TV to be destroyed

"(Online games are) going to destroy TV - and it's going to happen in short term," said Daniel James of Three Rings during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco (BBC story).

This is crackpot nonsense of the highest order highly speculative. James has been intoxicated by his dreams -- and his stock options.

And Mark Kern of Red 5 Studios is almost as dumb hopeful: "Five years from now a social networking site without a 3D universe will look like a dinosaur."

We heard all about the 3-D world of Virtual Reality in the mid-1990s. Remember the movie, Johnny Mnemonic? It never came to pass because a "3D universe" is a huge, inefficient, pain in the ass. Kern isn't going to change that in five years.

The predictions spinning out of the Game Developers Conference remind me of something Bill Gates said in January -- the internet will revolutionize TV within five years.