CinemaTech reports on the Consumer Generated Media Panel
CinemaTech: From AlwaysOn: `How Far Will Consumer-Generated Media Go?'
New York Times writer, Scott Kirsner, stopped in at the AlwaysOn conference at Stanford and posted a report about the panel 'How Far Will Consumer-Generated Media Go". The panel featured YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, the CEO of MP3 Tunes, and execs from Yahoo and Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment.
While I do believe distribution becomes more fluid with the continued evolution of digital technology along all points of the media supply chain, I do not believe that digital technology will democratize film making. Multinational corporations and conglomerates have the scope and capital to market and distinguish their product from the glut of global competitors (whether that competition is created by Chinese manufacturing or American independent filmmakers). Certainly the segmentation or "narrow-casting" currently developing with the expansion of world-wide cable and the internet creates spaces for creative expression produced, say, less expensively with digital technology; however, outside of those exceptions eventually marketed to broader audiences, digital technology will not disturb media firms' control over the organs of distribution. The question ALWAYS remains: Who reaps the benefits of copyright? Is it the content creator or the media firm that owns the intellectual property that the content creator sold to the distributor for a profit?
Indeed, media firms may be held captive at choking points along the supply chain - a consequence of handing their brands over to stars or whomever - but media firms are more apt to forge strategic partnerships or acquire internet portals like Amazon et cetera, then wither away and die. In an economic environment starved for content, the power does shift to the content creator or more specifically, whoever owns the copyright, but corporations are the ones most likely to benefit from this paradigm; because they can exploit their natural economies of scale. The myth of democratizing filmmaking is techno-utopianism. The creative economy needs a mixture of small, medium, and large size creative industry firms.
Excerpts from CinemaTech:
The panelists all seemed to agree that consumer-generated content isn't going to be a meteor that renders professionally-produced content extinct. They also seemed to agree that it's hard to monetize content that comes from the grassroots... since consumers don't like it when ads start cropping up on sites like YouTube and MySpace, and advertisers are wary about the kind of content their messages are associated with (risque, political, copyright-infringing, etc.)
Hurley downplayed YouTube's impact on old media. "We're not trying to replace the experience of TV or a movie theater," he said, noting that YouTube streams videos at fairly low resolution. He said that he expected advertising to help carry the company to profitability, and that YouTube had been part of the development of "a new clip culture." Users' attention span, Hurley said, is about two or three minutes, and he doubted the site would see longer-form content take off. He said that over 60 percent of all Internet video streams in the U.S. originate from YouTube, and that their nearest competitor (MSN Video?) was in the teens.
Arrieta said that he believed in the Internet as a new tool for discovering talent. "Sony's investment in iFilm," he said, "was because we saw it as a way to source talent."
