The Future: You Are Dependent On Your Profile. Not The Machine You Are Using

Here is the future scenario of a Sunday morning in a house with two adults with their two kids.

The parents have purchased a collection of Disney films and Nintendo Wii games for their children. On any given Sunday before driving to see the grandparents, one child will be playing the Wii game on one screen and the other child is watching a movie upstairs. When it is time to all get in the car, the children will pause where they are up to and logout.

As soon as they get in the car, they will log back in and pick up from where they left off. All the content and settings will be based on the network. Not on the device.

So a few things are going to happen.

The "network" is going to get faster both for download and upload. Infact, to think about the future, you should remove bandwidth as any sort of impediment.

Devices are going to be all about processing power and not so much about memory. They will be "thin clients". Meaning that they will serve the viewing experience and not also be depended on as this storage unit.

All things that used to be hosted on your computer - will be hosted on the network and you will be able to access them through any screen that you give permission to. ie You are sitting in a hotel room and login with your Gmail address for example, and you will get access to all your TiVo content (see post where I think Google will buy TiVo - and are waiting until they do a few more deals to become the first screen on services like Comcast).