Is the Human Need for “Story” a Mineable Natural Resource?
The truth about the nonstop demand for media
Last spring, I was a hundred yards from a beach, watching the Preakness live on my iPhone. A few days before, I had watched three back-to-back episodes of House of Cards on Netflix, and the movie The Age of Adeline from seat 10A on JetBlue. It was a “media rich” weekend, and what I wanted, when I wanted it. In the 1960’s, after watching The Wizard of Oz on TV and wanting to see it again, I had to wait roughly 364 days. In the 1970s, when cable TV first took off, I asked what at the time seemed like a rhetorical question, “Do we really need more television?” I’ve spent most of my career helping to divine more and better ways to create and distribute video, in every dimension, to nearly everyone. It turns out, demand for multimedia is greater than anyone ever could have imagined.
All industries respond to the laws of supply and demand. In the media industry, however, demand always manages to dwarf supply. Since the 1960s, human media consumption habits have been driven by technology; first terrestrial TV, then satellite TV, Cable TV, VCRs, CD-ROMs, DVDs, DVRs, the Internet — YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu.
I grew up in the age of the “Three Networks.” In retrospect, there wasn’t much on TV. As viewers we were indeed loyal. TV mainstays like Bonanza, The Wonderful World of Disney, sitcoms like Ozzie and Harriet, primetime cartoons like The Flintstones, and variety shows like The Ed Sullivan Show all helped to create a common culture of shared experience. Yet, television was really just a stopping point in a parade of media forms that have continued to grow and multiply. It didn’t kill radio or the theater and it didn’t stop opera or live music. Today, people still flock to see great paintings, just hanging there on walls, as much as they throng to see Beyonce perform live, or to see Hamilton on Broadway. With old and new media forms emerging, evolving, and co-existing for literally centuries, what drives the human thirst for more? The answer is simple enough: our human need for “story.” Ever broadening, it is the natural resource that drives the global media industry.
Media-consumer behavior suggests that consumption drives greater consumption, only creating greater demand: a perpetual motion machine. People often express mixed emotions at the end of a Netflix binge-watch: the relief of completion followed by a strange immediate nostalgia that they might never again find something quite so engrossing. After a deep sigh and a moment of silence, the search for another story begins anew.
Stories are everywhere, and they provide a structure and meaning to our lives. Whether they appear in TV, music videos, cinema, stage, or on our favorite sports team, we care about characters in the long arc of their adventure, whatever it might be. Protagonists in every form win our favor and we, their loyal fans, watch because we feel a part of their journey.
Predating any type of formal media, let alone a media industry, humans, for millennia have been held in the thrall of stories within culture. Our ancestors exchanged stories from generation to generation, shared tales that taught important lessons of heritage, culture, and values. Myths, Norse, Greek, or otherwise, have defined culture and cultural norms for thousands of years.
Even cave dwellers saw fit to illustrate their narratives on the walls of their supposed living rooms. As far back as there is evidence of human understanding, stories played an important role in daily life.
Though linking the human need for story and an industry that thrives on it is no grand revelation, media technology has evolved in lockstep with limitless demand. Seemingly the need itself is the limitless resource. A 2015 analysis showed that the top 150 US television channels will produce over 400,000 uniquely recordable hours per year, a staggering amount of content that is produced and consumed.
The sheer volume of multimedia content produced annually is important since growth potential is the primary driver of an industry’s success. In media, fortunes wax and wane daily — today’s hit can be tomorrow’s flop, and specific technologies can rise and fall. Cassettes replaced 8-track tapes even more quickly than streaming services like Spotify and Pandora have rendered the CD nearly obsolete. As media distributors like Netflix and Amazon have quickly learned, though technology may change, the demand for content is inelastic and persistent. Each knows that the value of their content will surely outlive the technology that delivers it today.
Working in the media industry throughout my career, I have seen its fortunes dip at times, often affected by other economic factors at play, but never for long. An industry built on the back of human imagination, curiosity, and shared experience will not be constrained by the price of an On Demand download or a Bruce Springsteen concert ticket. Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix are just the next iteration in the washing machine of value creation that can be derived from the joy of stories. The industry will certainly find new ways to deliver, aggregate, and monetize media assets, deriving even more productive uses of a wellspring that shows no sign of running dry. As fickle as an audience can be toward a single piece of content, in the aggregate, betting on growth of media, broadly defined, is like betting that there will be stars in the sky. You may not always see them clearly, but they are surely there.
In the 1970s, Bruce Springsteen wrote a song called 57 Channels (and Nothin’ On) — which may have been true at the time, but not today. Well, DO we need more television? It turns out my question of decades ago was actually the wrong query. Because the human drive to consume and create them is boundless, the better question is “Do we need more stories?” The answer is surely “Yes.”
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