Events
2008 Quello Center Lecture: Eli M. Noam
November 17, 2008, 1:30 p.m. with reception following | MSU Union Gold A/B Rooms
“If Fiber is the Medium, What is the Message? Next Generation Content for Next Generation Media”
Abstract: The nature of content is critical for the economic viability of a next-generation infrastructure. This talk asks what types of media content will arise when we achieve widespread fiber optic networks. In the past, an expansion of transmission capacity led to a ‘widening’ of the TV medium. But the impact of ultrabroadband will be a ‘deepening’ of the content to a richer, more bit-intensive content. The talk investigates, for 25 media, the price and capacity trends over the past century. This enables us to identify the trend of bits per second delivered – the ‘richness’- of the media over time. It grows at about 8% per annum. Projecting this rate permits us to predict the type, style, and genres of media content of the near future. It also enables us to determine the time when media will become visually richer than 3-D real life in terms of sensory experience. Finally, the lecture derives regulatory implications of this kind of content.
Bio: Eli Noam has been a Professor of Economics and Finance at the Columbia Business School since 1976. In 1990, after having served for three years as Commissioner with the New York State Public Service Commission, he returned to Columbia. He is the Director of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information. CITI is a university-based research center focusing on strategy, management, and policy issues in telecommunications, computing, and electronic mass media. In addition to leading CITI’s research activities, Noam initiated the MBA concentration in the Management of Media, Communications, and Information at the Business School and the Virtual Institute of Information, an independent, web-based research facility.
Besides the over 400 articles in economics, legal, communications, and other journals that Professor Noam has written on subjects such as communications, information, public choice, public finance, and general regulation, he has also authored, edited, and co-edited 27 books.
