There were a few topics that I thought stood out in the discussions of how digital distribution is affecting the media industries.
Piracy
The digital revolution has made it much easier to distribute illegal content and no one on the stage was more visibly concerned than Kelly Summers from Disney. She was very articulate at making Disney a victim of not only piracy but also of Silicon Valley who she claimed didn’t value their content enough, all of which sounded like carefully tailored talking points. Even thought Disney does lose money from pirating, this is partially their fault. Thomas Gewecke from Warner Bros and Serra Tinic from the University of Alberta both were clear that in this digital age, studios need to make their content available legally to avoid people using illegal means to get it. As Horst Stipp said, people want content to be easy to get and I believe people would be willing to pay for easy content. Disney has been slow to move away from the model of false sacristy that has been the standard for decades. However, I did ask Mrs. Summer if Disney was going to keep their business model of keeping their films “in the Vault” and to their credit she said that they are in the process of phasing that out for a marketing campaign encouraging people to build their own metaphorical “vault,” or collection, of Disney films.
Lack of Interoperability
There are so many devices and distribution services vying to get into consumers homes right now that it is hard for people to choose which one they should invest in, and everyone recognized this at the panels. There are many new opportunities for profit, but as Max Dawson from Northwestern University pointed out, there are also many fingers in the pie trying to get that new profit. Everyone has their own method of getting content to consumers and in doing so there is an incentive to limit content licensing to competitors. Richard Berger of Sony Entertainment made this clear when he compared the situation to a fictional analogy of having only Best Buy DVDs play on Best Buy DVD players and not on WalMart players. This is forcing consumers to make content decisions based on technology and devaluing content because of its lack of interoperability.
Consumer Ownership
Another topic that came up was consumer ownership of media (as in buying DVDs). I agree with Mr. Gewecke that there is very little distinction between owning something on iTunes and streaming it online (with the exception that the bought video will never expire). But the solution that I think makes a lot of sense (from my consumer perspective) came from Aaron Dignan, which was to create more depth to stories and sell extra content to expand the canon world. I think it would be interesting to have digital DVDs like what Warner Bros is experimenting with now, which is like an application-like product that offers everything that a DVD does and can update with new content other over time.
Independent Online Distribution
Along with being an outlet to expand the stories of popular entertainment on other media platforms, the internet has incredible distribution promise for its own content that is (hopefully) just getting its roots. Felicia Henderson, a WGA member, said that it opens doors for content producers who are unable to get studio attention regardless of their talent. Few online productions have been able to get enough attention to be successful and most have roots in other media for promotion, like Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and Sanctuary who both had initial following from the producers’ established fan base and the machinima Red vs Blue who had a die hard niche video game audience to spread the word. What I think would be interesting to see in the future is a website that is run by established film and television producers that distributes worthy independent films and television (like a modern United Artists). There would be no competition for time slots or release dates and so ideally anything worth attention could be distributed.
Windowing
Recently, the windowing traditions that have existed since the standardization of the studio industry have been called into question and digital media is a major contributor to this. Studios like Warner Bros and Disney are participating in the shortening of the window by making deals with cable providers for Video on Demand options. This is obviously strongly opposed to by the Theater owners who feel like they would be shorted profit and I think it would have been good to have someone representing them on a panel. There is a lot of money riding on this and it is going to be interesting seeing how it unfolds in the future.
In conclusion,
There are so many questions and so many possibilities for the future that any prediction is futile, yet I will still try to make one. It seems that consumers have more power to influence how they consume media now than they probably ever had. The conglomerates are not able to fully push their products and services onto the consumers because they are working, for the most part, independently instead as an oligopoly, investing in what they believe is the future they want to be a part of. Their competition to be the future standard will for some turn out to be a bad investment when the dust settles and only one (or a few) are endorsed by the consumers. Who the winners will be is a mystery but they will probably be the companies with the most content rights and (at least one of) the best consumer products or services.
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