reporter's notebook CENTURY CITY, Calif.--Anne Sweeney, president of Disney-ABC Television Group, opened her speech with a line probably more optimistically befitting the times than literally true.
"The beauty of our company is that we love chaos," she tells techies, movie and music executives sipping their morning coffee in a posh Century City hotel ballroom. "We embrace change as a part of life."
As the Disney executive associated with bringing small versions of "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" to Apple Computer's video iPod, she speaks of change with some authority. With a recent series of small but consistent steps, the TV and film world has put itself squarely on the often-painful digitalization path traveled by the music industry over the last five years.
Yet at the Digital Entertainment and Media Expo conference, held in the shadow of MGM's tall office tower here this week, it's utterly clear how much has changed. A similar event five years ago would have been peopled primarily by technologists promising to overturn the hegemony of old-media dinosaurs, with record label executives looking like the hunted, if they were in attendance at all.
Today, old-guard media feels far more in control of this particular technological cycle, even if it is one of chaos and change. Sweeney is joined at this conference by executives from other studios, record labels and TV stations. Few claim to have a definite picture of tomorrow's market. But it is clear that the start-ups and technology companies here see their futures as dependent on amicable relationships with those media titans.
Ask Conrad Teran, president of iSeeTV, a start-up that?-like an increasing number of companies in the past six months?-has allowed anyone to distribute video content online. Teran says this kind of alternative channel allows experimentation, amateur programmers into the business, and professionals to test commercial pilots and other shows without network support.
He's also quick to ask clients if they have advertising, sponsors or money. One of his first clients is a Clear Channel radio station that's turning its audio station into video.
The old giants "are still a big part of the game," Teran said. "They will never be irrelevant."
In many ways, the TV and video industries face the same challenges that record labels faced in 2000 and 2001. Consumers have begun experimenting with digitally downloaded versions of industry content, and early adopters' expectations already far outstrip what the content companies are willing to provide.
File swapping of movies and TV shows is widespread. Just as in the early days of the digital music business, the reluctance of TV and movie studios to provide a wide variety of online content has led to less-than-satisfactory official download services such as Movielink and CinemaNow.
Apple's iTunes store has provided a taste of one possible future for authorized downloads, but its available content has been scant and of poor quality compared to a DVD.
In 2000, that was recipe for consumer rebellion, as peer-to-peer shortcuts like Napster allowed pent-up demand for digital content to explode onto the Net, devastating any illusions the music industry had about its own future.
This time around, content companies have accumulated a half-decade of court support. Record labels and movie studios have filed thousands of lawsuits against individual file-swappers. Even if they've failed to stop file-swappers wholly in their tracks, it is now clear to parents and would-be swappers that copyrighted content isn't legal to download without permission.
A U.S. Supreme Court ruling has put peer-to-peer networks on the defensive; most are now seeking to make peace with content companies. And technology entrepreneurs remember the scores of now-defunct dot-com companies whose plans to revolutionize media distribution foundered on a lack of support from record labels, movie studios and TV networks.
Not that this makes life easy today for old media.
Just as transformations in the music business have made life difficult for retail music stores such as Tower Records or Sam Goody, the prospect of changes in TV and movie distribution is causing indigestion all the way down Hollywood's food chain.
Advertisers have been worried that Disney's relationship with Apple might lead to a further erosion of their ability to reach viewers. Theater owners, represented at this week's conference by the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO), have been fighting bitterly against the prospect of moving DVD releases and on-demand Internet viewing to more closely match theatrical release dates, an idea championed by Disney Chairman Robert Iger.
"At some point, that shrinking (release) window would dramatically affect cinema admissions," said NATO executive director John Fithian. "If the industry were to convert to simultaneous release on DVD, or with downloads, that would have devastating impact on the cinema industry."
There's plenty of chaos and change to go around. But the digitalization of Hollywood and its TV siblings is underway, and already taking a very different path than its musical predecessors.
I go to very few movies and it's not because I don't want to see the movies that are playing. I don't go because like a lot of people I have a home theater that gives me good enough quality that I have no reason to deal with screaming kids and inconsiderate cell phone users. If I'm going to cough the cash for consistantly rising ticket prices then I want a much better theater experience. I think the fact that home theaters are giving people such a great movie watching experience that they are having a hard time justifying spending $10-$12 per person to go out. Give me something to make me want to go back to the theaters, be it better sound or video quality, something but give me a reason not a sob story about how the theater industry is so hard up. Give customers a reason to use your service, don't just expect them to because they always have.
I can remember waiting for "Robots" in a foyer and the televised trailer, even without being HD, had depth and warm colour whereas the big screen movie was scratchy, flat and cold water colour like. Content left for tv long time ago, now technology is following suit. :) :) :)
"At some point, that shrinking (release) window would dramatically affect cinema admissions," said NATO executive director John Fithian. "If the industry were to convert to simultaneous release on DVD, or with downloads, that would have devastating impact on the cinema industry."
F*CK the cinema industry. $10 to watch 25 minutes of commercials first?
MIT creates a simulation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Spacewar. A relic of the early days of minicomputers, it was one of the first computer video games and set the stage for many others, including Asteroids.
Company requests ban on sales in the U.S. of the Samsung-made showcase for Google's heavily touted Ice Cream Sandwich version of the Android operating system, saying it violates four Apple patents.
AstrologyDating.com is a new site that tries to find you your perfect love on the basis of birth date, birth time, and birthplace. But will it tell you the truth? Well, it asks you to pay only per match. So I tried it.
The Web fulminates when it is revealed that executives from VEVO--vehement music industry antipirates--played a pirated stream of an NFL playoff game at a party. VEVO claims it left its Wi-Fi unsupervised. Have we heard that argument before?
Tor's "obfsproxy" technology would make encrypted data look innocuous and let it dodge government censors. That could help citizens in Iran reach blocked sites as antigovernment protests reportedly loom.
iPhones and Angry Birds aside, the arcade endures. Crave pays a visit--and offers up an homage to games and gamers of years past and a tribute to the possibly endangered, but not yet dead, atmosphere of the arcade itself.
had depth and warm colour whereas the big screen movie was scratchy, flat and cold water colour like.
Content left for tv long time ago, now technology is following suit. :) :) :)
dramatically affect cinema admissions," said NATO executive
director John Fithian. "If the industry were to convert to
simultaneous release on DVD, or with downloads, that would
have devastating impact on the cinema industry."
F*CK the cinema industry. $10 to watch 25 minutes of
commercials first?