Abstract:

There is great interest in the development of television technologies such as PVRs, VOD and Interactive TV. Forecasting the consumer response to these new technologies should take the recent history of technology forecasting into account in order to improve such forecasts.Clearly, there is a need to improve technology predictions, since practically all prognoses about the future of TV and new TV technologies made during the 1990s were wrong. This paper takes the point of view that these inaccurate predictions did not occur by chance, but that the forecasters made identifiable mistakes from which we can learn to make more accurate forecasts going forward.