In Search of Content
We have heard for twenty years, ever since the internet took serious root with the advent of widespread broadband, that content would be king. Like with many business imperatives, timing is everything and the world was not ready yet for content to be king twenty years ago. I would argue that to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the platform is the message and over the past twenty years there has been a great deal of jockeying among the platforms. We have seen a great many trends intersecting over that time, all impacting the platform or “medium” with which content gets served up to the masses. I am no media guru, but my powers of observation should suffice for this exercise. The first and most obvious trend that supersedes all others is from wired to wireless. The most obvious of these is cellular voice and data delivery versus landlines. The advent of fiber-optics, while certainly used especially for heavy duty data, seems more like an alternative to cable than landlines per se. Maybe that differentiation is meaningless today, but for those of us who grew up with phone service versus TV service, it’s still in our consciousness. As for cable, it is still a TV medium, competing primarily with satellite, pretty much concentrated under DirectTV now. But more and more, cable or fiber is just a delivery mechanism for broadband internet. I think its fair to say that if you have internet service you have all you need for computer, phone and TV purposes.
Within the realm of the hardware platforms, streaming has displaced VHS (long ago) and now most of Blu-ray and regular DVD’s. My son Thomas just asked if he could toss out all my old VHS boxes in Ithaca (he had used them like dominos to make a Rube Goldberg useless machine). Without hesitation I agreed since I had recently tossed most of my DVDs when we moved out here. I imagine there will be a day when I will kick myself for not mothballing these future valuable antiques. In fact, besides TiVo and DVR’s being quickly turned into doorstops, let’s also ask ourselves if satellite radio (Sirius is the DirectTV of radio). My Tesla has taught me I don’t need Sirius anymore. I have it in all my other cars and on my motorcycles, but I already consider it vestigial. Wow, these businesses sunk lots of capital into hardware that is already obsolete. I’m reminded of the Erie Canal, which took twenty years and millions to build and then only operated for eight years due to the advent of the railroads and steamships. Such is the way of the world. Capital needs to be very nimble these days to keep up. There have been exceptions for sure, but in terms of content delivery, I’m not liking the capital-intensive movie theater model (even with fancy seats and upgraded food service). It was feeling weak before COVID, but now, forget it. And would you want to be Best Buy selling TV’s and Stereos today? Everyone can afford the biggest flat screen TV their wall can handle and can probably buy it for credit card points. And now, all you need is Apple TV, Roku, or just a Samsung Smart TV all by itself. Anything else is just old habit.
The content channels are also in flux. Long gone are the days of the three big networks. People of my age remember the TV Guide excitement of the coming Fall Show line-up, but no more. The barriers to entry or ownership of the cable channels seem pretty non-existent at this point. Anyone can come up from nowhere and suddenly be a content king or queen. The one exception I see out there is Disney, which so very much owns the mindshare of children and has effectively hedged its delivery bets that I bet it continues for some time to dominate kids programming. But since Netflix, Amazon or Hulu have become the obvious princes of content, we have to admit that there is an added criteria, which seems to be based on attention span. Just like emailing got overtaken by texting and texting has been overtaken by Twitter, we’ve also gone visual with Instagram, Snapchat and Tik-Tok. I make no bones about it all, I just note that the pace of change is eye-popping. Now we have podcasts and audiobooks to avoid reading and news highlights and alerts that fill up our inboxes. Look, journalists have used headlines, photos, diagrams and grabbing opening paragraphs, anything they could use to get viewership mindshare. There is nothing new about this except the new technology to enable and improve on these catchy tactics.
The entertainment cognoscenti seem to be betting on the new “soundbite” small-screen entertainment model with models like Quibi. Those folks have sunk a bundle of capital into what is basically an untested format to deliver hopefully valuable content that draws dome combination of subscriber income and sponsor income. Launching during a global pandemic may have been tragic for it, but who knows if it’s the Stay-at-home issues or the fundamental format that doesn’t work…or maybe it’s too soon to say and it will get adopted, just more slowly.
What I do know is that everyone I know is sharing good series or movies with each other as we all scour all the available platforms for content to entertain us at a time when we need more entertainment than ever. We need it to fill our hours not spent on professional sports or gathering with friends and family or traveling. We are all more home-bound than we’ve ever been. I’m sure we will see screen time data at some point that shows it skyrocketing among all age and demographic cohorts. The other reason we desperately need the content is for our mental health. We need distractions and upbeat stories. The 30’s were big movie years for the same escapist reasons. My nephew in the content production game has remained gainfully employed (from home so far), which tells me that this demand is not lost on the content crowd.
I hope the world has had its fill of reality TV (not to mention the Reality King-in-Chief). I suspect we will see much more in the way of feel-good content, and I sense that the content makers are increasingly looking to history for its most interesting stories. For the next decade, I bet that people will want to look less to the stars and more to their feet and their loved ones. People will want to reaffirm basic human values and goodness as they struggle to convince themselves that there is a good and valuable life to look forward to beyond the stranglehold of Coronavirus and our coming economic debacle. As a storyteller, I take it as my imperative to tell stories for my own reasons, but we may be soon coming into a time when the world will need more and more good storytellers as it expands its ongoing and upgraded search for content. That would be new content and good content.