(Eli Noam, Video 2040: The New MediaTech, AI, and the Next Generation of Media, Izdavač: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited)
Book Choose Noama Video 2040: The New MediaTech, AI, and the Next Generation of Media It emerges at a historically transitional and almost paradoxical moment. Streaming has consolidated itself into a planetary infrastructure of cultural circulation and everyday consumption, normalizing “on-demand” access as the dominant regime of audiovisual life. Yet, even as this order stabilizes, the industry’s speculative horizon is already moving beyond it: toward immersive and persistent environments, interactive and adaptive narrative forms, and AI-driven systems of mediation in which personalization is no longer a mere add-on function, but a governing logic of production, distribution, and reception.
Noam’s key intervention is to treat this future-oriented “scan” not as a playground for promotional exuberance but as a subject of disciplined inquiry. The book asks a deceptively simple question—what, exactly, comes after streaming?—and, more importantly, insists that the answer will depend less on visionary rhetoric than on the technical, economic, and institutional frictions that every transition must go through.
Methodologically, Noam is explicit about the asymmetry between what can be predicted with some certainty and what remains structurally uncertain. The cultural meanings of media innovations are notoriously fluid: audiences reinterpret technologies, industries reconfigure themselves around them, and regulatory regimes often arrive late and unevenly. Yet the performance trajectories and cost curves of the underlying components—computing power, storage, bandwidth, and display technologies—are relatively readable. This is where the early quantitative material in the book really does the analytical work. By synthesizing long-term trends in semiconductor capabilities, the declining unit cost of data processing, and the historic decline in the cost per gigabit of usage, Noam builds an empirical platform from which the horizon of 2040 becomes more than speculative “music for the soul” (roughly a century after the advent of consumer television). His notion of increasing “bit-richness” functions as a conceptual link between engineering and culture: cheaper and faster bits expand the feasible space of mediated experience design, but feasibility is not destiny. Adoption still depends on complementary technologies and services, standards, content offerings, governance, and the simple inertia of habit.
The book’s very architecture is an argument for how to think strategically. The first part offers a historical genealogy of video, moving from film and broadcast television through multichannel systems and streaming, before framing “Video 4.0” as a prospective regime defined by heightened immersion, participatory structures, interactivity, individualization, and embedded transactionality. The second part then outlines the technological substrate on which such a regime would need to rest: processors and GPUs; cloud-based production and distribution; wired and wireless networks; display technologies, haptics, and interface design; blockchain infrastructures; and real-time rendering. The third part shifts the focus from infrastructure to the logics of content—gaming, immersion, interactivity, metaverses, and personalization—and then, crucially, pauses to confront their recurring pattern of weak or uneven adoption. Parts four and five elevate artificial intelligence (AI) from one component among many to an integrative principle, and then ask what an AI-orchestrated ecosystem would mean for content formats, business models, industry structure, cybersecurity, and regulation.
Several chapters are particularly successful in translating technical parameters into institutional roles. The discussion of networks is commendably concrete about what experiential media would require—especially in terms of latency, reliability, and throughput—and treats spectrum scarcity not as a technical footnote but as a permanent constraint on the media economy. The chapters on processors and cloud infrastructure layers illuminate a quieter but consequential shift: video production and distribution are becoming increasingly data-centered. Cloud architectures are increasingly shaping both the upstream and downstream flows of audiovisual culture—from financing decisions, to script development and virtual production workflows, to post-production rendering, and the logistics of content delivery networks (CDNs).
Equally important is Noam’s insistence that man is not external to the system, but one of its limiting conditions. Heavy helmets, motion sickness, clunky controls, and cumbersome setup are not minor inconveniences; they are frictions that kill adoption and turn the “possible” into the “impractical.” His consideration of blockchain is similarly de-ideologized. Rather than reiterating Web3 utopianism, the book considers distributed ledgers as a possible infrastructure for provenance, authentication, and transactions—especially in a media ecology increasingly destabilized by deepfakes, piracy, and uncertainty about source.
Perhaps the book’s most satisfying analytical stroke is its persistent explanation of why “next-generation video” has repeatedly failed to live up to its promise. Noam rejects single-causal explanations—whether the romantic claim that failure reflects a lack of imagination, the cynical claim that corporations are stifling change, or the patronizing claim that users are simply resistant or irrational. Instead, he argues that advanced video has often been a concept in search of a product, and a product in search of an audience. The obstacles pile up: high costs, immature standards, weak interoperability, latency constraints, bandwidth scarcity, insufficient content supply, fragmented demand, and—most crucially—the absence of a compelling value proposition strong enough to drive self-reinforcing adoption. The chapter on the “bad record” of media acts as a rebuttal to both techno-utopian triumphalism and pervasive techno-skepticism. The disappointment is real, but it is not mystical: it has understandable causes, and those causes can, in principle, change as technologies mature. Within this causal framework, Noam positions artificial intelligence as the variable most likely to alter the adoption equation.
In parts four and five, AI is not framed simply as a set of production tools; it becomes an orchestration layer capable of making a complex modular system readable, usable, and economically scalable. Noam lists industrial applications—audience analytics, script and story development support, editing, translation and dubbing, soundtrack generation, marketing optimization, and recommendation systems—but the deeper claim concerns agency. His model of “three-way video” crafts a personal AI agent between the viewer and the platform. Instead of an audience that is merely profiled, targeted, and behaviorally “nudged,” the viewer is presented with an intelligent module designed to carry out the user’s preferences and instructions: filtering advertising, organizing recommendations from trusted sources, assessing the credibility of information, blocking malicious actors, finding favorable terms, and conducting transactions. The prognosis is not that the power of platforms will automatically disappear; rather, the place of negotiation will change. Persuasion is increasingly becoming AI-to-AI, and control over the agent - its design, ownership, default settings, auditability, and incentives - is emerging as a new strategic bottleneck in the media economy.
Noam’s forecast of content is accordingly hybrid, not based on a simple substitution of one format for another. His notion of “gilm” (games plus film) names a plausible convergence: filmic storytelling adopts the procedural and participatory grammar of games—avatars, branching trajectories, social co-presence, and real-time responsiveness—while games rely more heavily on film aesthetics and narrative techniques. He sketches a sequence of adoption that resembles earlier media cycles: avant-garde innovation, then subsidized non-commercial applications, then marketing and media “early adopters,” and finally premium global production. Yet he also argues persuasively that linear, casual “armchair viewing” will remain the enduring default mode of everyday media consumption. The future, on this account, is not the complete suppression of streaming, but the expansion of modalities: a menu of engagement intensities through which users can choose how much agency, effort, and immersion they really want.
Economics and industry structure are given equal analytical weight. Video 4.0 platforms, Noam argues, are likely to be ecosystems with multiple revenue streams—hardware, subscriptions, advertising, retail and app stores, transaction fees, and various forms of subsidies. The deeper structural question is whether the sector will evolve toward decentralized, interoperable arrangements or consolidate into oligopolistic “walled gardens” of closed ecosystems. Noam’s expectations—based on network effects, economies of scale, and the strategic advantages of vertically integrated technology “stacks”—lean toward concentration. Even when he considers Web3 and open-source imaginaries, he treats them as countervailing pressures rather than as foregone outcomes.
One of the book's most valuable contributions is the way it links industrial structure to governance and cultural power. Market power becomes the power of the "gatekeepers" (gate keeping), and that power becomes a mechanism for shaping visibility, monetization, and ultimately cultural legitimacy. The regulatory chapters are broad without slipping into mere enumeration. Noam returns to familiar concerns—privacy, consumer protection, cybersecurity, media pluralism—while simultaneously foregrounding issues that become particularly acute in immersive, AI-mediated environments: algorithmic bias, liability for interactive harms, intellectual property in machine-generated environments, provenance and trust, and disinformation enabled by deepfake technology.
His proposal for Open Video 4.0 Access seeks to translate the traditions of communications policy into the idiom of platform governance: where market power becomes infrastructural, access rights to key functionalities and interfaces become a credible regulatory principle. He also anticipates governance by “accumulation” – a patchwork mosaic in which agencies and courts gradually piece together something like case law, a “common law” for AI and interactive media, rather than a single, comprehensive solution.
A rigorous assessment should also note what remains underdeveloped. The book’s main strength—its systems perspective—sometimes compresses culture into adoption curves and demand segmentation, leaving less room for sustained engagement with identity, labor, authorship, and the micropolitics of participation in computer-mediated worlds. The media economy of data ownership—who owns the behavioral trace, the preference model, and the personal agent that mediates the experience—deserves deeper treatment, not least because it is likely to determine whether “agency” becomes an emancipatory rhetoric or an operational reality. Sustainability is acknowledged, especially in relation to computationally intensive real-time rendering and AI, but the environmental tradeoffs of ubiquitous immersion—energy consumption, rapid hardware replacement, and supply chain externalities—could be further elaborated. Finally, a personal AI agent, normatively appealing as a counterbalance to platform asymmetries, raises complicated governance questions that the book only begins to raise: who audits the agent, who secures it, how conflicts of interest are prevented, and what institutional arrangements can make “compliance” more than a marketing claim.
These limitations do not diminish the book's achievement; they clarify its roles. Video 2040 is both a road map and a cautionary tale. It maps the technical, economic, and institutional components needed to move beyond streaming convincingly, and warns that the next generation of video will be shaped as much by governance decisions—interoperability, access, accountability, and control—as by engineering feats. For media and communications scholars, the book provides a vocabulary for thinking across technical and institutional silos. For industry actors, it functions as a disciplined inventory of the constraints that promotional narratives routinely gloss over. And for policymakers, it offers a timely reminder that “the future of video” is not a niche entertainment story, but a contest over agency, attention, legitimacy, and—on a larger scale—the very texture of social life.
Bonus video:
