The world of content — especially professional content — continues to shift beneath our feet.  Three years ago, I used my first class as a digital media professor at the University of Washington to understand just what I had produced with that first “amateur” film of mine (I had been a professional journalist, but I had never filmed my own feature-length documentary before).  The title of the class?  “Selling the Message: The Business of User-Generated Content.”  The “business” then, was under threat from pseudo-amateurs like me, with the explosion of digital media capture tools (aka, cheap cameras) and distribution platforms (aka, YouTube).  The established, institutional studio system seemed to be under attack as this proliferation in new “voices” transformed media into yet another commodity.

But interestingly, despite this commoditization, apparent amateurization, and the uncertainty of the economy, somehow the increased availability of media online has also produced more demand for “professional” content.  Witness Steve Jobs’ remarks this week as as he introduced Apple TV:

So what have we learned from our users? They want hollywood movies and TV shows whenever they want. It’s not complicated. They don’t want amateur hour. They want HD — everyone wants HD. They want to pay lower prices for content. They don’t want a computer on their TV — they have computers. They go to their TVs for entertainment.

HD. Anytime. Cheap.  That’s the new reality of video entertainment.  For us producers, it means more work, more technology, less revenues.  That’s probably one reason why networks such as NBC refused to sign up with this newest iteration of Apple TV, afraid that they would get bullied into the 99 cent rental cage — similar to what happened with iTunes.

And yet there’s another tension, even as all this content is miraculously made freely available online.  While the producers struggle to monetize their work, the content providers from the old media world are desperately trying to regain the luster of the Golden Age of monopoly pricing — when this stuff was actually hard to create.  In other words, they’re all wondering aloud whether there’s anyway to reverse the demolition ball of the Web and reconstruct a semblance of the studio system of yore.

Well if you pay close attention to Wired Magazine’s “The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet” cover story this month, that may indeed be happening.  Many have voiced their strong opposition to Chris Anderson’s conclusions.  But I’m more interested in the observations that led to those conclusions, as well as the ensuing sidebar debate.

Specifically:

- There’s a “struggle for control” over how content is distributed online — and who owns what.  We knew that already, Yochai Benkler mentioned it in his groundbreaking 2007 book, The Wealth of Networks.  The studio system would not so easily abandon the power and profits it once enjoyed, even as utopian web pioneers argued for complete openness — as libertarians, or socialists (depends on your point of view!).

- With the rise of smartphones, the mobile web, and apps, we now see that (a) we can bring more order to how we use the Internet; (b) we need more efficiency in how we do use the Internet given the inherent constraints in wireless streams vs. broadband (at least that’s the argument Google and Verizon seem to be making in their sideways attack on Net Neutrality).

- Although online advertising does produce revenues, it doesn’t produce quite enough to sustain the traditional, high-end, highly-compensated human and technological mass media infrastructures.  Sites like Mashable, Engadget and the West Seattle blog do make enough money to sustain themselves.  But are those revenues enough to keep the New York Times afloat?  Not in its current analog/digital iteration — hence the move to a pay wall.

- The recession was the “panic button” for content providers, with a sudden realization that they couldn’t give away the candy store, largely to Google’s benefit (as the traffic and sales manager of the open web).  Banner ads suck, and essentially lay the groundwork for a “thrift shop” mentality to online content — cheap and ubiquitous.

- Enter Apple, once the close friend of content creators such as myself, newly reformed as aligned with content providers as everyone rushes to create their own iPad app (not so coincidentally, Wired Magazine — owned by Conde Nast — has been heavily touting its $4.99 digital download for iPad.  I think I paid $12 for the annual dead tree subscription).

So what does this mean?  Google open web thrift shop vs. glossy Apple Studio System?  Indeed as one dissenter pointed out in the Wired articles, the whole “Web is Dead” argument has much less to do with the Web itself, and centers primarily  around professional content as producers search for more viable sources of revenue.

I’m still working all of this out, and I’m not without my own self-contradictions.  On one hand, I welcomed the promise of how the Web would set us free from the distrustful media oligopolies of the 1990′s (I used to work for one).  On the other, as a professional content creator, I’d like to find a way to make a decent living from the fruits of my creativity, so I get the need to bring some order to the chaos.  I would just hate to see the Internet co-opted in the same way that broadcast and print were in the 20th century.  Even as I prepare for another school year and attempt to take these fast-moving developments into account for the overarching “vision” of our graduate program for communications professionals (who need to somehow make a living from this stuff too!), I’m also enjoying the book Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture.  While I ponder the Wired articles, this passage stood out for me:

The end result of this ease of distribution and rapid flow of information has been a series of mixed blessings for the indie community.  On the one hand, artists are more in control of how their work gets distributed and promoted than they’ve ever been before, with the proliferation of cheap and easy technologies for doing so.  On the Urban Outfitters conundrum [the co-opted, easy accessibility of indie culture through a mass merchandising profit center] rears its ugly head.  The more overexposed indie music, comics, publications, and design get, the more that those art forms can be co-opted by the mainstream and its masters.

So is it over for the “independent voice” as powerful corporations have their way with the Web as they have had with our other sources of media historically?  I refuse to admit that this is so.  Certainly, viable distribution options may become more constrained in the iTunes/Netflix/Hulu/Facebook world.  But co-option can work both ways.  The tools of storytelling production are in our hands more than ever before.  We will continue to use them, we may resort to the big brand “utilities” from time-to-time to broaden our own reputations but the web is not dead, nor is it dying.  It remains a free, viable opportunity for any of us to create our own channels of story distribution through our own blogs, our own sites, our own relationships.  But we do need to make a sustained effort to carve out our own independently-owned space rather than surrender full control to the newly reforming studio hierarchy (which seems kind of like Terminator 2′s indestructible liquid metal!).

Indeed, rather than qualifying the Web as a bargain basement content repository (aka “thrift shop”) compared to the shiny new APPliance World, could we not see it instead as a vibrant, open village square, with healthy small (yes, Mom & Pop) businesses that provide a sustainable living for its denizens?  Can they coexist, even as attention and dollars flow more into the big box system than into the market square?

I’d like to think so, even if it requires a shift in our mentality and strategy as independent communicators and media makers.  I’m heartened that when I did meet with Wealth of Networks author Yochai Benkler this year, he continued to espouse his decision to give away the online PDF of his book for free, even as it remained a topseller for Yale University Press for months.  He called his creation his “calling card” — keeping his day job as a university professor and earning his keep from speaking fees and royalties as the book gained prominence.  If I can do the same delicate dance with my films — with a healthy mix of occasional broadcast licenses, online royalty payments, community screenings — as I build my own credibility, relationships and profile, while creating content that matters and hopefully makes a difference, then I will happily call myself a sustainable storyteller.

Watch more free documentaries

Originally posted to Storyteller Uprising

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The film industry is slowly but steadily being forced to part with quaint artifacts like the “hero’s journey…”

Of course in my Storytelling & Digital Media class, we meet Joseph Campbell and Aristotle head-on, cos’ you need to know the “rules” before you can break them.  Many of my students reached for the stars with our latest exercise: shoot a 2-minute film with a beginning, middle and end (Aristotle), doing only in-camera edits.

Here is just some of our work (all of our films are up on our class social networking site, www.mcdmspace.ning.com).

The idea of shooting a 2-minute film without editing it later may sound like a simple exercise, but these films required considerable planning.

Nicole spent a lot of time storyboarding this, and then shot it with the video function on the new Canon 5d SLR camera.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Then there’s Matt’s edgy, “This Encounter is a Lie:”

Click here to view the embedded video.

I loved the fact that Jay filmed this with her Macbook’s webcam (good thing Seattle wasn’t living up to its rainy reputation that day):

Click here to view the embedded video.

To complete the relationship angst trifecta, here’s Margery’s “Waiting for Him” (we penalized her a bit for using copyrighted music, but I see that YouTube now provides an on-screen link to buy the song from iTunes):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Annie blew my mind with this interactive “analog” survey:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Update: I had to add Yen-Ching’s French cinema-comes-to-UW-campus film:

Want to see more of our work? Find more videos like this on MCDM Media Space

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Xbox Live general manager Marc Whitten told Next Generation this week that Microsoft will soon begin to delete some Xbox Live Arcade games from the service. The rationale is, to put it nicely, paper-thin: To “focus on quality over quantity” and “make it easier to find the games you are looking for.”

I am surprised by this in light of what I have studied about the long tail. It seems to make sense in the context of that theory, that once an item makes it into inventory, it just stays there. Why would they pull a title?

Kohler seems to be overly defensive of the long tail but I suppose this is understandable if your editor in cheif is Chris Anderson. In the interest of full disclosure, I work for Microsoft but not in the Xbox division. I work for Microsoft Learning. But back to the question, why pull a title? Kohler is a bit vague on this point and perhaps that is because his source was not giving him a lot of information. He mentions that there is some concern about the user interface being confusing. I don’t believe that. Microsoft has plenty of developers to fix a problem like that. Kohler goes on to defend the long tail by saying:

Now, you guys know me. I’m a free-market, laissez-faire kind of guy. I think it’s important that Microsoft is free to do whatever it damn well pleases with Xbox Live. That’s because I believe that, ultimately, Microsoft will learn that it’s doing the wrong thing because companies that get it right will succeed in the marketplace.

Only I’m not entirely confident about Microsoft’s competitors, either.

Finally, Kohler gets to the root of his anxiety in the final two paragraphs.

Perhaps these three companies really do believe that digital delivery will usher in a brand new democratic, infinite-arcade era of gaming. But let’s not kid ourselves. The reason that Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are so excited about digital delivery is that it represents a future in which one company — them — has absolute control over the sole content distribution channel.

And that’s a future we should be very worried about.

I understand the concern he expresses, that the gatekeepers will stifle the democracy of innovation. Unfortunately, Kohler does not offer an alternative. He lays fear, uncertainty, and doubt at the feet of his readers and leaves us there.

Here are questions I have. Do Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft have a new model that optimizes the long tail? Is there a point at which the long tail does not make sense and it pays to chop it off? Pay is the operative word here. We are dealing with corporations after all and they are by law beholden to their shareholders to make money. Have they found a way to further monetize what they found in their study of Chris Anderson’s theory?

I had a chance to sit in on a lecture of Jonathan Zittrain at the Berkman Center about ten days ago. He did his stump speech for the speaker circuit that supports his new book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. By the way, Jonathan Zittrain is hugely entertaining. He makes the mundane sparkle. If you do get a chance to catch him on the speaker circuit, go. But I digress. Zittrain speaks of the “dark matter” of the internet, a generative force that impels creation. It is who we are as humans. We long to congregate, communicate, create, and share. It was in this spirit that the internet was created. Amazingly it, the internet, has managed to survive despite some huge vulnerabilities. Among those vulnerabilities is the desire of corporations to control this mighty social engine. But that, as Mr. Kohler might leave us to believe, is not the only vulnerability that threatens the democracy of innovation.

The days of idyllic cooperation appear to be coming to an end. Spam is rampant and pervasive. Gatekeepers like Comcast and Sprint vie for dominace over the wire. By some accounts, the music industry is dead and in response, other content providers like Viacom, Disney, and Microsoft seek to clamp down on piracy and place ever more stringent restrictions on re-use of content. The number of security incidents on the internet are rising significantly. So, the question is, can the Internet survive the urge to regulate? Will this desire for control and regulation squelch or kill the generative nature of the internet?

Zittrain offers suggestions for how we can ensure the continued resilience of this wonderful invention. But the time to act is now. The future is in our hands and is for us to decide. How and what it will become is up to us.

I am beginning my first read of the book this weekend. Based on the lecture that I heard, I have confidence that time spent with this book will be well invested. I believe that what I will find is a reasoned response to the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that Kohler expresses.

- Mark Shea

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