21923 - SCTE Broadband Aug2023 COMPLETE v1 (1)

68 Vol. 45 No. 3 - September 2023 Issue Whether anything useful comes from it all? Who knows. My guess? Very little. Meta(re)versal When Zuckerberg announced the surprising rebrand to Meta and the pivot to all things Metaverse, he was gambling his entire company on a single vision of how he thought the future of our digital world would look. And… nobody cared. Nothing anybody released was able to undo the sense of underwhelm. Each snapshot into the latest project or concept failed to answer the biggest question: why do we, the consumer, need this? The Metaverse is soulless, legless, empty and barely functioning. Decentraland and The Sandbox, the most popular worlds, have had vast numbers of users engaging in them. By vast, I mean 38 and 522 daily active users, respectively. Decentraland recently held its second fashion week event, and a grand total of 26,000 checked in, with barely more than 1,000 people online simultaneously. As Dan Olson summarised in his brilliant video, The Future is a Dead Mall , “In practice, it’s a bad video game made up of smaller, worse video games wrapped in real-estate scheme cosplaying as The Matrix.” As it stands, billions of dollars have been spent and wasted trying to shift the public perception and get people excited about the prospect of spending their work and social lives trapped in a digital environment void of practicality, purpose and, most of all, fun. Regardless, the company is continuing to invest in its hardware, and the Metaverse will rumble on in the background. Despite the so-called efficiency, its Q1 2023 earnings call is predicted to show losses by the Reality Labs division increasing by 15%. Nick Clegg—untrustworthy politician turned untrustworthy Meta spin doctor—was wheeled out a few weeks ago to cheerlead the Metaverse concept, boldly claiming that “something like this will be the heart of the new computing platform.” He also admitted that “it’s going to take a while.” No shit. But how long can it continue? With exponential losses, a weakening ad model, lack of public excitement, layoffs galore, the new shiny object that is AI, and the projected timeline being a decade or longer, Zuckerberg has realised his Metaverse could not only fail to change the world; it could be the death knell for his company. from the industry For more information, visit https://trendmill.substack.com/