European Custom Installer

System Integration for the Connected Home

The Future of Home Theatre: Entertainment Pills?

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Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has a far reaching vision for the future of home entertainment-- one revealed at the Wall Street Journal's WSJD event to include "pharmacological" alternatives. Pills, in other words.

Happy Pills"Movies & TV shows will be like the opera & the novel," Hastings says. "There will be substitutes." What kind of substitutes? A "pill that entertains you" is one such example, although there is no indication Netflix plans to substitute media streaming servers with chemistry sets, at least for now.

Of course, talk of entertainment drugs is pure science fiction-style speculation, even if human history is rife with the imbibing in weird substances in the search for the ultimate high. However, putting talk of drugs aside, installers still need to keep an eye out for the future. After all, the situation can change at any moment's notice, and it wasn't too long ago that VHS was the media format of choice before it was replaced by DVDs and Blu-rays. And even then, streaming media appears set to kill physical media, or at least further limit sales.

The moral of the story, then? Think outside the box. Virtual reality might become a home cinema replacement-- Netflix is already working to support the Oculus rift, and CEDIA is considering VR as the future of custom installation. So who knows, maybe in a decade of so Netflix and chill will become Netflix and pill...

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