‘Despite all the computer printouts, cluster diagrams, and mathematical models and matrices that futurist researchers use, our attempts to peer into tomorrow – or even to make sense of today – remain, as they must, more an art than a science’ (Toffler, 1980 p.128).

1.1 Active users

The subject of this report is a scenario exercise directed at future user roles in media and entertainment services and the way these roles are linked to businesses and technology. The occasion for this exercise is the growing importance of users in the online domain. Users at home are taking on all sorts of different roles in media and entertainment services. They are active in many parts of the value creation process. Users for example take on distribution roles in peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing and content creation roles in the case of user generated content. But users also actively rate and tag content (a phenomenon known as folksonomy) so it can be more easily found by other users. Users download content made by others, comment on it, communicate about it with their peers, remix it, and upload it again to a network so millions of other users can find it. Users furthermore share agendas, locations, bookmarks, documents, photos and videos, and even friends, all online and on a large scale. Figure 2 shows the different activities and roles users can take on in the value creation process. The concept of the user as a passive, mindless couch potato is long gone. Users still consume media content, but they also have taken on more active roles.

User roles in the value creation process (Slot, 2006)

1.2 Business uncertainties

Internet characteristics, combined with these user activities push, and at the same time enable companies to reorganize their businesses. Business models are changing. New parties enter the field. Businesses have also started to incorporate user roles into their business models. Sometimes, they even give users a monetary reward for sharing or making available their own content. More and more interesting new services appear on the scene, examples are Youtube (sharing movies), Flickr (storing and sharing photos), Blogger (weblogs, owned by Google), Weedshare (sharing music), Last.fm (radio station based on collaborative filtering), del.icio.us (sharing bookmarks, owned by Yahoo!), Upcoming (sharing events), Kiko (sharing agendas, bought on eBay by Tucows for more than 250.000 dollars), Plazes (sharing locations), and Writely (writing documents together, owned by Google).
Businesses take users as central point of their services. But the online domain is young, in a dynamic phase and changing very fast. Still, a lot of uncertainty resides on the producer/ business side. Where are the developments taking us? How are users going to behave in the coming years? What do users want in the future? How can we incorporate users and active user roles into our services? And most importantly; how are we going to make money with this?? These are true million dollar questions. Unfortunately, the quotation at the beginning of this report does not provide a lot of hope to get final answers to these questions. Because definitely, we can not predict the future.

1.3 Thinking about future possibilities

Nonetheless, it can prove to be very valuable to think about the future. Analysing barriers, drivers and possible directions of the developments that are now taking place, might enable us to gain more understanding of user roles and how they can be taken as a starting point in developing new services. We might not be able to predict the future, but maybe we can make some educated guesses. This report will provide an exploration of future directions of user roles and the dynamic between users, businesses and technology in media entertainment services. By sketching four possible scenarios, this report tries to contribute to the discussion about future developments. The outcomes can for example be interesting for media organisations that are thinking about their future actions and the way they can anticipate on user activities. Considering that users play a very important role in current developments, taking a user perspective might add something extra to the analysis. In most scenario exercises, users play a minor role of importance.
This report’s guiding question is; what can be possible new dynamics between users, businesses and technology in the online media and entertainment domain from a user perspective? The non-commercial and public domain will not be extensively discussed in this report.

introduction

methodology

existing scenarios

scenarios

concluding