What is "New Media?" I've spent the last several years reading and listening to one pundit after another espouse how this new thing would kill "Old Media" in just a few years and yet they never seem to fully define this new Fifth Estate killer...
The biggest problem with the new media is ultimately people like to be entertained and this is primarily a passive process. You buy tickets to the show or turn on your TV and you expect to be entertained; and if you are, you tell your friends and they decide they will go or watch and the "buzz" is created. But eventually the "buzz" wears off and you re-purpose the show to go after a different market segment until it gets placed on the shelf for someone to dust off and revive 20 years later. Key to this product life cycle is scale. The cost of movies, major series, sitcoms, and even reality TV is significant and the risks to create good content continue to be high. Creating consistently good content is both a risky process and very hard to do.
New media ignores all of this. First let's define what New Media is:
- Content delivered on alternative devices (not TV's)?
- Content delivered by alternative distribution channels? (IP, Mobile)
- Content that was not professionally created? (YouTube)
- Content that allows the viewer to interact with it in real time or near real time?
- Content that uses other dimensions? (3-D and 4-D viewing experiences)
- Content you purchase instead of receive free via an ad-supported funding model?
- Games?
- Anything that isn't traditional couch-potato, over-the-air, free to the home, old-fashioned TV seen on a 4:3 box?
What really is "new media"?
In my opinion, new media is all about making inexpensive content that entertains for a short period of time, but has no real consistency. In fact, the consistency is that it is inconsistent. The current major players of media content hate inconsistency. They can only keep their huge content engine cranking out new material by feeding it huge amounts of money and talent and hope that each day the audience and advertisers continue to recognize that they are consistent providers of top quality entertainment. If the engine breaks, people stop watching, ratings and other measures of performance drop and managers don't make their numbers and are replaced and we start again.
New media's real attractiveness is not the content itself but the method of distribution. It opens a more direct connection between the content creator and the consumer of that content. However, consistent, top quality entertainment is not a fluke, but a very carefully managed process that requires huge resources, high risks, a fair amount of luck, and the willingness to be flexible. Content distribution methodology and the associated payment philosophy are both important attributes, but are only a part of the media work flow. Most of the major content creators view new media as an opportunity to cut out the middlemen costs of distribution and as such will have more funds to make new content.
So what did every major content producer do before new media? They made lots of different pilots. Tested them in the real world to see what worked and what didn't and then made a few big bets. At the end of the day, some of those bets paid off and some didn't, but the successful companies made fewer mistakes than their competitors. As new media achieves a level of penetration that makes a significant impact to these large content producer's bottom lines, it also gives them a new platform to test content in ways they couldn't in the past. For the time being, they will continue to make real money through the more traditional distribution channels that have proven funding models. As more content consumers move to the distribution models supported by "new media" the revenue will support more and more experimentation with these revenue streams until you have a breakout event (a tipping point) that illustrates that new media can provide access to the same (or better) content as the more traditional distribution channels. This change will be gradual at first, but it will accelerate if the technology can support it. With any new technology, if it doesn't keep up with the demand, and delivers content poorly, this will limit adoption and stretch the timeline.
The producers of large scale, quality content will watch this transition carefully and must adopt new workflow and management processes to fit the needs of the new distribution, but for the most part they should survive the change. There is also the likelihood that a few smaller players will bet on new media and rise into the ranks of their big content producer competition. Many of the companies that depend on the current distribution system and do not have the scale to manage large content development and multiple distribution platforms will suffer and may be eliminated. It will be a time of major shifts in the industry and smaller players like StorerTV need to stay aware of where their customers fit in the old and new food chain and design new functions that support all the distribution functions.
For the large players, the most important function will be to manage the information flow from the early content creation stage through to the end of the content's life cycle when it has become a library title, collecting important metadata metrics through every phase. This will allow the managers of the content to determine what the appropriate distribution channels they should use to place the content at each point of its life cycle and maximize its ROI. The idea that all content follows the same path has never been true and will become even more complex with the huge matrix of choices that will face most content owners. Every choice will have both a benefit and a cost and understanding these values to maximize each program's return will make the difference between the winners and losers in this high stakes game.
StorerTV is strategically positioned to provide this type of ROI function for the current and future content mega-studios as well as for the larger number of content providers at the next level. It involves the expansion of partnerships and the creation of a data warehouse concept that is driven by CentriX workflow integrations and data collections starting at the earliest point of content creation and tracking a title through its entire life history. This pattern isn't really about old vs. new media, but about realization of maximum returns on the investments that create any media.
