“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
From Requiem for a Nun by William Faulkner

Though it’s just beginning, I suspect this blog will be more about the future than it will be about the past. However, when I saw this posting on my friend’s Facebook page (thanks Mike). I thought there were some interesting similarities to today’s pontifications and ponderings. This site from the American Historical Association has snippets of what people debated about television in the 1940s.

• It talks about movie studios being fearful of putting their good movies on TV, as people might stop going to movie theaters (substitute TV, for online, and how much different is the question now)?
• There’s a whole section on the FCC and spectrum. We might have finally given up the ghost on that one after 60 years with the switch to digital; but the debate still continues if you count wireless broadband in the mix to get video via the Internet;
• There’s a whole debate on standards; do we have the right ones to go forward (OK, in 1945 it might not have been Blu-ray verses HD-DVD, or HTML5…but you get the picture…pun intended); and
• There’s a section about advertising’s place in the new medium and what role subscriptions play (free verses paid is NOT a new dilemma).

So, in summary, everything old is new again. In the next 60 years (yikes…that’s 2070) how will our grandchildren look back at our debates and discussions about video in the dawn of the 21st century? And, how much will be a slight twist of today’s debates.

Photo via Library of Virginia: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_virginia/