I’ve seen the #mediaquake up close, my predictions for the next tectonic shifts to media&entertainment
The past couple years seem like a never ceasing flow of news in the media/entertainment space of newly launched content and distribution ventures, fueled by an incessant appetite from the public for streaming. Just this morning, thanks to my good friend and fellow curator Sébastien Provencher, I was alerted to Starbucks launching a content division to produce documentaries focused on social justice. The large continents we live within in digital eg Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook are all making big content plays, mixing production and distribution clout. It’s no surprise that everyone’s favorite third space, Starbucks, led by true cinephile and content lover Howard Schultz, is stepping up to the plate as well. DVD rental company Netflix and online bookseller Amazon are pushing boundaries in what is no longer “television”, computer company Apple is the leading source of digital revenue for musicians, etc.. The “artificial” boundaries stemming from the 19th&20th centuries are being “blown to bits” by the digitization of our world, which accelerated a couple of decades ago.
Here are some of my predictions for the #mediaquake effect on media and entertainment on which I’d love to be challenged (yes I mean you Duncan Stewart):
- the cable bundles will continue to bleed out and give way to a version of à la carte which will upend the model for the current “golden age of tv”
2. à la carte pricing will start to go mainstream in Canada first
3. one of the large integrated cable/content businesses in Canada will be split up and the cable/telco portion will be bought by either AT&T or Verizon
4. Vincent Bolloré of Vivendi will make a large content play in North America, potentially acquiring AMC/BBC America from the Dolan family
5. one of the Asian content&distribution players will also attempt to acquire a large North American business, possibly Lionsgate
6. Sony Corp will divest its film&tv business in 2015 as management refocuses, potential acquirers: Rupert Murdoch, Alibaba or.. Vincent Bolloré
Since 2009 I’ve been using the #mediaquake as a concept to encapsulate this movement. I’ve seen its effects first hand, almost 2o years ago. Here’s that story below, from which I’ll later posit what the future may hold for the #mediaquake.
I started my path in the fall of 1996, at a storied news photography agency in New York named Sygma (later Corbis Sygma, after Bill Gates’s Corbis bought the agency). It was a natural fit for the news junkie and aspiring journalist that I was. Passionate about tech, I was first among my group of friends to “see” the internet in 1994 via one of the early versions of Mosaic. My two passions fit well at Sygma, as JP Laffont, one of the most talented photojournalists of his generation, who ran the agency with his wife Eliane Laffont, was also a techie and self-professed worshiper at the altar of the Church of Apple.
When I arrived for my first day on the job in November 1996, I was pleased to see that Sygma was making strides in tech, in essence kickstarting professional digital photography. Our photographer correspondents carried with them bulky (for the time) scanners to war zones, to be able to scan their 35mm slides and negative film and send them to us via email. This sounds like a walk in the park and it was anything but. One of our photographers, Ilkka Uimonen, covered the tension in East Timor in 1999 and managed to locate the last lab with chemicals and water on the island. He was able to transmit a number of key photos, including this one below which made the cover of Paris Match and got him a 2nd prize at World Press Photo.
The majority of our US sales were made to the fantastic trio ie Time, Newsweek and US News, to which we hand delivered or shipped analog copies of our slides and prints, which they in turn would scan into their magazines. I was probably one of the last salespeople to go up and down Manhattan to sell analog photo stories to Time and Newsweek by presenting them on their desk.
Fast forward 24 months later in 1999 and the entire photo industry had been “blown to bits”, thanks to the acceleration of digital photography, our workflow had gone 100% digital, the first pro digital cameras were starting to be affordable, cutting out the need to develop and scan. This lightning fast digitization upended the “band of As” -Sygma, Gamma, Sipa- all 3 independent agencies who would soon be bought by larger industrial interests. The necessary tech investments they all needed to make to keep up were for the most part much too large for small structures with relatively low amounts of available capital.
News photography was the first industry I’ve seen “blown to bits” first hand and fundamentally reorganized due to profound effects of tech on its core DNA.
My path has now been in the entertainment business for the past 5 years, where I remain a keen observer of the mediaquake and of the digital tremors that are challenging the status quo. The first wave of web circa 1994–2000 left us with a worldwide broadband network that smart and nimble challengers leveraged to success: Amazon and Netflix are two perfect examples.
The second wave from 2004 to now has seen the growth of the mobile and social web. The third wave is just starting to pick up steam and will mix the Internet of Things, 3D printing, Virtual Reality as new platforms for growth. The media&entertainment business, confident for far too long that their way was best, has seen its share of zombie subindustries: the newspaper industry where the NY Times could justify buying the Boston Globe for $1Billion in 1993 and sell it in 2013 for $70M; the physical content business eg VHS, DVD and countless others. The current landscape is pitting huge vertically integrated companies that combine large distribution footprints with content production. The best example of such a behemoth is Comcast, which catapulted to the big leagues in 2001 when an ill-fated decision pushed AT&T to sell its cable business to what was then a medium-sized family-run cable business. Fast forward a short 15 years later and Comcast has swallowed other cable businesses to lead the pack in the US and is now the steward of the Universal business in film&tv. Its coopetitors range from telcos Verizon and AT&T, both children of the Ma Bell 1984 breakup to Google, who’s been expanding its Google Fiber “experiment”.
We’re in the first throes of an epic #mediaquake battle between the incumbent telcos and cable companies, and the newer entrants such as Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook, who are flush with cash and brains and seek to displace the incumbents. The consumer stands to benefit in the long term but the #mediaquake is ushering in an era of uncertainty that will take a few years to stabilize.
