Ari Emanuel Speaking about the Future Media Landscape

This is a very interesting conversation with Ari Emanuel, Hollywood super agent at the recent Web 2.0 Summit (whatever that's supposed to mean).  Some of the things that he says about the future of media are similar to points that I have been making.  Of course, the difference is that he actually knows about what he is speaking.   The future is coming quickly and for small players, the window of opportunity is getting smaller as the big players start to actually figure out what is happening.  Agility and the ability to pull together sophisticated media production and marketing quickly by leveraging technology and the incredible wealth of knowledge available to everyone with an internet connection will be as important for indies as it is for Lady Gaga.

Hope everyone is having a great holiday.  Much exciting news coming in the next couple of months.

Personal Brand Schizophrenia

I am just back from Brazil.  It was an amazing experience, I will write about it further when I have a little time to digest it and write about it intelligently.  I realize now that I have not even spoken about the substance of the project.  Let's just leave it at now that I am very fortunate to be able to participate in documenting a sustainable development project in the Amazon facilitated by this organization.  It was energizing (and a real privilege) to meet people who are doing so much right to improve a piece of the world through hard work, brains, humility, stamina and more hard work.

Beautiful, but not always easy

There is so much happening right now in my world, I will try to touch on a few important other thoughts today (against the advice of the experts who warn about keeping a focused personal brand--rather than corporations becoming more human, it seems as though we are increasingly assuming their attributes).

I wanted to post a link to this: Flipboard, a subtle, but important step forward in how I see us all consuming media in the future.  Media created by people you know and curated/repackaged for your consumption.

I will leave today's post with a few questions:

1.  Is there any reason to think that in the future visual media will be any more highly valued than music has become?  In China, it seems as though literally no one pays for music now.  People there are scrambling to try and create anything that people will pay for surrounding the consumption experience, especially using social media.  Indie filmmakers, is this sounding familiar? Once the bandwidth logjam is broken, and it will be broken, unless we are willing to become completely uncompetitive as a nation in the global marketplace, how will media producers stop visual media from becoming as valueless as an mp3 in China?   It seems like a survival strategy that madia producing companies like NBC/Universal are being consolidated into pipeline providers like Comcast.  As someone who creates visual media, and knows the dedication, skill and hard work that goes into its creation, this is not an easy question to ask.

2. Will the future of paid media production involve largely only a few high-end producers of technological wonders (like Batman, Ironman, etc.) which can only be produced with a lot of capital and organizational/technical expertise?  Will most of the rest of the media consumed be produced by, well, everyone and curated through Facebook, YouTube and other online social repositories?  It seems as though we are well down the path to ever-increasing media consumption, however, rather than being consumed as a separate viewing experience it will be consumed nearly constantly, in small bits, and much of it created by people we "know" (at least online).

I'm not leaving until I get my $.99 for that download

Free the Bits

Is there latency in your packet shaping, or are you just glad to see me?

It has been speculated for years that bandwidth providers (that'd be phone and cable companies) in the U.S. are slowing innovation and capacity increases on their networks.  Don't take my word for it, even the conservative Wall Street Journal is finally on board.  Why would they want to do that?  It seems mostly like a waiting game, trying to put off the day when entertainment users can download content as easily as music lovers were able to download mp3's back in the day.   These companies fear the day that their lucrative (and in the case of cable companies, local monopolies) businesses models that have served them so well are changed.   The companies that own the pipelines and distribution are increasingly the companies that own the content,  say NBC/Comcast or Time Warner.

What does that mean, besides the fact the people pay huge cable bills and still cannot pick (and only pay for) exactly what content they want delivered?  Now there's a radical idea, not paying for the Golf Channel because you don't want it.   For one thing, it means that innovation in new media forms are being stifled.  There are people out there with ideas out there that cannot be tried because they just are not feasible given data constraints.  It is in the interest of these companies to keep you passively watching cable TV and at best letting you DVR it so you can watch it on your schedule.  Forget interactivity, forget mob-sourcing, forget just about anything that isn't pretty much just a sickly derivative of the same stuff that's we've been watching for the past 60 years.

This has been a pet peeve of mine for years, especially with regard to decreased innovation.  Why is this important?  Culture is big business in the U.S.  It is a huge export product as well as being a political tool.  Will Hollywood become like GM and lose it's market share and profitability to other foreign producers through willfully slowing innovation and clinging to dying business models in order to control (slowly dwindling) profits?  Remember, in the 1960's it seemed inconceivable that Japanese cars were anything other than oddities to American consumers.   People laughed at the cars, their size and their quality.  With the democratization of media production, isn't there a whole world full of people out there now with their own media creation dreams?

The U.S. currently ranks #28 in Internet access speed and and "is not making significant progress in building a faster network."  The average download speed in Korea is four times faster than it is in the U.S.  And upload speeds, key for interactive media, those are even slower, usually by an order of 2-3X.  How long will consumers raised on interactivity and the belief that they are all media creators be willing to live with that?  And given the recent performance of U.S. mobile broadband providers like AT&T, will the future be more of the same?