It seems almost strange that the third set of predictions about technology trends in 2020 does not focus on customer experience. In fact, Juniper Research predicts a lot of activity in the TV market and, as we have said before, the streaming wars are hotting up.
5G, according to Juniper, will take off in 2020, but in a boring, backhaul kind of way. Games and gaming will continue a meteoric rise, Mobile as a Service will take off and move into the Asia Pacific region as the transparency between operators continues to grow.
Google will launch an offensive against Apple and its Apple Watch, ensuring that health becomes a battleground in the digital world. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has said (a year or so ago) that the healthcare market is so much bigger than the tech market that he is staking the future on it. Expect nothing less than all out warfare if Google does take the Fitbit fight to Apple.
Streaming, though, is interesting. Juniper sees Netflix needing to find new sources of income as competition grows.
And the competition is tough.
While Netflix has enjoyed a period of eminence as potential competitors have worked out how to address the market, now the game is on.
Content providers, big tech companies and mobile operators all see the future in video. And a price war has started. Apple, as you might expect, launched a premium product. Now Disney, with possibly the most compelling of back catalogues, has launched its offensive.
At the time, the world wondered whether buying the Star Wars franchise off Lucas for billions of dollars was proof that Disney had gone mad. Now it seems the opposite might be true.
With everything from Bambi to The Last Jedi in the bank, it would seem that the game belongs to Disney. Although the company will not go public with subscriber numbers until its next public results announcement, we do know that tens of millions of people have signed up.
The world of TV may seem incidental to the world of ‘real’ tech but it does provide a pointer.
If Disney is to be king of the content world, what other unlikely contenders are there for the world of big tech?
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