The Fourth Estate (Moved): Vid, Vlog, View

Video is having a kind of midlife renaissance. Having shaken off its early infamy in porn and exercise tapes – the medium is being reborn as viral broadband clips, iTunes downloads, and social networks. Hollywood is watching the space carefully. Sitting on hundreds of thousands of hours of raw footage, movies and TV shows – they believe their content will put them in a prime position to dominate once someone figures out a Googlesque model for making money out of web video. That may not be so simple, nor their advantage so pronounced. While there is lots of hot VC money chasing after kooky online ideas at the moment, early indications are that the space may play out in ways that the Titans of entertainment haven’t quite anticipated.

If you break down the online video market – there are three basic opportunities. Figuring out how to make money out of movie and TV show downloads is one, and is really just an extension of the existing VOD model. Although studio backed players like CinemaNow and the Apple iTunes Store are finally making some traction in this area – it ain’t really revolutionary. The reason for the long time between drinks is mainly due to bickering over digital rights management.

The second opportunity is around deploying a publishing, search and payment infrastructure to allow niche content creators to distribute to a wider audience. As you can imagine, this is big red target for the Google and Yahoo’s of the world, who are keen to expand the addressability of their search and entertainment functionality to non textual content. It will be a lucrative market too as millions of content producers suddenly connect with a global audience previously unavailable to them. And yes, somebody will make a fortune clipping the ticket each time.

The third opportunity is more subtle, but arguably has the most potential for disruptive change. It started with Flickr. Some bright sparks combined photo sharing with tagging, a clean interface and clever community building tools and voila – a new paradigm for aggregating consumer generated image content was born. Now the race is on to build the Flickr of video. There are certainly plenty of contenders – YouTube, CastPost, ClipShack, DailyMotion, Grouper, OurMedia, Revver, Vimeo and vSocial. Some say Flickr would have done it themselves, if not for the Yahoo acquisition. Given the undeniable influence of photo sharing networks, most of the emerging video social media plays are fairly similar in execution. There are few differences – OurMedia is primarily aimed at free storage of a variety of video formats, YouTube converts everything to Flash for easy playback, while Revver inserts video ads and shares the revenue.

Ironically – in the end the emerging social video market may have precious little in common with photo sharing at all. Certainly if you take a look at the content on any of the major video aggregators at the moment what you will find may surprise you. Sure there are the predictable home movie clips of dogs, kids and parties. But there is also a staggering amount of anime cartoons reset to music (known in video circles as AMVs), illegally uploaded TV shows, and slickly produced trailers for premium content websites. Unlike the original user base of Flickr – YouTube is not just about people sharing content they have created entirely themselves – it is also being used as a platform for the distribution, appropriation and remixing of entertainment culture.

To understand what is happening with video requires thinking more broadly about what the medium now represents. Online video is no longer just dirty deeds done cheap. Like a word or powerpoint document, a movie file whether it be Quicktime, Windows Media or Flash – is a flexible moving image and sound format which can be used to display photos, talking heads, remixed pop culture, animations, podcasts set to images, or holiday snaps set to music. In other words – anything at all. That means Internet delivered video is actually an opportunity for consumers to redefine their approach to content creation.

That might sound overwhelming to the average Baby Boomer who has just mastered email and who still thinks RSS is muscular disorder. However there is an entire generation born in the last few decades for whom short form video content is not programming innovation, it is simply the semantic language of media they best understand. Whether it be music videos, movie trailers or a viral email – there is a prevailing visual logic in short clips which translates perfectly to the new social media platforms. But here comes the rub. What Hollywood needs to come to grips with is that for this demographic – there will never be a clean separation between programmed Studio content and the stuff that they and their friends make.

Stickam is a case in point. It is a new service that allows you to add a multimedia player to your blog or MySpace page which plays music, videos, or even a live personal broadcast from your webcam. The execution isn’t perfect – but you can see the writing on the wall. The future of sites like MySpace is not kids decorating home pages with crazy fonts and tunes. It is in helping media savvy teenagers remix their lives, adventures, favourite scenes from movies, music and commentary into entertaining and addictive multimedia morsels which best advertise what they stand for.

It all makes a kind of crazy sense. If the big trend over the last decade was media becoming more personal, it was only a matter of time before the corollary also kicked in. People are becoming their own media companies.

Comments

You write: 'That might sound overwhelming to the average Baby Boomer who has just mastered email and who still thinks RSS is muscular disorder. However there is an entire generation born in the last few decades for whom short form video content is not programming innovation, it is simply the semantic language of media they best understand.'

Such condescending rubbish. Such total bollocks. Such ill-thought out commentary.

Many of the most active users of the Internet are well past the prime of youth. And have been working in this area for a very long time.

I was intercutting film in the 1960's - Andy Warhol was doing the same thing as well, but better - and there was a thriving underground movement using 16mm, Super8, Hi8 and just standard 8mm to produce seriously exciting content.

Damn it, we were filming in widescreen using anamorphic lens (look it up) in the late '50s. Yes, we had a problem with lip synch and there were amazing ways around it.

As for electronic linking - that which you call the Internet - in 1973 Sam Fedida launched Prestel in Britain and this was the Internet writ small. I was a very active user.

The French were distributing free Minitel - think Internet in black and white - terminals in 1983. Seven million of the damn things. Which is over twenty years ago. Which means that there are six million French citizens still alive who have grown up with the concept of electronic communication and, bluntly, can leave most of the current crop of you wiz kids for dead.

One of the problems of younger commentators - not that you are THAT young as you are now older than Jesus Christ when he died - is that they write off a massive slab of the market because it contains people over the age of 60.

I have a friend who edits seriously good video. He taught himself to use the computer when he in his sixties. He climbed to the base camp of Everest on his seventieth birthday. And, incidentally, he agrees with me and with most serious users that RSS is simply not going anywhere. The number of users is the square root of sod all.

And I know no one in my age group who could do a year's part time course at Uni in Mandarin and only end up being able to say 'Ni ha' - and that not well.

Condescend to me again and I will kick you in the knackers. Just as long as my nurse can hold me up long enough.

Yours, totally enraged,

Gareth Powell

Posted by: Gareth Powell | February 18, 2006 at 10:06 PM

Ah Mea Culpa Mr Powell - you quite right of course - I was being terribly ageist with my bon mot. As a longtime fan of your writing, I am naturally both flattered by your lengthy riposte and terrified by your threats of being clobbered by your walking stick.

Of course the great irony of all of this, is that I don't even belong to the generation I was writing about. Born in the nineties, the new wiz kids as you describe care little for analysis. They are too busy creating and selling web businesses to worry about older generations attempts at identifying the zeitgeist.

Posted by: Mike Walsh | February 20, 2006 at 11:48 AM

Hey Mike

Here is the rub with all this. My company Jigsaw Entertainment produces a new sketch comedy show for Network Ten in Australia - The Ronnie Johns Half Hour.

What we are finding is that a significant number of viewers are capturing the show off air and distributing copies of the complete show on the web. There are also clips distributed via email. None of this is attributed to us or the creators of the show. Indeed some of the clips have a "bug" on screen crediting another web site.

So while the ideas in the commentary are admirable, what we are experiencing is stealing. This is not stealing from a big Hollywood studio but from a small group of Australian creatives.

Some will say we should be happy about the "free" marketing this brings to the show. But without attribution there is no marketing rub. Indeed their reasoning is the same argument advanced by the promoters of K-Grind to justify their ill fated and shameful exploitation of naive short film makers.

While the article talks of savvy teenagers remixing their lives, the much of the content we see and you write about is stolen - some very funny, but stolen all the same.

I am in show business - creating original entertainment content as a proper business. Everyone is paid - it is expensive to do.

I get very sick of the proponents of ultra low budget films, short film festivals and internet sharing saying how good their model is. The model has a big problem - the wrong guys get paid - and as you say, the wrong people will clip the ticket.

If the goal is just to have material seen then sure, put it up for free. But if you want to have a career and a sustainable business then you are going to need a better solution.

All the best

Nick Murray

Posted by: Nick Murray | March 02, 2006 at 11:06 PM

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