This is Life After Television
In 1990, I picked up a book by George Gilder called “Life After Television”. It changed my life.
It caused me to imagine technology that could move so fast that our industry might be gone in a decade or two. Most of the people where I worked couldn’t see that. They bet on the past. Because of George’s book, I bet on the future and left to start my own business.
It was one of the the hardest decision of my life, but I’ve never looked back.
George predicted a world where traditional network television programming ended because of computers, digital video and fiber optics. You can still call that box in your house a TV, but the TV business as we knew it in those days is gone. We didn’t have the words to describe all the inventions George talked about back then like “teleputers” and “channels of information”. But today we know them as iPhones and the web. The internet, mobile and streaming revolutions happened just as George predicted.
Watching George’s predictions happen, living through them and building my business around them, I learned that the cycle of innovation doesn’t stop after TV. Surviving the next revolution means connecting the dots early and trusting your instincts when things are about to change. For the past 13 years, I’ve always been prepared for this. It’s because of Jules.
I showed up at Jules’ mother’s house one Friday night at 10pm to meet him in the San Fernando Valley. What he showed me that night also didn’t have names at the time and nobody I asked had heard of it. You could call it graphical, cinematic, realtime, interactive, intelligent. Everyone told me it wasn’t possible, except George, after I sent him to meet Jules. Today we have all seen that what Jules was working on was GPU raytracing, machine learning, cloud computing, virtual economies, and volumetric video. All things that have since become industries in themselves and revolutionizing our world.
I quickly learned that Jules is always preparing for the future — even when there are no words for it and it doesn’t make sense to anyone else. A month after meeting him I offered him a million dollars. He was still living at his mother’s house and he told me he couldn’t take the money. He needed to focus on what he was building for another few years, that it would be worth way more, and this was a distraction. It says something about how he sees things. He never let go of his vision. He was planning for the long-term.
Since then, Jules and I have been building a system for the future. It will all be built on RNDR. We have lined up and signed deals with all of the major media companies from Disney and HBO to Facebook and Unity. LightStages will be built at our WME offices for blockchain based scans of all our clients and athletes. I am driving media to go through the Render Token network.
Entertainment, news, media, platforms and payments will be revolutionized by the blockchain. Consumption and Creation will be defined by it. This is Life After Television.
