Who invited the guys from IT?
Television producers have long traded in their regulation black for prêt a porter suits once they began to be called television executives and chief creative officers – the arrival however of the guys from IT in the past few years at MIP really puts a real strain on the eyes with their loud Paul Smith shirts, square glasses and appalling taste in shoes. It reeks of “I may be from IT, but I’m not boring”.
This happened because we are no longer in a television broadcast environment but a multi platform, on-demand, customized to my community, eat-as-much-as-you-like pipe that now delivers our precious pearls of entertainment and information on to the laptop, PDA, mobile, sling box – in fact anywhere but the television screen it seems! That last bit was an exaggeration because none of this would happen without television, but that’s another story.
Today was all about the impact of Broadband and VOD (video-on-demand) on content creation & distribution. The lines were drawn early on the panel for broadband explosion. The guys from IT (Brightcove / Joost (from the creators of skype) / MSN networks) were erudite and upbeat about the brave new world of high speed, video rich, interactive (make your own directors cut of Desperate Housewives), and then share it with your friends the morning after, so you can talk about it and refine the edit all day on the net. Which sounds like a lot of fun, if you are a student or an out-of-work TV producer with a lot of time on your hands! But more seriously their offer to the market is the capacity to deliver rich content (tonnes of it), some smart software that allows you to customize media consumption on your terms ( i.e. when and where you want it cause you’re so busy) and that is un-doubtably changing the changing the status quo of the content producer, rights owners and distributors. And that’s a good thing, its going to grow the audience’s appetite for media and they are going to gorge themselves silly, which is likely to make us all quite busy meeting their insatiable need to watch telly anywhere but on the telly.
Unless……they don’t bother to ask your permission for your content. Which was when the morning got really interesting in the shape and form of a not-to-be-messed-with Rick Sands from MGM. He was a one man riot on the panel, seething with indignation that the guy from Brighcove has visions of a global audience for his sons winning goal at the local primary’s soccer game and even more outraged that loads of spotty teenagers were mashing up us very expensively produced latest season of Stargate thereby denying him his god-given right to distribution income. And you had to see his point, because Rick is a very persuasive man – I wouldn’t want to meet him if I was a spotty teenager, cause it would be a bare fist fighting spectacular which itself would make great pay per view content. And he made a good analogy to the death of Indies in film when the studios bought them up (thereby making the concept of Indies a redundancy), by comparing that sad passage of film history with the unashamed haste with which the big media corps like NewsCorp snap up social phenomena like MySpace thereby neutering the very rebellious nature of this “up yours” to mainstream distribution by co-opting them into a promotional platform for network shows. Its not a palace coup if the king is pulling the strings.
Dinner was excellent by the way – Coquilles St Jacques – you should have been there, wish the boys in Franshoek figure out how to make a decent rose soon. Then we could really put to use those big fat pipes that the guys from IT support have on offer. Rose, anytime, on-demand and shared with 1 million of my nameless friends.
Stan Joseph is a Executive Director at Ochre Media, a Johannesburg based content company.