Network as Platform

The second major wave of technology innovation on the Web, known as Web 2.0, positioned the network as the primary platform for computing. This is pushing media with it out onto the so-called “cloud,” making locally stored and played media more and more irrelevant.

A image showing a flow chart of the virtualized network world

This image from a patent application by Apple for a tagging system for cloud-based media shows the complex flows that are emerging in the virtualized network world.

Technology analyst Tim O’Reilly, one of the early proponents of Web 2.0, defines it thusly, "Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; …delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users…” Similar to Sun Microsystems’ declaration in the 1990s that the “network is the computer,” Web 2.0 and related evolutions of programming, software development, network architecture, and media have put the network at the center of the system map, with media, content, computing power and data increasingly residing in what is commonly referred to as “the cloud” of Internet-connected servers and applications, delivering whatever consumers want, wherever they need it. Increases in access speeds for many consumers, and falling costs of storage and processing, has accelerated this trend to a point where now the network is a substantial “platform” for media delivery itself.

Signals:

Peer-to-peer media services such as Pandora, Napster and Last.fm applied a similar network-as-platform strategy as Internet telephony service Skype by borrowing both files and bandwidth from users to turn the public Internet into a platform for media delivery. This model has been continued by dozens of smaller, similar media networks that deliver content from the network as host.
Companies such as Microsoft, Sun, HP, and IBM have made extensive investment in developing and distributing various new networked computing tools and applications to reinforce the network as platform for both consumer and business use.
Apple is expected to push its dominant platform for media, iTunes, to a cloud platform in the next year, and has already made investments in technology and infrastructure to power this. Such a move would trigger a new wave of movement to the network by competing players, further powering this trend. It has already opened up the system to social networking, allowing the network to be the platform for media as social object.

Implications:

Using the network as platform will increase both media portability and the reach of many media companies, as it lessens the reliance on physical infrastructure.
This trend has implications for controlling flows of media, as networks cross borders. Storage and transmission of media in the cloud now has to take careful consideration of national and regional rights structures, and implement new technologies to manage this.

Countertrends:

Growing capacity and falling price of local networks and storage represent a minor countertrend, which, along with local media ecosystems, could encourage some measure of re-localization of media.

Extrapolations:

Location of media sources would become unimportant as consumers chose to trade this for access to media anywhere, on any device. This would result in a shift of media devices toward quality of playback and breadth of access (i.e. iPad) and away from the local storage (i.e. iPod).