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The Film Business Is About to be Slammed

Authored by Ray Bolger on June 22, 2007 - 12:11pm.
From Digital Media Conference 2007: A beautiful day in DC, weatherwise, for the Annual Digital Media Conference, taking place today at the American Film Institute in Silver Spring, Md., just across the city line. About 500 registered attendees and about 60 panelists are converged in the AFI’s striking Art Deco space, and a lot of the chatter here centers around the notion of “monetizing” content and audiences, and which business models on the Web are going to work best going forward, moving past Web 2.0 and toward Web 3.0 (whatever that might be). Seems similar to the question that a lot of people in the business were asking way back during Web 1.0: Would the best business models be advertising driven or supported by paying users?

One thing that’s for certain, according to Joe Bates, director of research for the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), citing recent survey results: “Consumers what to dictate when and where they view and hear content. Those that realize it and build their business accordingly will win the revenue system,” Bates told an early session this morning. John Barrett, director or research for Park Associates, citing other survey results, told the crowd that, in terms of user behavior, the youngest generation among us is taking multitasking to new heights, taking in multiple sources of media all at once -- talking on the phone while they use a computer for messaging with friends, while also watching TV, for example. “Now, it’s no longer two eyeballs and a screen, it’s two eyeballs and three screens,” Barrett said. What that means in terms of designing or running a digital media business, don’t ask me. Old fart that I am becoming, it just makes me dizzy to think about.

Jim Brady, vice president and executive editor of washingtonpost.com, revealed publicly that the business unit of the venerable news organization for which he is responsible is in fact growing nicely. But, he candidly pointed out, the online unit is not growing as fast as the company’s flagship newspaper business is shrinking! That’s gotta be a point of concern for the Post’s owners, I would guess.

I’m doubling as a roadie today, and I need to help tear down the stage here pretty soon. So I’ll just sign off with this final message that for me was a take-away from the event: The film business is about to be slammed -- disrupted, put it how you want -- by the same kind of tsunami that buried the music business not so long ago, profoundly changing its rules. The technology to overcome all the complaints about how long it takes to download files and burn copies of feature-length movies -- the same kind of complaints that were made about moving digital music files around on the Net not so long ago -- are right around the corner for the film/video world, more than one industry insider at the conference warned. Or promised, depending on how you look at it…

Ray Bolger

Published in DMW Daily, June 22, 2007
tags: Games | Internet | Video | Music | Movies | Events | Film | Digital Media Conference 2007 |



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