I missed the beginning because someone had forgotten to pay our exhibitor bill. So - just some sketchy notes, taken from half way through Chris Anderson's keynote here at NATPE.
Per month 75% of the most popular top 100 on YouTube comes from broadcast.
Per day, however, 75% of the most popular top 100 come from users.The more business/broadcast is taken off youtube, the more that youtube will be taken over by usergenerated content - and broadcast content won't feature.
My children have never seen television as we traditionally understand it. They don't know what a network is, what a channel is, a schedule. "When is it on" is meaningless to them. And we're not a radically different household. We use xbox 360s to stream media, and a central server which is my wife's PC in the study. We download or tivo everything. My kids don't differentiate between any of it.
Last night we put the kids in front of the tv, and they had to choose what to watch. Two of them voted for star wars, and two of them voted for machinima, The Codex. It's my kids' favourite show. It resonates with their specific interest.
Overall, the content is equally available to them: it's content available on a screen throught the traditional search mechanisms available to the internet.
The good news: they love moving pictures. The bad news: they're not watching your ads.
Kids love interactive media. They want control. We've trained our four angels to never watch one of your ads again: not because we don't love advertising, but we can't deal with any more requests for your toys.
[laughter]Let's talk about movies: there are more and more people making more and more content every day. There is exploding supply, increasing quality, increasing diversity. The only problem is the link that used to connect the two - the broadcast business model - is being used less and less.
The biz model behind broadcast of advertising adjacent to content is completely broken in these new forms of distribution.
The big question is neither about the future of TV production nor of TV distribution, (the answer to both fo those is "more").
It's about the future of video advertising.
The audience is chasing choice. Google has cracked text advertising. Look at what it's doing to most of the print idustry, as we go from unmeasurable print ads to measurable text ads. It's just a matter of time before Google figures it out for video advertising.
"And we're not a radically different household."
That's just complete bull$#!+, particularly in light of what Anderson goes on to describe as his home media set-up. In a world of vcrs flashing 12:00, I seriously doubt that an XBox 360-based home entertainment set up is not radically different. Reminds me of a friend who imagined the average rate of college graduates was over 50% because "everyone I know graduated from college." Anderson's frame of reference is completely out of whack.
Posted by: Todd W. | January 17, 2007 at 10:26
Yeah, absolutely. I laughed when I read that. The "Wired" crowd often seem to forget just how not-average they are in regards to tech.
Perhaps we're being unfair and he contextualized that statement. Perhaps he meant other households whose inhabitants have college degrees, are between 25 and 45 years of age, do tech-related media work, have at least twice the median US income and set up their own media servers and have game machines and tivos. You know, those people.
Posted by: bob | January 18, 2007 at 01:45
William Gibson said, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed."
This guy's offhand comments about being 'not a radically different household' struck me as particularly clueless because in one sentence he describes a couple of thousand dollars in hardware and access fees as though most everyone can afford such luxuries.
If these are the people making decisions about the future of visual media, where does that leave those of us still watching broadcast TV on a 19" cathode ray tube? Will we be the Okies of the 21st century?
Posted by: TacomAroma | January 18, 2007 at 17:44
'William Gibson said, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed."'
Think about when few people had cell phones or home computers compared to when they became common. Other technologies became available in the mean time (such as the web, in the case of computers), and things qualitatively changed just because of all the people using them and contributing to their development. The dynamics surrounding the technologies were significantly different at the two points, and in ways that weren't all predictable.
Thus, these "Wired" folks not only make the mistake of thinking they're average and thus are talking about the present, but they're also not even *really* talking about the future.
(In other words: just because you had a rocket car in 1965, it didn't mean you were living in the future. It just meant you had a rocket car.) *Hopefully* no one who is making actual decisions is assuming that everyone has rocket cars, or that everyone will have rocket-engine-equipped 1964 Chryslers in the future. Metaphorically speaking, that is.
Posted by: bob | January 18, 2007 at 19:26