Table of Contents

Introduction
Defining the Age
What the People Want
Market Drivers
Some Trends
Conclusions

Introduction

Every television a network. Everyone a director. Guerrilla Filmmaking. Desktop filmmaking and democratized distribution. User-driven programming. The Fall of the Media Elites.

We’ve got a New Media Age on our hands.

It’s a revolution of sorts. The top down, dictatorial relationship between media providers and their passive audience is ending. Enter media democracy.

What does it mean? Where will it go? How can a media professional survive in the new environment?

This paper addresses some of these questions. The goal is to provide a framework from which the media professional can navigate. Or at least another perspective that, when colliding with one’s own personal paradigm, creates some kind of shift or "ah hah."

Or maybe skepticism and "give me a break."

Defining the Age

What characterizes the New Media Age? The table below looks at some of the differences between the old and new media ages.

Some of the above that’s listed under the "New Age" is really already happening in the "Old Age." So the characterizations blur. But the distinctions in a broad sense hold water when you look at what is essentially a movement away from the old age and toward the new age that has been happening for several years and now accelerated by the Internet.

How to Compete

How does one compete in such an environment? In our view, the only way to compete is to go with it. To become it. To in fact help it. The way not to compete is to fight it. Because it is happening, will happen, and will not stop. The Movement is a force unto itself.

The Movement is driven by technology, but also by people seeking alternatives. The System has upset a lot of people. Voices have been silenced. Creativity squelched. Rejection letters for quality material litter the landscape. The Least Common Denominator has been forced down everyone’s throats. Many feel victim to media pollution and being dumbed down to the point of numbness.

As for the so-called alternatives, many have co-opted the bohemian style but not the content. Many artists today look like Bob Dylan but feel like Bob Dole.

What the People Want

The conventional wisdom is that content providers today are responding to what people want. And because the economics of media production are expensive, they are forced to provide to the majority.

Mediocrity in the media has become a habit, something run by apathetic and cynical producers who don’t believe in anything but the bottom line.

But who is the "majority" that most producer’s cater to? The "majority" is really human nature. The majority as it applies to programming and content is appealing to the most basic human impulses because we know that works to get an audience. We also know it keeps us in an unending cycle of sameness.

High production costs have forced programmers to appeal to the many. Now those costs can come down. Digital Video cameras are cheap and ubiquitous. A non-linear editing solution can be purchased for under $10K that used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Internet content distribution is cheap and universal, and with Broadband will have the same quality as broadcast or cable television. The result is that producers are empowered by a new economic dynamic that allows them to produce much more cheaply and allows them to appeal to a much narrower demographic, even narrower than the current fragmented media market.

Lowered production costs and niche programming force content providers to appeal to the few, and the few will soon be much more localized than you think.

A cottage industry is arising of "desktop filmmaking" and "video publishing." Many homes will become production facilities. Many other New Media Age storefronts will also arise. The New Media Age production facility will become as ubiquitous as Kinko’s. The new communication paradigm will shift from the written word and PowerPoints to the edited image and PowerVideos.

We will both lose language and find it anew. The use of images to communicate will be almost as ubiquitous as text. DV-mail will be as common as E-mail or Voice Mail. And that’s just the start.

Market Drivers

Some of the market drivers for the New Media Age include:

• Revolutionary Change
• Values
• Non-Products

Let’s look at each in detail.

Revolutionary Change

We are in a decade of revolution. This revolution is occurring on many fronts, and has both positive and negative ramifications.

The technology revolution will continue. Broadband and Internet media distribution will offer a broader access mechanism for voices that have rarely, if ever, been heard. And no one will filter this media from on high. Individuals will instead make their own decisions as to what the watch, and when.

A social revolution is also brewing. Issues related to education, the environment, and global economics will continue to become more and more important as the decade progresses. These voices will demand a vehicle for expression. The Internet, Broadband and low–cost digital content creation technologies will provide that vehicle.

On the mainstream media front, the irony is that the lowered cost of production enables media providers to lead an audience, if they so choose. The reason is that the New Age Media economics promote creativity in such as way that will not only enable new voices to be heard but demand it. Newness and change will be a such a hot commodity that the market itself will demand revolutionary change.

Because the niche-oriented nature of Broadband will take more and more mindshare from traditional audiences, traditional media will be forced to embrace a more diverse and fragmented programming agenda. The concept of a mass audience will in some ways disappear.

Revolutionary change will in fact drive the economy. The New Media Age is the voice of that change.

Values

Initially, we may see a lot of programming crap as a result of the "revolution" (mostly because of people trying to do Hollywood on the Cheap). But we will also view the new, the truly revolutionary, the enlightening. We’ll see that much of New Media Age will be driven by values.

The least common denominator will give way to the greatest individual potential, The Age of Media Enlightenment. Value-oriented. Altruistic. Not altruistic so much by choice, but inevitable altruism by the laws of evolutionary change.

Values will propel the New Media Age because a large section of the market will demand values to counter the numbing downward spiral of media content that the cynics see as inevitable.

Values don’t necessarily imply uniformity of opinion. New coalitions will form that might seem strange bedfellows at first. Many former enemies may unite against the value-less media in order to counter a general trend toward programming that emphasizes the darker side of human nature.

The vehicle for distributing this new media content will be new broadband networks accessed by Internet portals. The portals, which will be owned and operated by a few large companies, will nonetheless have open access to thousands of New Media Age content providers. This open access, when combined with interfaces that allow people to create their own programming, will mean that there will be absolutely no commonality in the interface to the media. People will define their own interfaces, in effect, their own networks. Even though the portals will be under the banner of the Old Guard media, open access will allow people to create their own media world, and many will do so.

They will do so because the current media meets the needs of the corporations they serve and not the people. Over decades, corporate interests have conditioned people’s expectations and tastes, greatly influencing the so-called "market". This will change in the New Media Age, where people will define the nature and scope of their media experiences. Conventional wisdom will no longer apply. That status quo will be shattered in a way no one can quite foresee.

Non-Products

Non-Products began with shareware and "free stuff." Advertising itself is a form of Non-Product. The idea is that a free commodity or experience will help to sell a paid for commodity or experience. A free product is a non-product.

More and more, people are demanding that what was once charged for become free. The free music movement is a prime example. In the future, films will follow suit. This trend will only accelerate no matter what Jack Valenti wants.

Eventually, copyright owners may need to give up the idea that they can somehow control the sharing of content and will have to look to other ways to generate revenue from their products. Business models that don’t depend on copyright must and will flourish. The Old Guard will be able to create stopgaps to the trend, but ultimately it will not be possible to forestall. The media industry will have to accept that the model of property rights as applied to physical property does not neatly apply to digital media, which can be replicated ad infinitum cheaply and universally.

Moreover, free sharing might not be such a bad thing. In the case of music, the free sharing of an individual song may lead to the sale of a CD the song is associated with. Thus the individual song becomes a non-Product to sell the CD.

With films, trailers can serve the same purpose. During a certain early release window, a film’s trailer can be distributed for sharing on the Internet, which will lead to the sell of the film’s theatrical release or video/DVD (this is in fact already happening with some films). Thus the trailer becomes a non-Product on the Internet, an entertainment in its own right that is a tie-in to a product.

Non-Products will rule. But for traditional Old Guard companies to survive, they will need to tie non-products to products. For the new guard media, low costs and embedded product placement will enable them to compete and survive.

Some Trends

The New Media Age will be characterized by several trends, a few of which are described below. All of these trends will be supported and buttressed by the market drivers described above. These include:

• Guerrilla Filmmaking
• Advertising as Art
• Media Couture

Guerrilla Filmmaking

Guerrilla filmmaking will flourish in the New Media Age. Guerrilla films will be made for a fraction of the cost of traditional films, shot in digital video, and most likely distributed free on the Internet. Guerrilla films will be in many cases sponsored by companies (for example, fashion-related) that can embed product placement, with the cost of the product placement paying for the entire budget. This is possible because of the extremely low cost of guerrilla filmmaking.

Guerrilla filmmakers will compete with traditional Hollywood by offering their content for free sharing over the Internet, bypassing all forms of distribution except free distribution, and by appealing to a young, hip, or niche-oriented audience. The idea will be that guerrilla filmmakers will create a few films a year with somewhat of a margin to cover their costs, but will be anti-Hollywood in their business model, ethic and aesthetic. Guerrilla films are another form of non-Product.

Whether Hollywood likes it or not, Old Guard media will proliferate on the Internet and become sharable and free, even if by piracy. As this occurs, the traditional business models associated with film libraries will diminish or disappear, forcing Hollywood to reduce production costs to compete with Guerrilla filmmakers, and finally to open up their content libraries to the Internet, so they can at least have some modicum of control over their vast content assets.

Advertising as Art

Advertising in the New Media Age will be completely different. The reason for this is that pulling content from the Internet is a lot different than broadcasting content.

One trend will be that advertising itself will become an artform. The trend toward short films being distributed on the Internet (such as with Atom Films and Eveo) will inevitably lead to short, entertaining advertising co-existing with artistic short films. Filmmakers will be contracted by companies to create shorts that somehow sell their product, if even implicitly through product placement. Advertising as expressed through short films will become a post-modern art form.

As mentioned, film trailers can also be shared and distributed freely over the Internet to sell a film experience, either a theatrical release or a video/DVD release. More and more, the short content medium will be used as a non-Product to sell a product.

Media Couture

Another trend will be toward media couture. Media couture is to media what haute couture is to fashion. New, avant garde art forms will experiment and drive innovations in "pret au porter" or more conventional media content.

Media Couture artists will find sponsors to fund them whether or not they actually perform any kind of product placement within the content itself. The sponsor will want to be associated with the Media Couture artist simply because of their artistic stature.

Media couture is similar to trade publishing, where trade paperbacks have become distinct from popular fiction as a more artistic expression. As ever cheaper computerization of publishing allowed for niche oriented trade publications or "boutique" publishing, every lower costs of digital video production will create the same trend in feature films.

Conclusions

The New Media Age is both exciting and intimidating. There are social and economic reasons for the shift from the old to the new, with the Old Guard representing certain values that will be questioned and challenged.

Hollywood will certainly survive, as it has survived in the past with the advent of television, cable, and other innovations. The theatrical experience will certainly be maintained as part of the Hollywood system. Post theatrical release, the Internet will become a major method of distributing and change the dynamic completely.

The post theatrical market for film content will so change with the Internet that Hollywood will have to adopt hybrid business models that incorporate elements of television sponsorship, guerrilla filmmaking, and content subscription. They will inevitably have to open up their content libraries fully to the Internet, because if they don’t, they will find their content being shared freely no matter what stopgaps are put in place. At least if they open up their libraries they can use advertising embedded in their content (either as a trailer or ad, or product placement), and offer subscriptions or syndication.

While the art of prediction is certainly a precarious one, some of these trends, many well on their way to being formed, will come fully to fruition. Also, we at nextPix hope to influence the future of media by offering a positive influence both in terms of technology and content. We believe that the future can be shaped, and those of us with the courage to do so can enhance the quality of today’s media experience and increase the opportunities for media professionals in the future.