THOUGHT (aka Centric's Blog)

I was asked to speak on a panel recently, addressing the top studio executives in Hollywood. For this panel, I was “the outsider,” brought in specifically to try to answer a question nobody could (or would) answer:

What will the entertainment industry look like in five years? Or ten?

Now, I’ll readily admit that I’m biased. I believe we’ll end up with an all-content, subscriber-supported pervasive network with popularity-proportional revenue sharing that I call the MediaPool. Everyone will contribute, and there’s plenty of money in there so that the loss of control of distribution (and perhaps even copyright) won’t mean disaster for the creative community.

But in five years, we’ll still be in transition. And I think the two power blocs will come down to this:

Open-Source Production. The next step for user-generated content. Someone will fix CBS’s broken InnerTube model and add user-generated content to their advertising-supported online content hub. Someone even smarter will have the great idea to redistribute ad revenues to the user-generated content producers based on popularity. And someone else will have the brilliant idea to say, “Hey, why don’t we take the most popular user-generated content and turn it into shows?” With this kind of revenue and reward model, small groups of people can come together and produce higher-quality user-generated content, with the intention of “fishing for dollars.” These small groups–from one person to run the camera and another to do the editing, to much larger groups with directors, DPs, actors, and more–will be participating in “open-source production.” In other words, they’re doing this on spec with the intention of building a fanbase and making some money. The most popular of these open-source production groups will do very well indeed from advertising revenue sharing alone.

Immersive Studio Experience. On the other hand, studios will have gotten smarter. Some of them, at least. They’ll start inviting fans into their worlds, through shared fan wikis and immersive gaming (perhaps unlocked through the purchase of physical media, such as a Blu-ray disc). They’ll monitor the most popular memes that run through these virtual worlds, and incorporate them in their ongoing storylines. They will, in effect, be building complete alternate universes, using their characters and their worlds. With a few smart game-developer acquisitions, they can create uniquely compelling worlds that make users come back and visit, again and again. This drives an advertising, merchandising, and downloadable media revenue model.

The good news? There’s room for both of these models in people’s need for entertainment. And the overall narrative structure, the need for great stories, and the need for escape aren’t going to go away. In five years, both models will still be evolving, and there may be conflicts as they do.

In ten years, I suspect we’ll all look back on this and laugh, and wonder why there was ever any panic. There will be a complete continuum, from very sophisticated open-source production to people wearing heads-up displays and living in the studios’ alternate worlds as an overlay on their reality.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 10:22 am and is filed under Ruminations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.