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a new SocialText wikiSony Open Forum Speech 2004
Summary
The Internet has cut the cost of distributing media. Advances in hardware technologies have put professional quality production and editing tools in the hands of the general public. Sales of major label CDs are noticeably decreasing and the spending habits of the youth have shifted from the consumption of mass produced content, such as CDs, to interactive content, such as games and karaoke, and to content which they produce themselves such as messaging and photographs. As the media industry continues to try to protect its assets by investing in technologies that are clearly more costly and difficult to use, new technologies that enable the public to produce and share their content more easily such as weblogs and photo sites are rallying around open standards and showing explosive growth. Is the production of content and the mass distribution of this content via controlled distribution channels going to survive? What will be the keys to success and how will it change? Is there an overlap of the producer/consumer and the media consumption worlds and how do they interact?Trends
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People will spend more time/money sharing content they produce than content produced by media companies
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Cost of production decreasing
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Cost of distribution decreasing
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Communities such as bloggers forming around sharing
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Shift from CDs->Karaoke/Video Games->Cell Phones is shift from consumption to interaction to sharing
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Segmentation (fragmentation) of many markets is already happening (and obvious)
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Smaller, more-tightly-bound communities
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Consider the specialization of magazines
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DRM will continue to make technology of media distribution more and more difficult and will diminish the value to the customer more and more
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File formats are becoming increasingly incompatible and fragile for compression and encryption
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Streaming and non-random-access impinging on quality of experience - file-based alternatives like Tivo and iPod sell well
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Attention for artists and individuals becoming exceedingly important
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More important to manage audience (I prefer "relationships" or "experience" in this context) than protect from pirates
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Most artists wish they were popular enough to be pirate-worthy
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Media is substrate on which communities form
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Increased importance of live events
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Value is created with the whole experience, not just a song or a film
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Opinion makers able to voice opinions on Net and networked communities
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Remixing culture / Importance of DJs
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Local sub-cultures playing increasingly important role in local trends over national trends
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Non-local subcultures able to form online and share disparate interests
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The number of opinion makers is very small relative to the broader market, but their influence is critical to reaching that market
Technologies that support non-traditional content production and distribution
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Blogging
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Camera Phones
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GarageBand and similar music composition tools - Easier user-creation and sharing of music
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Wikis as horizontal information assembly, particularly at scale
On media awareness, how are they taking in what you're saying right now? On the future of media, how do new developments affect conferences like the one they're at now (eg wireless backchannels) --JohnAbbe