Technological advances are allowing consumers to become producers , who in turn are transforming the content industry, writes Haydn Shaughnessy
The biggest challenge to the future of the content industries- which include the companies that make the stuff we listen to on radio, watch on our PCs and see on TV - is the viewer.
Whether on mobile screens, computer screens, or TV screens, those who watch, view and read, want to and are already making their own content.
They've gone beyond compiling and sharing playlists of obscure musicians on the internet and have entered the audio-visual industry. Viewers now make movies like they used to take photos; they blog; they podcast; they snap; they film; they rip, and they share. The consumer is now the producer.
When Mipcom, the annual jamboree for the world's audio-visual content industry, hosted its first mobile TV awards on October 18th, they misunderstood the creative nature of their clients. Prizes went to the traditional content world, even to Desperate Housewives. The average viewer or mobile user was nowhere to be seen.
But at an EU workshop in Brussels a week earlier, senior technologists from companies such as France Telecom and even the BBC talked of the shocking extent to which user power was transforming their future.
The user, viewer and reader is posing a huge headache - for which read interesting opportunity - for the technologists that supply the global content production industry.
The logic of technological advances previously went like this. The quality of content, for example, screen resolution, is on a continuous upward curve, so that ultimately we'll watch our favourite movies, soaps and game shows on high-definition screens, with tone-perfect sound linked to a home control system. The home will be a high-fidelity network.
However, users have shown themselves to be content with the feeble resolution attainable on a mobile phone, and with the mobile's inadequate sound quality.
In the late 1990s, newspapers spent millions of euro establishing their presence on the web. The trouble is, readers have shown themselves to be just as content to read amateur bloggers, and indeed to blog themselves.
Radio spectrum is bought at a cost of millions by professional broadcasters, but users podcast on the internet - there are now 15,000 podcasts from a standing start last year. Very soon, mixed reality technologies will allow us, at home or on the move, to interpolate a range of images into any content type, just like Woody Allen did in Zelig.
How seriously should we take the consumer as a producer of content? Well, seriously enough that in the UK, the BBC and Channel 4 have created a copyright licence so they can make their own TV content available to their viewers who will be able to rip, share, and re-use it at will. Do it yourself TV has arrived.
The tendency of the user, viewer and reader to take communications technology and do their own thing with it has led some commentators to conclude that users and technology are co-evolving. Co-evolution is a euphemism for an era when users begin to shake off the shackles that technology and its traditional business model imposes.
Of course, it is a problem and an opportunity. The R&D paradigm in the communications world has traditionally been straightforward. There is a value chain, or production and distribution chain. It begins with a content creator, proceeds through a production process, and ends when a broadcaster distributes to a home audience. The future of home entertainment has long been predicated on that value chain. That's why the major players in digital communications always assumed the future home would combine something akin to a home theatre with very high-resolution images conveniently interconnected to home automation systems that would also be controllable remotely perhaps via mobile phones.
This was the "record your favourite film in high-definition while you are driving home from work" syndrome. Once users started playing with content, the idea that industry could build a monolithic home network around traditional distribution models began to fall apart.
The value chain is now transforming. Viewers record their own movies on a mobile. They happily share parts of their desktop, such as photofiles and they even share their sex lives, recipes or obsessions on blogs. The privacy that used to be the home is now out on the net and the micro-audiences it serves are now well established.
Its biggest long-term impact is on the people who build televisions, make lights, or do anything to make life at home pleasing.
Whereas in the past, these technology companies could rely on major content producers to persuade large audiences to tune in, log on or plug and play a new device or service, the future audience is already known to consist of many minuscule ones, securing loyalty through the highly personalised nature of the content.The BBC and Channel 4 have spotted that participation encourages loyalty, but they know something else.
Content production costs are high for them, but next to zero for their viewers. As content outlets proliferate, they need to acquire amateur content every bit as much as the pornography sites do. That means the value chain is rapidly going out of shape.
But mobility has also contributed to the angst of companies who make their money in the home. Now we know the mobile device will be a continuation of the home with the home taking second place. Mobile phones are more flexible as entertainment devices. They are already networked, whereas the TV is not. They can incorporate games. They are cameras as well as sound devices and unlike the PC, they are not associated primarily with work.
While in Cannes the TV grandees awarded themselves prizes for creativity, in Brussels, the technologists worried that this changing business landscape is likely to make the cherished idea of a home entertainment system intelligently inter-operating with home controls uneconomic. We are not going to sit by the fireside watching high-definition TV.
More likely we'll be in the back of a taxi ripping the latest soap, interpolating a virtual image of ourselves behind Ken Barlow waving to our mates, or getting serious with a new version of Zelig. The power to utilise imagination was never closer.
