The performance-capture technology of “Avatar” will become widely available and trivially inexpensive, much as once-fancy-pants “morphing” has done since 1992, but with far broader implications. Because you won’t have to replace the performer with a blue alien, you of course can also replace him with a computer model of himself. Or a computer model of a photorealistic 3D puppet of your own creation. There go the $2M salary hold-ups, but by then it won’t matter -- this technology also eliminates the need for costly sets and extended production time multiple camera set-ups require. Anyone will be able to shoot “24” in their living room after work one evening, and they will. They may even tart up their work with special effects of dams bursting near cities and people jumping between the roofs of cars speeding down freeways, but they also might not bother -- spectacle will lose its currency when you can generate any visual you have a hankering to see in real time from a free app on your phone.
We sometimes take as absolutes things that were the product of technical limitations. Before 1980, the next best way to reach someone after TV and radio was the telephone, the next best way after books and newspapers was writing letters. Producing entertainment was prohibitively expensive, as were the very few means of its distribution.
Technology will... is... changing all that. What is unknown is what those changes will do to our appetites. When the same movie had to entertain the entire planet, it needed to star someone the entire planet found appealing. That person then transformed under such an unnatural level of attention into the modern star. That stars have their appeal is a given. Already, though, Facebook has replaced soap operas. Who needs fictional dopplegangers when the real thing is at hand? Similarly, in short enough order you will be able to instruct your television to replace Bruce Willis with your wife when it plays “Die Hard.” Not that you will need “Die Hard” -- this stuff will be so easy to create that ameteur stuff will clog the internet, much of it good. It’s possible the sheer ubiquity of such offerings, and the forms having given up the ghosts of its creation that once made it seem magical (or even just believable,) will drain narrative visual entertainment of its ability to entertain.
This is somewhat going on in music right now. Anyone can create and post songs from their laptops, and many do. By some measures music has flowered as a result. And yet it’s hard to escape the feeling that music as a form has receded in importance in the popular imagination, or not suspect that the best and brightest are no longer drawn to the field.
So what, of course. Except that -- as it pertains to this discussion -- if you are a media company it is your doom foretold. In the long run, there likely is no smart set of actions that can deliver them from extinction. They are smart enough to realize it, and are in no hurry to hasten its arrival.
First off, let's put to bed this fantasy that people only steal entertainment because companies give them no alternative. That was a convenient rationalization before iTunes gave everyone immediate cheap access to music, yet I notice Pirate Bay is still hopping.
Secondly, more rational business people have been galloping in to save Hollywood from its excesses since they built the place; they always leave penniless and bewildered. You can make a TV show for a million dollars an episode until your star demands two million. If you have a solution to that problem, Hollywood is all ears. Replace the star? Unless it's a procedural, your audience will flee. That lesson 10,000 time over is why Hollywood actually must behave in all the crazy and wasteful-seeming ways that it does. Outsiders never connect the dots -- wow, an entire industry that is as filled with dedicated and competent professionals is behaving in ways that seem absurd to me... *maybe there's something I don't know.* No, never, it must be them.
Then there's the revenue question. Yes, TV commercials are advertising too -- advertising that brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop. Throw in the retransmission fees affiliates and cable companies pay networks, the international sales, the ancillary markets of syndication and home video, and you are talking about a "legacy" model that is still very, very profitable.
And what is the alternative? Studios can put up their shows on the likes of Hulu and yes, absolutely, feel like they are part of the future instead of the past. Instead, perhaps you will understand if they prefer to be part of the present. Something like Hulu is great for the consumer that isn't thinking things through -- I get to watch whatever I want wherever I am for free! Except: That sell-once, always-on-everywhere approach eliminates the many big-money revenue streams listed above in favor of... right now? Next to nothing. Divide Hulu's profits by the amount of content you would prefer it offered and what does it come out to? Enough to make that content? No? What is your proposed solution?
No one making your points ever has one. Media companies are supposed to forsake their underpinnings and jump blindly into the new-media abyss and be happy with the knowledge that one day all media will be consumed this way and they got there first!
Maybe eventually an internet-centric distribution model will evolve that can sustain the high costs of entertainment creation, though so far none have. If it does, the companies will migrate there then. Maybe it will come to pass that the internet can never sustain the costs of professional-quality entertainment but nevertheless is where people insist on consuming it. If so, the entertainment industry will crumble. Right now your message is: You're dying anyway, so why don't you kill yourself?
Tech industry zealots make me yawn. "If you worry about short term profits you just don't get it" ...until the entire field was revealed to be in the midst of an unsustainable bubble.
"Media companies that abuse their customers and lobby Washington to protect their revenue streams are evil" ...Until we're talking about Internet companies rifling through address books to target ads.
A cheap blog can sustain itself on banner ads. A $3 million dollar an episode tv series is another story. In any case, why would the companies you are second-guessing jeopardize the many big-money paydays a movie or show generates under the present system in favor one minute before they have to? To look forward-thinking until it turns out they were full of crap? To delude themselves they are doing something loftier than making a buck?
Those approaches may work for you guys but they're not for everyone.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Mattheww.
By the way, the future as I see it...
The performance-capture technology of “Avatar” will become widely available and trivially inexpensive, much as once-fancy-pants “morphing” has done since 1992, but with far broader implications. Because you won’t have to replace the performer with a blue alien, you of course can also replace him with a computer model of himself. Or a computer model of a photorealistic 3D puppet of your own creation. There go the $2M salary hold-ups, but by then it won’t matter -- this technology also eliminates the need for costly sets and extended production time multiple camera set-ups require. Anyone will be able to shoot “24” in their living room after work one evening, and they will. They may even tart up their work with special effects of dams bursting near cities and people jumping between the roofs of cars speeding down freeways, but they also might not bother -- spectacle will lose its currency when you can generate any visual you have a hankering to see in real time from a free app on your phone.
We sometimes take as absolutes things that were the product of technical limitations. Before 1980, the next best way to reach someone after TV and radio was the telephone, the next best way after books and newspapers was writing letters. Producing entertainment was prohibitively expensive, as were the very few means of its distribution.
Technology will... is... changing all that. What is unknown is what those changes will do to our appetites. When the same movie had to entertain the entire planet, it needed to star someone the entire planet found appealing. That person then transformed under such an unnatural level of attention into the modern star. That stars have their appeal is a given. Already, though, Facebook has replaced soap operas. Who needs fictional dopplegangers when the real thing is at hand? Similarly, in short enough order you will be able to instruct your television to replace Bruce Willis with your wife when it plays “Die Hard.” Not that you will need “Die Hard” -- this stuff will be so easy to create that ameteur stuff will clog the internet, much of it good. It’s possible the sheer ubiquity of such offerings, and the forms having given up the ghosts of its creation that once made it seem magical (or even just believable,) will drain narrative visual entertainment of its ability to entertain.
This is somewhat going on in music right now. Anyone can create and post songs from their laptops, and many do. By some measures music has flowered as a result. And yet it’s hard to escape the feeling that music as a form has receded in importance in the popular imagination, or not suspect that the best and brightest are no longer drawn to the field.
So what, of course. Except that -- as it pertains to this discussion -- if you are a media company it is your doom foretold. In the long run, there likely is no smart set of actions that can deliver them from extinction. They are smart enough to realize it, and are in no hurry to hasten its arrival.
Would you be?
Re: Re: Or maybe they know their business better than you do
Secondly, more rational business people have been galloping in to save Hollywood from its excesses since they built the place; they always leave penniless and bewildered. You can make a TV show for a million dollars an episode until your star demands two million. If you have a solution to that problem, Hollywood is all ears. Replace the star? Unless it's a procedural, your audience will flee. That lesson 10,000 time over is why Hollywood actually must behave in all the crazy and wasteful-seeming ways that it does. Outsiders never connect the dots -- wow, an entire industry that is as filled with dedicated and competent professionals is behaving in ways that seem absurd to me... *maybe there's something I don't know.* No, never, it must be them.
Then there's the revenue question. Yes, TV commercials are advertising too -- advertising that brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop. Throw in the retransmission fees affiliates and cable companies pay networks, the international sales, the ancillary markets of syndication and home video, and you are talking about a "legacy" model that is still very, very profitable.
And what is the alternative? Studios can put up their shows on the likes of Hulu and yes, absolutely, feel like they are part of the future instead of the past. Instead, perhaps you will understand if they prefer to be part of the present. Something like Hulu is great for the consumer that isn't thinking things through -- I get to watch whatever I want wherever I am for free! Except: That sell-once, always-on-everywhere approach eliminates the many big-money revenue streams listed above in favor of... right now? Next to nothing. Divide Hulu's profits by the amount of content you would prefer it offered and what does it come out to? Enough to make that content? No? What is your proposed solution?
No one making your points ever has one. Media companies are supposed to forsake their underpinnings and jump blindly into the new-media abyss and be happy with the knowledge that one day all media will be consumed this way and they got there first!
Maybe eventually an internet-centric distribution model will evolve that can sustain the high costs of entertainment creation, though so far none have. If it does, the companies will migrate there then. Maybe it will come to pass that the internet can never sustain the costs of professional-quality entertainment but nevertheless is where people insist on consuming it. If so, the entertainment industry will crumble. Right now your message is: You're dying anyway, so why don't you kill yourself?
Thanks just the same.
Or maybe they know their business better than you do
"Media companies that abuse their customers and lobby Washington to protect their revenue streams are evil" ...Until we're talking about Internet companies rifling through address books to target ads.
A cheap blog can sustain itself on banner ads. A $3 million dollar an episode tv series is another story. In any case, why would the companies you are second-guessing jeopardize the many big-money paydays a movie or show generates under the present system in favor one minute before they have to? To look forward-thinking until it turns out they were full of crap? To delude themselves they are doing something loftier than making a buck?
Those approaches may work for you guys but they're not for everyone.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Mattheww.
Submit a story now.
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