Recently in Creative Economy Category
For example, on the service end:
"Decades of experience, creativity, and growth have made film production and distribution one of the most economically important industries in the United States," notes the 2001 U.S. Department of Commerce Report on Runaway Production, "[u]nfortunately, our official statistics are woefully deficient." Current available data does not offer a precise picture of employment numbers for the full rage of professions involved in motion picture production or, for that matter, consistent measures of the industry's economic impact both regionally and nationally. Data available for production days and budgets is primarily collected by local film commissions and prone to irregularities and inaccuracies by default of naturally occurring idiosyncrasies in the measures and classifications used by those organizations.
In the absence of incentives or common effective measures, figures used are often volunteered by production companies and, therefore, in-auditable or even suspect. According to one film commissioner I spoke with, volunteered figures do not necessarily reflect actual monies spent in one's own region, especially when a production crosses state lines. In those cases, revenues accounted for in one state may be simultaneously accounted for in another state's revenue totals. Obtaining aggregate data at the national level is even more difficult.
In terms of overall economic model:
Outside the specificity of film production, we may have begun to
rectify our overall fiscal vagueness about the creative industries with
the recent adoption of the North American Industry Classification
System (NAICS) that replaces the U.S. Standard Industrial
Classification (SIC) system originally devised in the 1930s. The SIC
system, although periodically updated throughout the last century,
structured our economy on an obsolete industrially driven model. The
NAICS identifies hundreds of new, emerging, and advanced technology
industries, while reorganizing industry into more meaningful
sectors--especially in the service-producing segments of the economy.
Then in terms of advertising:
The growing price and waning influence of advertising expenditure
on mainstream television channels is a serious issue for many
advertisers today. Intolerance about wasted ad spending is mounting.
ROI is the today's advertising catch phrase. The linkage gap
between producers and consumers of non-subscription broadcast content
amounts to failure of means for assessing consumer preference with
suppliers and network television was chosen by thirty-two percent of
respondents as the worst medium for proving ROI, according to a study
by Advertising Age.
Advertising, long the main revenue source for much
of the media industry, is rapidly moving to the Internet, and shown by
the financial success of sites like Yahoo! and Google. This is part of
the trend in advertising from "mass" marketing to "measurable"
marketing. The interactivity of the Internet is driving the process of
fragmentation for broadcasters, but has the potential to provide
advertisers with information about the taste, preferences, and habits
of consuming audiences. So the Internet offers advertisers a valuable
advantage that mass media cannot provide.
Entertainment financials:
Many commentators have noted how inefficiently Hollywood does business. A studio will spend millions of dollars marketing a particular star in lieu of having its own brand only to toss that brand away at conclusion of a project. There is no question that media and entertainment are by nature risky. What I am suggesting is that there is a slow evolution towards efficiency measures in the media firm and entertainment firm business models. So for example, gaming firms reuse code from failed titles instead of starting from scratch with every title. Digital technology allows for greater fluidity and quantification in distribution, for example: In d-cinema the ticketing systems are integrated into the pre-show systems and concession stands, so business can see clearly what is working and what does not.
In the social consciousness:
Americans are generally oblivious to the economic benefit of media and entertainment. The industry is often viewed as glamorous when in fact it is also anything but that. So much of the discussion, in my view, is overly politicized by both the left and right: "Hollywood is destroying America!" or "Advertising is destroying art by commodifying it." What I aim to do is open up a space for discussion that looks at these matters in context.
As media and entertainment follow an R&D model, like oil exploration and pharmaceuticals; I thought the article below was interesting in light of my thoughts above about the increasing trend towards efficiencies in the creative industries.Fundamental to solving creative inefficiencies is understanding the nature of the creative process, in as much as it is developing models or solutions that make those processes profitable and capable of sustained duplication.
So the solution lies as much in developing models, as it does in understanding the limitations of those models...
FT.com / Columnists / Lunch with the FT - Lunch with the FT: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“There is a lot more randomness in biotechnology and any form of medical discovery. The role of design is overestimated. Every time we plan on trying to find a drug we don’t because it closes our mind. How are we discovering drugs? From the side-effects of other drugs.” Researchers very often “change their story” when they discover something by accident to give the impression it was by design.
Though not well known, there exists a dynamic cross-fertilization between media, entertainment and defense technology: i.e., military surveillance, targeting, and weapons systems use technology that was developed primarily for motion pictures and entertainment software. In fact, the U.S. government currently employs Panavision's 300x compound zoom lens for military surveillance; and according to an interview I conducted for The Second Sight (http://www.alexaobrien.com/TheSecondSight) with Bob Harvey, senior vice president of worldwide sales at Panavision, federal contracts with the U.S. State Department are the fastest growing segment of Panavision's business.
More provocative is how Hollywood and video games drive the development of high-speed, high-resolution digital image capture, management, transmission, and display that have implications for fields where these advanced technological applications would be economically unviable to develop on their own. Entertainment software has lead to faster introduction and deployment of processors, broadband networks, and high definition disks like HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. But, "IBM places value on chips made for entertainment software that goes beyond revenue and profits," says Dr. John Kelly, senior vice president and group executive for IBM Technology Group: "These chips help drive technology in other areas." The Mercury Computer's CELL based blade server, for example, can handle the requirements of sonar and radar computation for military or scientific applications, because of its ability to process real time data streams. "The Cell BE processor was originally designed for the volume home entertainment market," says Craig Lund, chief technology officer of Mercury Computer Systems, "but its architecture of nine heterogeneous on-chip cores is well-suited to the type of distributed, real-time processing that will power tomorrow's digital battlefield."
If the U.S. military is the primary global military power, and this hegemony is based on the ability of the U.S. Navy to dominate the world's oceans, then the condition of hegemony is partially based on the superior numbers and technology of U.S. naval vessels and augmented significantly by U.S. dominance in space-based reconnaissance technology, made possible by entertainment software consumers and movie goers world-wide.
Most Americans, however, are oblivious to the considerable role that content industries play in job and wealth creation - not only in terms of regional economic development and growing high-tech industry, but also in terms of U.S. global economic competitiveness:
- In fact, the media, entertainment, and cultural copyright sectors create new jobs at a rate three times faster than the remaining economy. In 2002, these sectors employed 5.48 million workers and accounted for six percent of U.S. gross domestic product. These sectors also generated $89.26 billion in export revenue - surpassing every other category including automotive, aviation, agricultural, as well as chemical and allied products.
- Foreign sales of motion pictures alone totaled $17 billion in 2002. The motion picture industry is the only U.S. sector that boasts a surplus balance of trade with every other country in the world; and the international sale of filmed entertainment plays a significant role in our nation's overall trade surplus in services.
- U.S. sales of entertainment software also totaled $8.2 billion in 2004, and U.S. game designers exported an additional $2.1 billion the same year. Deutsche Bank forecasts that global revenue for game software will grow at thirteen percent annually over the next four years, while PricewaterhouseCooper projects that the U.S. media and entertainment industries will be worth $690 billion by 2009.
This development has hastened the transformation of the U.S. economy from one based largely on information and knowledge to one driven principally by creativity. John Howkins categorizes the creative economy to include fifteen creative sectors - such as research and development, software, design, and content industries like film, music, and video games - that produce intellectual property in the form of patents, copyrights, trademarks and proprietary designs. The annual global revenue for Howkin's fifteen identified sectors was $2.24 trillion in 1999. The U.S. share represents forty percent of the market with revenue totaling $960 billion. The U.S. share also accounts for more than forty percent of research and development, forty percent of television and radio, and thirty percent of film. Howkins calculates that core copyright industries will be worth $6.1 trillion internationally in fifteen years. U.S. dominance in these segments - more than productivity improvements related to new technology and new manufacturing methods - is responsible for much of the nation's global economic competitiveness since the nineteen-eighties.
Community Interest Companies - FAQ Annotated
Social enterprises are diverse. They include local community enterprises, social firms, mutual organisations such as co-operatives, and large-scale organisations operating nationally or internationally. There is no single legal model for social enterprise. They include companies limited by guarantee, industrial and provident societies, and companies limited by shares; some organisations are unincorporated and others are registered charities." from ' Social Enterprise - a strategy for success'
A CIC is a new type of company, designed for social enterprises that want to use their profits and assets for the public good. CICs will be easy to set up, with all the flexibility and certainty of the company form, but with some special features to ensure they are working for the benefit of the community.
"A social enterprise is a business with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or in the community, rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit for shareholders and owners.
Social enterprises are an exciting and fast-growing sector. Yet some of the legal forms were originally designed for completely different types of organisation. The Government wants to support the sector by creating a modern and appropriate legal vehicle and to help raise their profile.What are the differences between community interest companies and charities?
- Charities must be established exclusively for charitable purposes, but a CICs can be established for any lawful purpose, as long as their activities are carried on for the benefit of the community
- Charities have certain tax advantages that CICs do not have
- In return for those advantages, charities are subject to more onerous regulation than CICs
- The CIC legal form was specifically designed to provide a purpose-built legal framework and a “brand” identity for social enterprises that want to adopt the limited company form
- CICs will be free to operate more “commercially” than charities (e.g. CICs limited by shares can pay dividends to individual shareholders, subject to a cap), but stakeholders in CICs will still have the assurance of community benefit provided by the asset lock and transparency about their activities ability through the community interest report
Why be a community interest company rather than a charity?
There is no doubt that charitable status is exactly right for many who wish to further charitable objectives and it is likely that most organisations operating for the public benefit (and who are eligible for charity status) will choose to be charities, not least for the fiscal advantages.
The sort of people who will want to set up a CIC will typically be entrepreneurs who want to do good in a form other than charity. This may be because:
- They are looking to work for community benefit with the relative freedom of the non-charitable company form to identify and adapt to circumstances, but with a clear assurance of not-for-profit distribution status.
- Members of the board of a charity may only be paid where the constitution contains such a power and it can be considered to be in the best interests of the charity. It means that, in general, the founder of a charity who wishes to be paid cannot be on the board and must give up strategic control of the organisation to a volunteer board, which is often unacceptable.
- The definition of community interest that will apply to CICs will be wider than the public interest test for charity.
- CICs will be specifically identified with social enterprise. Some organisations may feel that consequently this is a more suitable than charitable status.
From Mamet to the "Office" the discusssion over Hollywood Financials is gaining traction in the public arena. I call this phase one, dispel myths and get real.
Hear the noteworthy Leonard Lopate Podcast Interview here.
Download the MP3 here.
I am not sure if anyone noticed the parody about our common misconceptions and outdated notions about creativity and art as they relate to the economy on last night's episode of "Office" called aptly enough "Business School" (Episode 3)
Television has never been better and I have great faith in the generation of artists and creators coming off age today.
Once again, these two small examples are symptomatic of the larger movement and discussion within the creative industries about solving the endemic vagueness around creative financials that I alluded two last year in one of my first posts. This discussion will intensify in the coming years and include Wall Street and private equity funds and emergent media firms like Google, Itunes, and Amazon.
Viacom Asks YouTube to Remove Clips - New York Times
In a sign of the growing tension between old-line media and the new Internet behemoths, Viacom, the parent company of MTV and Comedy Central, demanded yesterday that YouTube, the video-sharing Web site owned by Google, remove more than 100,000 clips of its programming...
The dispute underscored the tense dance that major media companies are doing with Google, which bought YouTube for $1.65 billion last October. Google hopes to strike deals that will give it the rights to mainstream programming and also wipe away its potential liability for any violations of copyright law by YouTube so far...
YouTube is supported by advertising, but in most cases it does not share that revenue with copyright holders.
These developments are important to note, but the following comment jumped out at me and formed a synergy of thought about intellectual property and property rights in an age where the frontier no longer exists and natural resources of the world have become scarce.
"They choose not to filter out copyrighted content, " said the spokesman, Carl D. Folta. He added that the company apparently had the technology to filter out pornography and hateful material, which is rarely seen on YouTube.
It is no secret that totalitarian governments like the one in China use filtering software designed and sold by western companies, headquartered in liberal democracies.
I am not suggesting that Google’s use of filtering software in the context of this New York Time’s article is totalitarian. It’s not. The thoughts that flowed within me after reading the article and which will follow do not directly relate to the content of the article itself.
NB I do know Google's relationship with the Chinese Communist Party is complicit when Google agreed to filter the Internet in order to secure their place in the oxymoronic "opening" of the Chinese market(s). Who knows? I suspect they rationalize that their decision to do so is part of China's long term transition to liberal democracy brought about by the eventual increase in the economic and consequent political power or the Chinese middle class: in other words, a slow revolution or political evolution. That model is certainly documented in human history. I hope they are right.
In terms of any technology, for example, it is not the knowledge of how to split the atom that creates ill, it is the contextual use of technology that creates both good and evil.
More to my ultimate point, I was more struck by the description of the filtering technology's application and the way in which its reference in the article further illuminated to me my own age and its philosophical dilemmas.
Perhaps, the mention of filtering technology describe within reminded me of how its benign application for Google could be used in other contexts. Certainly, Viacom has the right to protect its intellectual property however it wishes. But what about this notion of intellectual property and ideas itself, the life blood our political and economic discourse?
The rise of fundamentalism and the changing post "Cold War" world order has been studied and described by others more accomplished than me, including Samuel P. Huntington in his "Foreign Affairs" essay and then book, The Clash of Civilizations.
News, media and politics are interdependent organisms...and certainly many political scientists focus on their relationship to one another both in terms of the political cycle of nation states (elections), but also their political economy, in other worlds the market place. The West increasingly depends on sectors like entertainment, research and development, and defense for its continued economic growth, and its overall political economy is direct responsibility for much of the West’s political stability and power.
We live in an age where entertainment and defense are curious bedfellows. For example, entertainment software, as I have said elsewhere on this site, drives the technological development of the processors used by the defense sector.
I have never heard anyone, however, flesh out the dilemma of Locke's notion of property rights in his "Second Treatise on Nature" (the philosophical underpinning of our own democratic republic is this notion of property rights) vis a vis intellectual or abstract property rights, central themselves to our creative economy, the underpinning of the West's continued economic growth.
When intellectual property becomes the central driver of our economy, as it has, and the organs of information that distribute that property are consolidated (as they naturally are. See Creatonomics), what does this mean for the average citizen? For those who poo poo these ideas as too high brow for the mass, or somehow separate mass culture from the philosophical debates of our time, I say, “Forget the forest or the trees, you, my friend, are missing ecosystem of the forest.”
Will our citizen own his plot of land in the media and entertainment landscape, or will he be forced to rent space from the company owned tenement, distribute his goods by the company owned railroad, and buy his supplies from the company owned store? What does self-protection, natural to Locke’s notion of natural rights mean for the individual and social group within society?
More importantly, the growing factionalism of our political discourse and the ceaseless polemics of extremist ideas are not simply a rehashing of polemics from times before. These extreme polemics are manifest because of the underlying conflict and philosophical dilemmas of our time, the repercussions of which are experienced through every organ of society, including its central organs of information and ideas, mass media, entertainment, and art.
There is no save haven or neutral space for the tolerant in a world with less resources and no frontier to escape to. This is the philosophical dilemma of our age and we must understand the dilemma as such. Our liberal democracy depends upon it. Our economic innovation, which drives our nation’s wealth, also depends upon that neutral and open space.
The role of art, information, propaganda, and communication are the new frontier and the battleground in our ‘New World of Information’. Is there an alternative to the increasing space that extremist polemics take up in our nation’s intellectual life? Any alternative must ultimately float the complex tensions of political correctness and fundamental secularism that is equally damaging, in my opinion, to the fabric of our society.
Understanding these questions is the work of my generation and those living whose experience and wisdom can guide our society’s safe passage. There are always consequences, even to inaction, so the focus of those who are interested need not be filled with petitions for the lazy.
When the pilgrims came to North America, they were escaping religious persecution in the Old World. A war of ideas is not new to human history, the epoch that we are in, however, is critical to the very existence of those organisms that we take for granted in the West.
I continue to look to the former dissidents of eastern bloc countries, like the former Czechoslovakian, Vaclav Havel, 'playwright and antipolitican' later president of the democratic Czech Republic, for insight into the post-modern world order.
For example, Havel wrote in the 1981 in his famous essay the "Power of the Powerless” about the post totalitarian state: where ideology is the tyrant (not the Politburo) and how the line of complicity runs through each citizen, including the grocer who puts up his seemingly benign poster which states, "Workers of the World Unite".
All of us live in interesting times, but those of us involved in media have a tremendous responsibility for those who come after us. I look forward to investigating and understanding these questions myself and in the timely work of my generation and others more capable and experienced than me. More on these ideas later.
I will not have access to the Internet between November 4th and the 18th, because I will be traveling on a sail boat from Grenada to Antigua. Please excuse the blog interruption.
I leave you for the time being with my undigested thoughts on the broad and relevant topic “the evolving nature and aesthetics of creative content”.
First, it covers the evolving structures of storytelling via new media. Examples of new media structures are foureyedmonsters.com and lonelygirl15.com; and interactive television content that is created on the web to supplement traditional shows. Reality TV is obviously interactive but LOST is the best original dramatic example of this interactivity; and then of course, their is the growth of user generated content from channels like YouTube and CNN): What do these new storytelling structures look like? How are these structures similar and different to their predecessors?
Television, can have a relationship with the internet that film cannot. I imagine that the nature of going to the movies will still demand High Imaging that allows for suspension of disbelief...but there is a degrading of image quality and techniques that lower-end digital technologies have supplanted into the aesthetic psyche of many younger viewers – just look at the ads created and aimed at the under 30 demographic. Old tricks. Why is that? Perhaps because they are expert consumers of electronic stories and know it’s manufactured.... They are deconstructing the image.
Another thought, I think of Mark Chiolis’ (Grass Valley) remark to me in my interview with him:
"Today there are a number of thought provoking questions that are being asked. What happens when there is a true RGB 4k (there isn't one today) sensor that rivals, if not exceeds, that of today's film stock? One of the arguments for film is that people like the "look" which includes the grain and movement through the gate. What happens when the "game-boy" generation takes over? Having grown up with "video" is this the "look" they want to see? Will they have a different set of standards to compare to?"
Film (theatrical features) is (are) different. I think they will demand even more heighten realism and I suspect that Digital 3D will become increasingly popular in that format in the years to come (an outgrowth of the gamers demand for a heightened experience).
What are the fundamental relationships that the younger generation seem to be exploring via this new media content and traditional content? Some may say the subject matter is generally solipsistic, passive - an outgrowth perhaps of the individuals solitary communion with the anonymous web or with media itself...but look at the bleeding edge technology and science of virtual reality. Look at the studies of the psycho-physical effects of these media tools on users in medical and defense research. Passive is not the right word to describe this relationship. Interactive is better. But with what (media) and whom (other players)?
I say one cannot understand this generation unless they have a MySpace page and love it. Why? There is a freedom of movement in the field of archetype and symbol that enables both artist and audience to observe without disclosure, absorb without acquisition, and create without the demand for conclusion. The repetition of archetypical representation uncovers both artist's and audience's collective mythologies, thereby revealing: The anonymous is personal.
Renowned urban planer Richard Florida notes that the fundamental social and economic changes that underpin the Creative Economy, demonstrate that in “virtually every aspect of life, weak ties have replaced the stronger bonds that once gave structure to society. Rather than live in one town for decades, we now move about. Instead of communities defined by close associations and deep commitments to family, friends, and organizations, we seek places where we can make friends and acquaintances easily and live quasi-anonymous lives. The decline in the strength of our ties to people and institutions is a product of the increasing number of ties we have.”
How have television and new media influenced the sensibility and subject matter of creative content. I see the primary relationship that the younger generation is exploring, is with the media itself (I am not talking about the news media, I am talking about media itself). You may critiqued the passivity of video games...but, perhaps that passivity masks an exploration with identity that is not understood by non-participants and therefore disregarded as irrelevant. I say this exploration is powerful and emergent in movies like Adaptation and I Heart Huckabees. This relationship between identity and media is increasingly portrayed as mystical, interactive, and “high touch”. Their is a propensity for role playing, a desire for authenticity coupled with a disdain of truthiness and even traditional ideology. For dramatic content and docu-reality, they create satire and even sarcasm (the mass may also create cynicism, but I would never characterize this generation as cynical. They know the line of complicity runs through each of them).
In some respects, “reality shows” seem like an outgrowth of this propensity for role-playing, a study of the dramas of personality. In deconstructing the “sit com” and “documentary” and even the “commercial brand”, there appears to be an investigation of topics like truth and being.
Regarding lonelygirl15.com. As one writer I spoke with remarked, “Entertainment is always flirting with reality. It seems that things that don't aim to be thought of as real do a much better job. Verisimilitude, it's what it's all about."
Is there a common thread in the subject and structures explored by newer creative content, a post-post modern sensibility? See the NYT’s article, “Brand Underground”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/magazine/30brand.html?ex=1311912000&en=82edb890b1d6c977&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
There are several larger forces manifesting in the recent development of MTV's Virtual Laguna Beach for example. One of them is the evolution of brand: how the concept has extended itself into the realm of branded communities in the digital age. Gamers (the generation under age 35 and including generations X and Y) have grown up in a world saturated by brand so that the phenomenon is now a vehicle for personal expression and identity beyond the ostensible confines of a corporate mandate (well, except their own). Commentators like Rob Walker (The Brand Underground, NYT) have elucidated the social phenomena well, however, they tend to look at the expression as another failed modernist attempt to beat the system. Hand me the cyanide, the revolution is over and we lost!
Boomers are wired to view creativity as a choice between “selling out” or “sticking it to the man” and the quest for the great society as a dogmatic battle between the mediocrity of relativism and the virtue of absolutes. To use former bohemian terminology, today’s generation does not have that hang up. “They have relatively little generational consciousness,” writes David Brooks, “because this generation is for the most part not fighting to emancipate itself from the past.” The suggestion is provocative considering that while “the baby boom included the largest U.S. birth cohort to date, the game generation will ultimately outdo the baby boom in size, in scope, and presumably in influence,” notes John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade in their study of the game generation’s influence on organizational values in business. “The total size of the game generation is already greater than the baby boom ever was,” and the whole generation of gamers, “including X and Y and letters to be named later-simply approach the world differently than their predecessors.”
I am a broken record, but like dissident antipoliticians from the former Czechoslovakia, who used satire and absurdity to highlight the fact that in a postmodern consumer society the “line of complicity runs through each of us," this new American generation distrusts political grandstanding and even traditional forms of organized politics. Hence, the popularity of so-called no brow satires like South Park, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show.
The playwright Heiner Mueller once remarked that the potency of theater in his native East Germany was based on the absence of other ways of getting messages across to people. "As a result," Mueller says, "Theater here has taken over the function of other media in the West," before now. While the never ending surface chatter of talking points and double speak on both the left and the right continue to erode the value of words, they also inflate the space between the lines.
None of this mentions how the game generation take globalization for granted and the growing crossover of cultural content from other traditions, “bollywood”, Japanese Anime et cetera.
Reality television is a result evolving market forces. Certainly, the rising cost of production and the demand for content with the worldwide proliferation of cable is one obvious driver. Reality television especially of the type that is integrated with the Internet or with direct viewer response is also part of the evolving trend towards interactive media with the younger demographic. Interactivity is also part of the gaming generation's fascination with role-playing. Sims in the world of traditional television content is found in the form of reality television. According to John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade, in their study of the gaming generation's attitudes towards business, entertainment software has trained this generation to expect a heightened relationship based on immediate rewards or consequences with media and the world at large. I believe this ethos towards role-playing and interactivity is seen in the form of reality-based shows like "American Idol" and the "Apprentice".
With advertising in turmoil on broadcast TV, reality shows - like American Idol or even Tommy Hilfiger's less successful "The Cut" - take product placement well beyond a can of Coke enjoyed by our favorite television show's character. "Idol was simply a marketing tool for me to sell records," says Simon Cowell on "Larry King Live." "The show was one thing but it was actually my record label, which was the most important thing. So, my background is I run a record label, and I still run a record label and that's really my passion.
The real winner of "American Idol" is Cingular Wireless. Cingular has an exclusive deal with the show's producers that let customers text their votes instead of trying to call in on busy lines. In Season Four last year, 41.5-million text votes were sent in; Cingular charges between $19.99 per month for a text package with 2,500 messages included and 10 cents per message on a pay-as-you-go plan, meaning the company raked in as much as $4.15-million in text messaging fees from American Idol votes alone last year. When the Apprentice was at its peak, Ad Age writes, Yahoo's product placement was a solid success, "After the ice cream challenge during the second season, viewers were told to go search Yahoo, and “Within three hours of the end of the show, the term ‘Apprentice Ice Cream’ was the third-most-searched term on Yahoo that day. By 5 o’clock the next afternoon, the ice cream was sold out,” says Yahoo VP Jim Moloshok. And the results kept coming. After the Levis challenge, “[f]our days after that episode ran, viewers were still searching Yahoo avidly for ‘Apprentice Jeans’ to get a copy of the catalog. And "Apprentice Jeans" was still ranked No. 1 among Yahoo Web searches,” AdAge reports. Using secret tracking devices, Yahoo discovered that “The core demographic for the ice cream was 21 to 34 years old. For the jeans, it was 35 to 44.” Yahoo VP Moloshok says, “If you can complete the loop, product placements like Mark Burnett is doing are one of the most effective ways to get people engaged with a product.”
Now CNN like MTV Flux are taking "reality" one-step further implementing an infrastructure for user-based content.
Advertising Age - MediaWorks - Dell to Sponsor CNN's 'Citizen Journalism'
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- At a time when much of the digital media world's focus is on how to monetize user-generated content, CNN has signed Dell as a major sponsor of its foray into citizen journalism -- iReports and the CNN Exchange program.
I am particularly interested in how the emergent creative economy will influence Hollywood financials. One of the hypothetical parallels I have drawn in this blog is between movie making and the pharmaceutical business. The latter is a creative industry that continues to formulate and incorporate efficiency measures into R&D. There is no question creativity is and will always be risky, time consuming and expensive. How are these respective types of creativity/innovation similar or dissimilar? I suspect that media and entertainment will continue to evolve in respect to how efficiently they do business. Creative flukes that generate a conflagration of interest are certain, but what about measurable success for creative content considered more standard fair. What implications do these developments have for the nature of content? Here is an interesting article on the Euro RSCG study the "Bollywood Predictameter":
Do you watch a film 'coz a 'prosumer' said so?- The Times of India
Called the Bollywood Predictameter, it has written off movies like Don, Umrao Jaan andDhoom 2 as flops even before they have been released. The predictameter, which is actually a study based on marketing and advertising efforts of yet-to-be-released movies, claims that Munnabhai Lagey Raho will be a bigger hit than Kabhie Alvida Na Kehna. Not only that, it has already 'predicted' the BO fates of 18 A-list Bollywood movies to be released later this year!
Business Standard - Disney in India
How soon shall we see a Bollywood film made by Disney?
It’s a matter of time but not in the too distant future. Our intention is to make Disney-branded clean family movies for the entertainment of the local Indian market. But we have to first make sure that it works for the Indian audience, then this will go to the Indian audience around the world. If we make two to three movies in the next three or four years, I think it is a good beginning. We have recently hired P S Shyam, the executive director for Rakesh Mehra’s Rang de Basanti. He is head of studio production in India and currently looking at scripts, ideas.
America in the Creative and Innovative Economy - Government Technology
Most economists now seem to agree that the emerging so-called "creative and innovative" economy represents America's salvation. Given that "the world is flat" -- as author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has pointed out in a book by the same name -- this new thinking encourages America once again to do things it does best: "create and innovate."
EContentMag.com: Group Members Only Launches MySpace Type Technology for Businesses
Group Members Only has announced a MySpace type social networking technology to help corporations solve issues related to collaboration, innovation, communication, and networking between employees, customers, vendors, and partners. Group Members Only was recently launched by a group of business and technology entrepreneurs whose background include Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Oracle, Peoplesoft, and Amazon.com.
Will the growing segmentation and narrowcasting of television and the Internet erode this dominance? How will the intermix of television and the internet contribute to this? I ask myself these questions.
I believe U.S. media and entertainment are undervalued assets in the American economy. It trendy to say that American films are of poor quality and that our media is valueless. Certainly, the media may deserve criticism for becoming in some respects the "un-ratified fourth branch" of American government. However, outside the context of THAT discussion, U.S. media and entertainment industries are the only U.S. sectors that boast a surplus balance of trade with nearly every nation in the world. That deserves some attention, consideration, and respect.
Creative copyright industries will always engender debate as to their cultural and social effect. Since these industries are at the core of the emerging global creative economy we can expect these discussions to become more heated as time goes on: whether the topic be American movies, Disneyland, or cloning. The point I want to make is this: These debates about cultural effect can also overpower our discussions about these sectors' legitimate economic benefit. Many countries may also use these debates as smoke screens to cover up their protectionist policies.
Media heir wants 'Airbus of the web' - Financial Times - MSNBC.com
Excerpts:
Christoph Mohn, the heir to the Bertelsmann media empire, has called for Europe to create an Airbus of the internet, to compete with US giants such as Google and Ebay.
"So far, we have not built up a sizeable internet company in Europe," he said. "It's not good for the European Union. Nano-technology, biotechnology and the internet are the growth industries but in most of these the position is not good for Europe."
Mr Mohn endorsed the controversial Franco-German plan to build a state-funded European search engine called Quaero, saying: "It's a little bit like Airbus Industries. I don't think it requires consolidation [of Eur-ope's internet industry] but it needs co-ordination."
Quaero was launched this year with initial funding of €1.7bn ($2.2bn) to develop voice-based and picture-based search technologies. "[Quaero] is not just about 'let's beat Google'," Mr Mohn said. "It's 'let's build up a competitive internet industry'." Bertelsmann and Lycos Europe are members of the Quaero consortium, which includes Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, Thomson and France Telecom.
Moenk's piece on the game generation's social application of technology and its influences on Web 2.0 design is both insightful and uniquely refreshing. While everyone is talking about marketing on MySpace, Moenk focuses on the effect of the MySpace ethos on business culture as the game generation matures into their productive years.“They have relatively little generational consciousness,” writes political columist David Brooks about the game generation. Why? "[B]ecause this generation is for the most part not fighting to emancipate itself from the past.” This suggestion is provocative considering that while “the baby boom included the largest U.S. birth cohort to date, the game generation will ultimately outdo the baby boom in size, in scope, and presumably in influence,” notes John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade in their study of the game generation’s influence on organizational values in business. In fact, “the total size of the game generation is already greater than the baby boom ever was,” and the whole generation of gamers, “including X and Y and letters to be named later-simply approach the world differently than their predecessors.”
This generational amnesia is partly the result of the movement away from traditional forms of social capital towards weaker, and more numerous ties. Renowned urban planer Richard Florida notes that the fundamental social and economic changes that underpin the Creative Economy, demonstrate that in “virtually every aspect of life, weak ties have replaced the stronger bonds that once gave structure to society. Rather than live in one town for decades, we now move about. Instead of communities defined by close associations and deep commitments to family, friends, and organizations, we seek places where we can make friends and acquaintances easily and live quasi-anonymous lives. The decline in the strength of our ties to people and institutions is a product of the increasing number of ties we have.” Continues Florida:
"What appears to be self-indulgence to conservatives or devices of corporate oppression to liberals in fact turns out to be the result of the rational evolution of economic forces. Changes in taste and lifestyle that at first glance seem superficial and unrelated turn out to be rooted in widespread, fundamental economic change.”Excerpts and Highlights from Moenk's article:
While much of the discussion regarding social networks in the business community is focused on word of mouth marketing and user generated content, this trend has even greater ramifications for the way it will impact businesses internally.
Many analysts are of the opinion that applications of the future will be increasingly web based. While this idea has been met with much skepticism, Microsoft has aggressively begun to shift gears in order to adapt to these developments.
The timing for this is impeccable as Google is currently threatening to eat into their Microsoft Office market share with free web based solutions such as Google Writely and Google Spreadsheet.
Given that there are now web based alternatives to much of the productivity software that we use every day, how does this new generation of tools differ and improve upon what’s already out there? The answer lies, believe it or not, with social networking services like MySpace, social bookmarking sites like Yahoo’s del.icio.us, and peer to peer social networks like the blogosphere.
The most successful of these services are designed to be intrinsically social, while focusing on the utility they provide to individuals. Thus the web not only becomes a great place for individual productivity, but also real time group collaboration and community building around the information that is being interacted with. This balancing of needs between that of the individual and the group perhaps gives us an indication of what was missing in enterprise ‘groupware’ of the nineteen nineties.
In the past few years there has been a fundamental change in the way teenagers socialize which can be credited with two developments: the proliferation of cell phones, and the rapid adoption of the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook. The most profound ramifications of Web 2.0 won’t be fully felt nor understood until the MySpace generation begins to enter the workforce in the next few years. The current level of connectivity between students in high school and college is drastically different from anytime in the 20th century or even the first three years of the 21st.
In the Information Age where the adage "it’s not just what you know but who you know" is increasingly relevant towards maintaining a competitive advantage, today’s teenagers are learning and largely influencing the development of new networking practices that are foreign to current business professionals.
While the old paradigm of the web is focused on static information, the new web is developing into a dynamic collaborative medium where the social network is ubiquitous with content creation and information flows from person to person more efficiently with the individual in control of what they see and whom they interact with.
Email may currently be the most used application for collaboration because it is what the first generation of web users are familiar with, but as the MySpace generation begins to enter the workforce they will rapidly influence the adoption of tools that embody the collaborative social practices to which they are growing accustomed.
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 first link is the raw data from the BEA sorted by state and region alphabetically from 2000-2004. 2005 has not been released as yet. The links below that are then sorted by highest gross state or region decending for each respective year. It should be no surprise that California and New York and their respective regions rank highest for all years:
In The Experience Economy, Joseph Pines II and James H. Gilmore spell out how experiences are the fourth economic offering as distinct from services:
"Consumers don’t want services, financial or otherwise - they want experiences. Consumers dine at theme restaurants such as the Hard Rock Cafe or Planet Hollywood, shop at experiential destinations such as Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles or Beursplien in Rotterdam, and vacation at a Disney theme park or other venues that stage a feast of engaging sensations and dramatic stories for them."
Pines and Gilmore continue:
"Experiences have always been at the heart of entertainment, from plays and concerts to movies and T V shows. Over the past few decades, however, the number of entertainment options has exploded. Today, the universe has expanded to encompass a vast array of new kinds of experiences, as new technologies encourage whole new genres of experience, such as interactive games, World Wide Web sites, motion-based simulators, 3D movies and virtual reality."
In "Good Morning, Hollywood," Munarriz offers an interesting proposal to theater owners faced with a waning box-office and increased competition from alternative media. Munarriz' suggestion elaborates on this growing trend towards experiential marketing and the ethos of the creative economy.
Munarriz writes:
"The studios can deal with the audience shift from theater to DVD. They'll get their money for delivering the content either way. It's the theater chains that are spooked, because their reach begins and ends with the theatrical run. The studios take a generous cut of the box-office take, so theaters have been relying on things like marked-up concessions... I may never understand, however, why concession menus err on the side of boring. I mean, sure, I understand the magic of high-margin wieners, salty snacks, and candy. But what I don't get is how nearsighted an industry can be by not realizing that the whole "dinner and a movie" mindset can be altered in its favor with a more meal-worthy, experience-driven approach to feeding the captive film buffs."
Here is a summary of upcoming pieces in my four part series on digital technology and emergent media trends for 2006:
The second installment will focus on the changing nature of our industry’s below-the-line labor market vis-à-vis digital acquisition and post, and how newer technologies are transforming our industry’s culture and training cycle. I will illustrate how our industry is moving from a culture of apprenticeship to a culture of technicians, and how this development fits into the larger context of globalization and the creative economy.
The third piece will focus on growing demand for greater clarity and efficiency in the way that Hollywood and other creative industries do business. I see the viability of digital technology as part of an emerging trend in Hollywood towards solving the endemic vagueness around creative financials that are symptomatic of our outmoded ideas about creativity.
The fourth piece will focus on emerging markets and the changing nature of content that is resulting from these newer technologies and other generational and economic trends.
Cheers,
Alexa D. O'Brien
A specter is haunting America - a specter of the
creative economy. Its expressions
are the lifeblood of our nation's economic muscle, and the metamorphoses of our
social and economic organs are symptoms of its manifestation. Yet, we are largely unaware of its
existence, and its ideation remains unarticulated in our public discourse -
obscured as it were by the rapping bare knuckles of narrow-minded extremities
on the left and right hands of our cultural divide. The more opposable of left-handed thumbs
call the phantom menace capitalism
and condemn the corporatization of art and the commodification of culture. On the right, all fingers - except
pinkies - point to the sun setting in the West and call the umbrage Hollywood. For
it is better, that one of your fingers should perish rather than have your
whole hand cast into Gehenna.
I have reduced these analogue dubs into binary code
- comprised of the numeral zero and - for the increasing number of this
magazine's bilingual readers - the numero
uno. I then filtered out
discordant noise using compression algorithms that preserved each sound bite's
ideological fidelity, but I scrambled the signals so that left and right
channels reversed stereophonic polarity.
Presto change-o! At zero
decibels, the human ear perceives near silence - or the sound of both hands
clapping for the "no brow" culture of today's youth.† The canine ear, however,
would still detect the looping chant of hippies asking if that is freedom rock
they hear, and if so, that the volume be turned up.
Friends, country/city men/women! Before you hand cyanide to the old
man behind the curtain - excuse me, 35mm camera - or have postmodern nightmares
of movie executives screaming, “What are our theaters now if not the tombs and
monuments to Film?” Before you condemn the blasphemy of Technicolor's "technology
agnostic" e-cinema rollout; or become a digital Bolshevik, shooting at the
heart and mind of film's aristocracy with your web clips of skateboarding dogs;
before you write that long-procrastinated blog manifesto on the weak social
capital of myspace friendship; or, better yet, one to educate our Prince de’
Medici; keep in mind: This is no joke.
Call it what you will, but the creative economy is here, and our
nation's and your region's wealth depend upon it.
Our means of production is no longer capital,
natural resources, or labor, declares economist Peter Drucker. It's
information.
Yet, one in four IT jobs and ten to twenty percent of financial
services jobs in the United States and Europe will be offshored by 2010. Forrester Research estimates that from
2000 to 2015 some 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages will
shift from the U.S. to lower-cost countries like India, China, and Russia. Manufacturing bore the brunt of outsourcing
in the past. Today, the service
sector, which employs four-fifths of the labor force, is increasingly affected.[1]
“In the old days," says computer scientist
Vernor Vinge, “anybody with even routine skills could get a job as a
programmer. That isn’t true
anymore. The routine functions are
increasingly being turned over to machines.”[2] Appligenics, for example, a small
British company, has created software that writes software. The application is "up to 500,000
times faster than human programmers and completely error-free," says Jim
Close, the company's business development director: "That means whereas a
human would consider four hundred lines of computer code a good day's work, our
software writes that in under a quarter of a second."[3] Even online à la carte legal services have made inroads into the legal
industry. Analysts say, "As
online resources grow, the demand for traditional services force lawyers to
lower fees."[4]
More provocative than outsourcing, is the magnitude
of convergence between telecommunications, digital technology and
industry. This development has
hastened the transformation of our economy from one based largely on
information and knowledge to one driven principally by creativity. John Howkins categorizes the
creative economy to include fifteen creative sectors - such as research and
development, software, design, and content industries like film, music, and
video games - that produce
intellectual property in the form of patents, copyrights, trademarks and
proprietary designs. The annual
global revenue for Howkin’s fifteen identified sectors was $2.24 trillion in
1999. The U.S. share represents
forty percent of the market with revenue totaling $960 billion. The U.S. share also accounts for more
than forty percent of research and development, forty percent of television and
radio, and thirty percent of film.
Howkins calculates that core copyright industries will be worth $6.1
trillion internationally in fifteen years.
U.S. dominance in these segments - more than productivity improvements
related to new technology and new manufacturing methods - is responsible for
much of the nation’s global economic competitiveness since the
nineteen-eighties.[5]
The creative economy suggests more than
technological progress or the growth of media and entertainment. However, the latter development is
important to emphasize. Most of us
are oblivious to the considerable role that content industries play in job and
wealth creation - not only in terms of regional economic development and
growing high-tech industry, but also in terms of our nation's global economic
competitiveness. In fact, the media,
entertainment, and cultural copyright sectors create new jobs at a rate three
times faster than the remaining economy.
In 2002, these sectors employed 5.48 million workers and accounted for
six percent of U.S. gross domestic product. These sectors also generated $89.26
billion in export revenue - surpassing every other category including
automotive, aviation, agricultural, as well as chemical and allied products.[6] Foreign sales of motion pictures alone
totaled $17 billion in 2002. The
motion picture industry is the only U.S. sector that boasts a surplus balance
of trade with every other country in the world; and the international sale of
filmed entertainment plays a significant role in our nation's overall trade
surplus in services.[7] U.S. sales of entertainment software
also totaled $8.2 billion in 2004, and U.S. game designers exported an
additional $2.1 billion the same year. [8]
Deutsche
Bank forecasts that global revenue for game software will grow at thirteen
percent annually over the next four years, while PricewaterhouseCooper projects
that the U.S. media and entertainment industries will be worth $690 billion by
2009.[9]
U.S. regions are increasingly unable to compete
against places like Bangalore, India or other lower cost localities for the
routine information and knowledge jobs considered to be the holy grail of
economic development. Emphasis is
frequently placed on attracting and growing high-tech to the exclusion of all
else. In reality, the high-tech
sector does not grow in a vacuum.
It certainly will not grow without the creative forms of the content
industries that drive technological advance for fields as diverse as real
estate and medicine, and that also add high-value to technology products and
consumer goods in today's glutted marketplace. “You can’t have high-tech innovation
without art and music," writes urban planner Richard Florida: "All
forms of creativity feed off each other."[10] Ultimately, high-tech requires a
creative social milieu - what Florida has termed "the creative
ethos". This chief ingredient
underpins the entire creative economy and those fertile regions that establish
tangible high-tech hubs.
Even firms cannot compete exclusively with
technology in today's global market.
Technology is cheap and ubiquitous until it acquires the
high-value-added context of creative forms like branding, content, and design. “At Sony, we assume that all the
products of our competitors have basically the same technology, price,
performance, and features," says Norio Ohga, former chairman at Sony.
“Design is the only thing that differentiates one product from another in the
marketplace.”[11] Global competition has pushed quality so
high and prices so low that the pressure to add value is intense. “We can’t compete with the pricing
structure and labor costs of the Far East," remarks Paul Thomson, director
of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City. “So how can we compete? It has to be with design.”[12]
Stock from companies that place a heavy emphasis on
design outperform their counterparts by a wide margin.[13] For every percentage of sales invested
in product design, a company’s profits increase by an average of three to four
percent.[14] In 2001, Whirlpool introduced its Duet
line of washers and dryers. By
2003, the company had nineteen percent of the front-loading washer market, up
from zero, two years before.
"If you looked four or five years ago, the average life of a
washing machine was something like thirteen years," says CEO, Jeff Fettig:
"We're surveying owners and finding out a lot of people are replacing
their washing machine with the Duet after five, six, or seven years because
they want it, not because their old machine broke or wore out."[15] Coleman Coolers was long considered the
industry standard until competition began to erode the company's market
share. In 1999, Coleman redesigned
its coolers. Two years later, the
company's cooler sales increased by forty percent and Coleman led its product
market for the first time in years.[16]
“Jeff Grady, CEO of Charleston based DLO,” remarks
Director of the Charleston Digital Corridor, Ernest Andrade, “was smart enough
to figure out that you've the iPod, but you don't have the little accessories
to go along with it.” Design also
has the powerful capacity to create new markets - whether for ring tones,
medical devices, or cutensils.
“Abundance, Asia, and Automation turn goods and services into
commodities so quickly,” explains business writer Daniel Pink, “that the only
way to survive is by constantly developing new innovations, inventing new
categories.”[17] “Every product from sneakers to software
is constantly being upgraded," writes Florida, “and everything from mutual
funds to potato chips now comes in an ever-proliferating variety of types -
because the Creative Economy is largely based on selling novelty, variety, and
customization.”[18] "Design has expanded its definition
to include creating, recognizing, and developing opportunities to build business,"
says Tim Brown, president and CEO of IDEO, a design firm based in Palo Alto.[19]
While the creative economy does not represent the
first time application of the high-value-added context of creative forms to
technology products or consumer goods, it does embody the large scale and
pervasive use of this methodology - what Virginia Postrel has termed the
"aesthetic imperative" - and the considerable bearing that this
approach has on the profit margins of every major industry sector. “Manufacturing and technology generate
wealth only when they make matter and information serve human desire,"
writes Postrel: “Desire is the true source of economic value.”[20] When The
New York Times asked GM Vice Chairman, Bob Lutz how his approach differed
from his predecessors, Lutz responded, “I see us being in the art
business. Art, entertainment and
mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide
transportation.”[21]
Branding, like design, can distinguish a product
from the glut of global competition, but firms today cannot succeed with a
brand strategy based on awareness and identity alone. “Mastery of design,
empathy, play, and other seemingly, 'soft' aptitudes," explains business
writer Daniel Pink, is “the main way for individuals and firms to stand out in
a crowded marketplace.”[22] "It may seem odd to hear a designer
discuss brand positioning," writes John Tanz in Fortune: "Get over it.
No longer the wacky freethinkers whose work may never exist anywhere
beyond their sketchpads and computer screens, designers are developing serious
business chops, becoming better versed in the concerns of the manufacturing,
finance, and marketing departments."[23]
When I asked media-christened branding expert, Rob
Frankel, how companies protect brand in the digital age with its lower barriers
to market entry, he responded: "Most of these guys confuse 'brand' with
identity or product. Identity is one small fraction of brand and products are
merely 'proof' of your brand's promise." Frankel distinguishes himself from
"old school" marketing consultants like Jack Trout and Al Ries
"by redefining brand in a way that impacts the bottom line." "Branding," Frankel continues,
"is not about getting your prospects to choose you over the
competition. It's about getting
your prospects to see you as the only solution to their problem. Everyone makes
a PC, but why do some people insist on a Mac, when it costs more and ostensibly
has less software?"
When you look at the size and scope of the global
advertising industry, you can appreciate how creativity factors into our
economy. Zenith Media estimates
that global expenditure on advertising totaled $403 billion in 2005.[24] According to economists Deidre McClosky
and Arjo Klamer, persuasion, advertising, counseling, and consulting account
for twenty-five percent of U.S. gross domestic product.[25]
Economist Gillian Doyle also notes that when “expenditure on advertising is
calculated as a percentage of GDP, the pattern that emerges indicates that as
the national economy has grown over time in real terms, advertising has not
just grown in parallel, but has grown even faster. So the amount of advertising activity in
an economy is related to the size and growth rates of the economy itself, and
advertising has tended to account for a progressively more significant portion
of GDP as time goes on.”[26]
The convergence of digital technology,
telecommunications, and industry has also eroded product market
boundaries. Sectors that were once
distinct and unrelated now overlap through their shared use of media and
information technology. "What
we do in medicine now relies on digital imaging. It also relies on high-resolution,
high-speed data processing," says Dr. John Raymond, Vice President for
Academic Affairs and Provost at the Medical University of South Carolina. So do digital cinema and entertainment
software. "MUSC was one of the
first institutions in the U.S. to have a sixty-four slice CT scan that gives
amazingly high-resolution pictures of the heart," continues Dr. Raymond,
"Some people believe that this technology may even supplant doing cardiac
catherizations for diagnosing cardiac disease. But trying to enhance the images, learn
how to use computer algorithms to read them correctly, or transfer the data
rich files to a distant site to be read by an expert; those are issues we have
to deal with, that we haven't dealt with adequately."
The CELL based Mercury Computer blade server is a
perfect example of a direct technology transfer from entertainment software to
medicine. Video games rely on
powerful CPUs for the high-speed data processing required to render 3D images
in real time. As gamers demand a
more heightened experience and greater realism, the data rich digital graphics
and audio require more processor speed. Advanced scanning techniques - like the
one described by Dr. Raymond - lead to huge amounts of data. Using a traditional computer processor,
reconstructing an image takes two seconds per slice, or over five minutes for a
full image, but using the CELL processor, a central processing unit developed
and optimized for gaming and broadband by Sony, IBM, and Toshiba, an image is
processed in seconds.
Digital cinema technology has repercussions for any
application where the display and transmission of high-speed high-resolution
data rich images are required: for example, high-resolution satellite imagery
or telemedicine. Consequently, the
National Institute of Standards and Technology developed scientific measures
and test materials to assess image quality and the effects of compression for
the display and transmission of digital content in collaboration with the
Digital Cinema Initiatives LLC - a consortium formed by seven major movie
studios to create a digital equivalent to 35mm film. Before a cinema can screen digital movie
content, the presentation is compressed using high-speed high-resolution
algorithms, encrypted, and transported to theaters via satellite, broadband, or
hard drive. In the end,
"networks don't care what kind of data you are sending over them,"
says Bob Gibbons, Director of Marketing and Communications at Kodak Digital
Cinema.
Military surveillance, targeting, and weapons
testing also use technology that was developed for motion pictures and
entertainment software. The U.S.
government currently employs Panavision's 300x compound zoom lens for military
surveillance. The lens made its
television debut during ESPN's coverage of the Mercedes Championship in Maui
this year. Applying Panavision's
lens technology with a high-speed high-resolution digital camera like the
Panavision HDMAX - that incorporates the QuadHD CMOS sensor - detailed images
of test missiles or objects of interest can be captured for analysis or target
verification. The Mercury
Computer’s CELL based blade server can also handle the requirements of sonar
and radar computation for military or scientific applications, because of its
ability to process real time data streams.
“The Cell BE processor was originally designed for the volume home
entertainment market," says Craig Lund, chief technology officer of
Mercury Computer Systems, "but its architecture of nine heterogeneous
on-chip cores is well-suited to the type of distributed, real-time processing
that will power tomorrow's digital battlefield.”[27]
Hollywood and video games drive the development of
high-speed high-resolution digital image capture, management, transmission, and
display that have implications for fields where these advanced technological
applications would be economically unviable to develop on their own. Digital Light Processing technology
(DLP) from Texas Instruments uses Digital Micromirror Device light modulators
(DMD). DMD technology has made
significant inroads into both the home and theatrical digital projection
display markets, but the technology also has applications ranging from
volumetric display, holographic data storage, lithography, scientific
instrumentation, and medical imaging.
Entertainment software has lead to faster introduction and deployment of
processors, broadband networks, and high definition disks like HD-DVD and
Blu-Ray. The “media richness demanded by gamers and game developers drives
progress in graphics and audio for the entire PC industry,” notes John C. Beck
and Mitchell Wade in their study of the game generation's influence on
organizational values in business.[28] “IBM places value on chips made for
entertainment software that goes beyond revenue and profits," says Dr.
John Kelly, senior vice president and group executive for IBM Technology Group:
"These chips help drive technology in other areas." Online gaming and game downloads are one
of the fastest growing uses for bandwidth connections, and entertainment
software stimulates the demand for third and fourth generation cellular
telephony with broadband speed capability. PricewaterhouseCooper projects that
wireless games in the U.S. will grow from $142 million in 2003 to $2.8 billion
by 2008.[29]
Despite a prima
facie assumption regarding technology's cardinal role and inherent value in
our local and national economies - technology, while an important catalyst, is
not the central driver of long-term economic growth. Although, we are not used to
"thinking of ideas as economic goods," writes economist Paul Romer,
"they are surely the most significant ones that we produce." Unlike
traditional goods such as raw materials or machines that diminish or
deteriorate with repeated use, ideas offer us increasing returns and actually
grow in value the more they are used.[30] The increased competition and shorter
product cycles of the global market, however, have made time a scarce
commodity. As Florida writes,
"Time is literally worth more than it use to be."[31] Therefore, sustained and consistent
creativity is the keys to deriving durable economic growth in today's
economy. The "only way for us
to produce more economic value-and thereby generate economic growth,"
continues Romer, "is to find ever more valuable ways to make use of the
objects available to us.”[32]
The changes in our economic, social, and cultural
organizations that have been developing for decades and define the landscape of
the creative economy are not the result of new forms of technology. Technology, innovation, and creativity
are the products of these broader and deeper shifts; because, it is these
structures, and not technology, that consistently support and elicit the very
conception, production, and transmission of ideas that generate economic
wealth. The “most important ideas
of all are meta-ideas," writes Romer, “ideas about how to support the
production and transmission of other ideas.”[33]
Creativity is expensive and time consuming. The production of commodities in the
creative industries, which include film and television, is said to suffer from
"Baumol's disease": Costs
in these sectors tend to climb faster than the rate of inflation, chiefly
because creativity is dependent on highly specialized human capital and
inherently labor intensive. Labor costs in the creative sectors also tend to
rise more rapidly than others do. [34]
Conventional creative sectors - like high tech and entertainment - have always fallen under the traditional research and development model with its characteristic high production and low replication costs; intrinsic risk; and dependencies on intellectual property and human capital.[35] Once the first generation of a pharmaceutical like Lipitor or a movie like Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is produced in its expensive and lengthy R&D phase, it costs comparatively little to reproduce and supply it to extra customers. In the United States, the period from development, to FDA approval, to market for a new prescription medicine is ten to fifteen years, and typically costs $802 million.