LIVE FROM DIGITAL HOLLYWOOD FALL 2008: It’s All About the Content*
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 by Patrick Ross* i know, I prefer the term “creative works,” but I’m speaking the lingo of the conference here and will use “content” in this blog entry.
SANTA MONICA, CA — Another Digital Hollywood, another amalgam of creative start-ups with bizarre Web 2.0 names, another set of panels where people continue to try to figure out how to “monetize” creative works online. A recurring theme so far based on the panels I’ve attended and the hallway conversations I’ve had? It has to start with compelling content. (It doesn’t have to do with a “Remix” hybrid economy, as a certain law professor has recently written; more on that below.)
Now the focus on compelling content shouldn’t be a surprise, but there are some out there who view content as a commodity. They think it’s something that can be made to pitch a product, or it’s just something that gets distributed and it’s the distribution model that is the thing of beauty. The market has shown those people that they were wrong. Distributor after distributor has run aground when the venture capital dried up, yet content producers soldier on.
When the idea of content becoming a commodity was raised at one panel (the idea being distributors see it that way), Paul Kontoni (producer of “Laguna Beach” and other shows) said “How dare you! Content is not a commodity.” He acknowledged the pressure of accommodating multiple distribution streams to satisfy both consumers and advertisers, but insisted that none of this mattered without powerful creative works. “There are only so many times you can see a guy fall off a bike or get kicked in the nuts,” he said. While I fear there are some for whom there is no limit, I think for the most part he’s right.
As for distribution, the consensus seems to be one syndicates work if there isn’t a large brand attached to the work, but if there is then you keep it at your site. Saturday Night Live is getting a lot of online views lately (including from me, who has a harder time staying up late nowadays), and their skits are available on a special sub-site on NBC.com and on Hulu, part-owned by NBC. (By the way, folks here continually cite Hulu as the shining success of online video, a site that is user-friendly and has great content posted very quickly after release. Even its name was praised by one panelist.)
From an engineering perspective, Steve Canepa of IBM said the digital space can take compelling content and expand it to compelling experiences, showing how real-time Masters footage was enhanced online with multiple camera views, statistics, diagrams of the holes, and the ability to pull up the leader board. If I liked golf I’d love that site.
So if it’s all about content, where’s the breakaway hit? Moving Target Entertainment’s David Tochterman predicted it would come within a year, but frankly I don’t know that the digital space will ever have a breakout hit in the way that we think of hits on television. The Internet lends itself to niches. Was lonelygirl15 or Rocketboom comparable to Heroes on broadcast television or Mad Men on cable? No, but they were pretty big for their medium. There are a handful of broadcast networks, a few hundred cable networks, and millions of web sites.
Ty Ahmad-Taylor of MTV Networks seemed to agree. He discussed the intense pressure to have content go viral. “It’s awful,” he said, “expectations have changed so much.” “You put it out there,” he said, and backers expect it “will spread across the Internet like wildfire, and that we’ll get something from that. It doesn’t work that way.” Bill Bradford of Fox Digital Media agreed, calling distribution “chaos” and consumer choice impossible to predict. He actually has paid “community outreach” staff that use social networks and other means to target different communities and ‘sell” them on new content. Now that’s a lot of work to create spontaneity.
Bottom line — consumers are unpredictable, there is too much content to choose from, and even when it does spread that doesn’t mean you make much of any money off of it. That’s a lesson I’ve heard at many Digital Hollywoods.
One thing I haven’t heard a lot about is “remixing.” Lawrence Lessig, in his new book “Remix,” goes beyond his past arguments on mashups and actually suggests that there is an economy for remixing copyrighted works, a hybrid economy as he calls it. This is evocative of Yochai Benkler’s arguments about an emerging economic collective of mutual back-scratching, an economy similar to the kibbutz on which Benkler once worked. Lessig acknowledges Benkler as a mentor in his book.
So where’s this hybrid economy the Stanford Law professor and his Harvard Law professor mentor see so clearly? If it exists, evidence of it surely must be here, where it seems every single individual from around the world looking to make money with digital video is in attendance? I haven’t seen it. If that hybrid economy is here, it’s doing a good job of hiding, which is surprising because the folks here aren’t shy about self-promotion. (You’d think their wrists would get tired, flicking all of those business cards around.)
I only heard remixing in one panel, during the Q&A where an audience member asked about it. The notion was quickly dismissed as a source of revenue. In fact, the entire panel had focused on how even repurposing of original content by the content creator had little value on the Internet, that the value almost solely was with truly original works.
Perhaps Professors Lessig and Benkler can attend Digital Hollywood Spring 2009. I’m sure the attendees would love to hear, after all of these years of frustrating searches for the right monetization model for digital video, from these two law scholars that there is in indeed a golden path before them, and they no longer have to spend the time and money to make original works to follow it.
