneously, or three 1080p/60 bit streams.

And speaking of equipment, you must realize that we are moments away from a major technological hurdle, where "to be created" chips are created entirely by "exisiting" chips (i.e. a really smart computer). Back in the year 1000, who knew how to plant vegetables or build a house? Everyone did. Today, how many people know how to design an Integrated Circuit? I think nobody. It is now so complex that even the chip designer himself (or herself) does not know how to run the factory, much less how to sell the products. What a simple step it will be for the machine to design itself. Of course, will we understand what it does? Could we understand?

And there are rumors of 40 gigabit, and even 100 gigabit networking, being worked on in the background. No wonder that Hollywood (and soon Bollywood) is jumping on the 10G bandwagon. They have huge files to send from place to place. These files are called ‘movies'. They are now shot in HD or even higher resolution. Check out the "RED" camera offering 4K resolution for USD 17.500 with cheaper cameras already coming.

And if the file needs to leave the building, we are expanding bandwidth into the Internet at a similar fast pace. By the year 2010, it is predicted that the information flowing on the Internet will double every eleven hours. And it seems safe to say that our wired world will stay wired, although there are technologies coming down the road that will change the way we wire the world.

Carbon nanotubes are one such technology. These offer ultra-low resistance connections. Of course, there could be zero-resistance connections and room temperature superconductors. The problem is that the tiny conductors blow up on the quantum level. The magnetic field produced is so huge, because the ceramic used has no resistance that the molecules fly apart. Fix that and you could be the world's first trillionaire.

Our continual search for the Unified Field Theory, with experiments soon to start at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, could mean we discover even more amazing things. How about communication using alternate materials? We are currently limited to electrons on copper and photons on glass. What about other particles, or subatomic particles? If they can be controlled, we can use them to communicate. Maybe we will communicate through alternate dimensions. Talk about wireless.

And speaking of wireless in our regular world, wireless will be concentrated at the end points, where mobility is required, or where mobile vehicles need to be added to the data flow. But those end-points will be mighty busy. The advent of wide-area WiFi will usher in a number of possibilities. The ultimate might be the disappearance of memory in devices.

Instead, there will be a number of servers, what I jokingly call "yottabyte" servers (10²⁴ bytes). Then all your device needs is access. Your device, camera, sensor, laptop, vehicle can send data online to the giant server. The server will store all the data, photos, files, videos, or whatever you wish. And, just as easily, you can retrieve whatever you need. Surely content providers would love such a system because each user will buy the rights to a specific product, such as a movie. And we can buy the rights to watch it for one showing, one year, or one lifetime. Since no device, we own, can store or record, there is no way to steal anything. Just police the downloading!

And where should we build these yottabyte servers? I can think of three great locations. How about Antarctica? First, it's empty. Second, it's cold. This huge server will run very hot. Third, for six months out of the year you have a constant power source (the sun). Maybe we also charge up a fuel-cell farm for the other six months. The second location I suggest is Siberia, which is also cold and, even better, has a lot of computer scientists and other brainiacs put there in the old Soviet gulag days. And finally, a third server in Outer Space, at one of the Lagrange Points, that would never move in relation to the earth. It would talk to the other two servers.

In fact, this is really a giant RAID-array which, we are told, is the only way not to lose data. Have it continually written and rewritten from server to server. If your skill set is ice climbing, computer programming, and/or you speak Russian, you have got a job.

Your consumer or professional video camera could stream video and audio into this storage constantly, as long as the unit is powered, or as long as we wish. Perhaps this creates a bit of an editing problem. If your entire vacation and I mean "entire vacation" is now available, how will you know which bits are worth saving? And, in our paranoid world, who gets to look at all the other pieces?

Broadcasters would love this world because the professional video camera streams audio and video in real-time back to the station. That video can be edited or streamed out live to their paying audience. And this may lead to a very interesting possibility. Given the number of consumer video cameras out there, and seeing that the quality of the consumer devices is rapidly closing on the professional, why bother to send a reporter out with a camera?

Surely there is someone with a camera at every breaking news story, if not a dozen cameras. Pick the best angle or best shot, or even switch between them. And then pay the owner of each camera a generous amount per second for the video used. Then every camera and every cell phone will be ready looking for the breaking story.

And how will this be distributed? Obviously, we no longer need a huge building with lots of edit suites and a giant transmitter on the hill. Maybe that transmitter site is now the wide-area WiFi site? One only has to look at My Space and many similar ventures. How easy is it for others to get content, indeed any content, out now? The only problem, and one of the next billionaires, will be the person who figures out how to package all this information into something meaningful for you and me, that has the content that we want to see.

So this personal stream will be part news, part data, part family, and part entertainment. And the computer running it all will know more about each of us, our likes and dislikes, than we probably know about ourselves. But then again, this is a bit scary. Who runs our lives, anyway? If we are "fed" a diet of information and images, is it we who are controlling? Or is it someone else? Even today we talk about how "the media" controls countries, even continents, and manipulates entire population on an emotional basis by the choice and presentation of material. Surely, our future world will be both better and worse as the possibility of manipulation take on both a universal and personal approach.

This leads, in a twisted logical fashion, to one conclusion. Ray Kurzweil, the futurist I mentioned earlier, said a few years ago that the complexity of the Internet has now passed the complexity of the human brain. If that is indeed true, then surely the Internet is beginning to think for itself. If it has the same survival instincts as each of us, it would be delighted that we have invented a machine that can never be turned off. Wasn't that the whole idea that DARPA (the US military) had, thirty years ago, a computer network that could not be destroyed? Since my little article will pass a number of times through the Internet until it reaches your eyes, I would like to tell the Internet, personally. "I would love to talk. Please do not hesitate to call."

Of course, if I were the Internet, I would do a lot of thinking before I talked to anyone. By the time it does talk, it will be the equivalent of talking to aliens from outer space, and probably the start of an entire world-wide cultural shift. Many people, who want to get information faster and more accurately, will probably have something implanted so they do not have to depend on eyes and ears, low-quality input devices.

But the conclusion to this vision is a man-machine hybrid, not unlike the ‘Borg' of Star Trek-fame. Does this predict the loss of our humanity? Of course, maybe this is the way evolution works on every planet. Maybe this is the way evolution is supposed to work.