1. This brought me back. When she clicked into the "mall" and the navigation was an imagemap with hotlinks [1] going off to a flower shop, I immediately thought of a website that some guy payed me to build back in the 90's when I was in high school. He bought SellMemphis.com, SellAtlanta.com, etc and wanted to create a directory for local businesses. Also - good on you, Philips Flowers, for keeping 1800florals.com in what must've been intense pressure from 1800flowers.com!
2. We still can't buy items directly in-stream. However, product placement is huge, and not just for consumer goods. Music featured in Stranger Things ends up trending on Spotify. Apple creates a playlist (in its own platform) for "Defiant Jazz," featured in Severance, also on its own platform).
3. Regulation (or lack of regulation) played out in an interesting way. We now have an interesting problem with digital infrastructure in the US anyway, where copper cables (still) only get you so far, wireless is the new expectation, and countries that -had- no comms infrastructure are by default more modern now than large tracts of the US, because they skipped past the "telephone poll" phase straight to cell towers.
Cell towers are not a replacement for wired connections. There's only so much data rate you can have for a given frequency bandwidth[1]. Wires (or fibers) work around this because the medium isn't shared. Each wire has the entire spectrum for itself.
I suppose it is easier to run one major fiber line to a cell than it is commit to FTTH. Still I though this was a half-deserved dig at how outside of cell-service many more rural parts of North America still top out at decades old ADSL, and the places that do have good broadband are often via cable tv infrastructure (DOCSIS). I suppose if someone did build new infrastructure from scratch they would just start at LTE/5G and laying fiber to the premises, why start anywhere else?
The only reason this isn't a thing yet is because consumers don't ask for it and companies don't want heat for making their entertainment "all about the money".
We will definitely see something like that soon, is my bet. Perhaps not "AI" which is able to inspect the scene from a video feed and recognise items for your convenient weekend shopping (say you wanted to purchase the vase used in movie X, or the drapes from tv-show Y). But we're not far off...
2. We still can't buy items directly in-stream. However, product placement is huge, and not just for consumer goods. Music featured in Stranger Things ends up trending on Spotify. Apple creates a playlist (in its own platform) for "Defiant Jazz," featured in Severance, also on its own platform).
3. Regulation (or lack of regulation) played out in an interesting way. We now have an interesting problem with digital infrastructure in the US anyway, where copper cables (still) only get you so far, wireless is the new expectation, and countries that -had- no comms infrastructure are by default more modern now than large tracts of the US, because they skipped past the "telephone poll" phase straight to cell towers.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19990208003609/http://branch.com...