Why Apple’s 5G iPhone Will Change Content
A quick look at history tells us that there is a correlation between bandwidth and the types of content we can create.
Today Apple announces its first ever 5G iPhone as part of the iPhone 12 lineup and it’s going to slowly change the content industry.
Why? Because bandwidth increases always transform the content industry.
In the mid 90’s, 56K Dial-up connections allowed us to create the first websites and consume blogs along with their annoying banner ads.
DSL connections in the late 90’s allowed us to download music, digging the graves of record stores.
In the early 2000’s we had the expansion into broadband. Broadband enabled the capability to start streaming video at home, and uploading it as well. This is when Netflix began their shift to streaming video, pivoting from being a DVD shipping company and sticking a fork in Blockbuster Video.
Furthermore, once broadband speeds were enabled, YouTube was founded, and the Vlogger was born.
This correlation is even more evident in the mobile phone era.
The 4G Apple iPhone was introduced in the fall of 2012. A quick look through their top apps of 2012 and you’ll find some regular names, Google Maps, Flipboard, Pandora, Facebook, Instagram, Angry Birds. All with limited capabilites compared to today. What’s more telling is the apps that would come in 2013 and beyond, made possible by that jump to 4G speeds.
Vine was one of the firsts to launch in January 2013. While other video streaming apps did exist before, all were reliant on WiFi connections for the viewer to consume, or upload.
Simultaneously began the rise of Snapchat and it’s video sharing capabilites. A few years later Instagram enabled video. By 2014 one third of Twitch viewers were watching from phones.
Even more important than the 4G download speeds are the upload speeds that also got a dramatic boost. Creators were now able to start creating content on the go and upload from wherever. No longer was a WiFi connection needed to showcase a piece of content to the world. Combine that speed with the phone camera advancements and suddenly the term ‘influencer’ was born and the new industry would grow to be worth billions today.
4G is clearly the catalyst that brought upon the mobile video revolution.
So what does 5G mean? For starters it means you will be able to download an entire TV season in seconds. But it also means that content will become more innovative. It will become more interactive, and it will look different too. At the speeds enabled by 5G, you can create Pokemon Go on steroids. 5G will be the catalyst to Augmented Reality (AR) that 4G was to mobile video.
Tim Cook has been open about his views on the potential of augmented reality. And it’s reaffirmed by the investments they have made and keep making in the technology.
AR’s current success lies in the social media landscape of lens filters on Snapchat and Instagram. But with higher speeds the possiblities are going to grow beyond lens filters.
Let me be clear, video content is not going away, but it is going to become increasingly difficult to use it as a marketing tool. AR’s future success lies in brands and marketers leveraging AR technology to stand out in what is a crowded mobile video landscape. Standing out in new creative ways, interactive ways to give the consumers something new, utilizing every single megabyte of download speed in the most creative way possible.
Meanwhile Apple and Google will keep investing billions in the technology and its success. And its success is inevitable because AR is the solution to one of society’s greatest problems, screen time.
It’s worth noting that all of this is of course dependent on the speeds actually delivering what they’re advertising they will deliver. While I definitely expect a rocky and slow rollout of those advertised speeds, I think it’s safe to presume that they will be reached. When that happens, 5G will not only change the content we consume, but how we consume it. Get ready for… The Wearable War.
