Actually this is no surprise. The traditional players – RIAA and MPAA – keep complaining about how their “industry” is shrinking, but in fact:

This all points to the fact that what is happening within the industry is not a challenge of a business getting smaller — quite the opposite. It’s about the challenge of an industry getting larger, but doing so in ways that route around the existing structures.

The industry is getting bigger, but recorded music on round discs isn’t. The film and TV business is getting bigger but not through the MPAA’s member studios. Remember these are lobby groups for legacy businesses, not representative of the modern industry.

This is a great study.

Some of the key points:

• Entertainment spending as a function of income went up by 15% from 2000 to 2008
• Employment in the entertainment sector grew by 20% — with indie artists seeing 43% growth.
• The overall entertainment industry grew 66% from 1998 to 2010.
• The amount of content being produced in music, movies, books and video games is growing at an incredible pace.

Read it for the conclusions and methodology and continue to resist the dinosaurs approach to protection: they don’t need SOPA/PIPA/ACTA or any of the other attempts to kill innovation to protect legacy business that do not represent any creative artist.

I’ve long said that there is no credible support for the ridiculous figures of “loss” to the US economy either in dollars or jobs. Even the US Government Accountability Office says there is no credible support for any of the ridiculous figures of loss promulgated by the MPAA and RIAA. And yet, the numbers are repeated by politicians and the mainstream media to “prove” that “piracy” is a problem “we can all agree on”.

No we do not “all agree”. Until you present evidence that there really is harm by using independent, credible and peer-reviewed studies, we simply do not believe your BS.

This article from the Cato Institute attempts to find the “facts” behind the ridiculous figures and finds exactly what I found: nothing. Zip, nada.  According the the real results of even studies by funded by the SOPA supporters, amount to nothing more than the global gross of Alvin and the Chipmunks!

Julian Sanchez takes down all the stats in a most thorough way.

But it misses the point and Nat Torkington nailed it brilliantly. I’d post the whole thing but that would not be right. It’s short, go read it.

He brilliantly juxtaposes a story about a farmer who’s property is flooding and house being inundated and yet he rejects help from a neighbor in a truck before the waters rise, a boat when it’s above floor level, and a helicopter when he’s on the roof. In each case he rejects the help claiming he’s praying and “relying on God”.

Well, Bob drowns. He goes to Heaven and finally gets to meet God. “God, what was that about? I prayed and put my faith in you, and I drowned!”

God says, “I sent you a truck, a boat, and a helicopter! What the hell more did you want from me?”

And that is *exactly* the point. In speaking to the proponents of SOPA/PROTECT IP (MPAA/RIAA) he nails it so completely it should be published far and wide:

All I can think is: we gave you the Internet. We gave you the Web. We gave you MP3 and MP4. We gave you e-commerce, micropayments, PayPal, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, the iPad, the iPhone, the laptop, 3G, wifi–hell, you can even get online while you’re on an AIRPLANE. What the hell more do you want from us?

Take the truck, the boat, the helicopter, that we’ve sent you. Don’t wait for the time machine, because we’re never going to invent something that returns you to 1965 when copying was hard and you could treat the customer’s convenience with contempt.

Don’t wait for the time machine. Business models *always* change and if you don’t adapt, you die. Sometimes you can use your influence and money to buy a few more years by buying a few votes in Congress while distributing completely inaccurate information (less politely called lies).

There’s not going to be a time machine. Any legislative bailout you get will only delay the inevitable: business models for entertainment funding and distribution have already changed, it’s just some people haven’t realized it yet.

And Nat, sorry I still managed to quote way more than I should of your article, but since I couldn’t say it better, what was I to do?

About 18 months back I started a blog post “Apps are the future of distribution” but beyond the title, didn’t really have my thinking clear enough to finish the post. Fast forward and now Erick Schonfeld expresses what I could not.

While I’m excerpting a few paragraphs I strongly recommend reading the whole article to get a full feel for it.

Except there already is a global market for digital media. They are called apps, and they represent the future of media in many ways. Apps are media. Not only are they a form of media in the way that consumer software and games have always been considered media (they compete with TV, books, and music for consumers’ time and attention). But increasingly, they are also subsuming other forms of media.

I think this is probably the crucial point he’s making:

 The lines between software and media will become harder to tell apart as apps begin to include more and more traditional media.

And I can’t put this any better:

A song or a TV show will become a hit because it is shared by millions of people on Facebook and Twitter, not because it is getting millions of dollars of promotion on radio or TV. These apps will determine what we watch next through social and algorithmic recommendations—because how else do you find something to watch when traditional programming is dead?

The apps that deliver this media will exert a powerful influence over our consumption habits—what we watch, listen to, and read, as well as how we do it. Apps will help us find media through social and other filters, and throw it onto our TVs, iPads, stereos or whatever device is handy. They will bypass the set-top box, the radio, and the book store. Apps are where media consumption will happen. Media companies can continue to ignore or fight that trend at their own peril.

To date I have never found a peer reviewed study (i.e. one that has some validity) that shows any harm from unauthorized distribution via bittorrent or other means. There are, however, many studies and examples that show a positive benefit from the publicity and promotion that happens when a project gets released onto a torrent tracker.

Within 24 hours 5,000 people had already grabbed a copy without paying. For some filmmakers this is a nightmare scenario, but Diestler clearly disagrees as he sees all these BitTorrent downloads as a good way to gain exposure for the film that took blood, sweat and tears to make.

“I would much rather have 500,000 downloads than 5,000, although our distributor may feel differently. The worst thing that can happen to a small film, any film for that matter, is to fall into obscurity. 500,000 people could download it and hate it, but in my mind that is better than then not seeing or hearing about it all,” Diestler tells TorrentFreak.

Once, when doing a presentation on How to build and monetize an audience for your independent project I bought up the issue of “piracy” starting with:

“If you aren’t being torrented…”

before I finished someone in the audience completed the sentence with

“… you suck”.

And that’s the truth.  There is one thing worse than being torrented – being ignored!

“When you are a small film with zero money for advertising, BitTorrent can get your film out there and get people talking about it – that is all advertising really does anyway. It’s certainly an interesting question. Being friends with Jamin and Kiowa Winans – the filmmakers behind the film ‘Ink’ – I am very close to this topic,” he says.

You’ll notice the reference to “Ink”.  That is an example I use in the presentation noted above:

“Ink” got heavily pirated 400,000 times, shot into the top 20 movies on iMDb up from 12,991!

Kiowa says that is really hard to put an exact figure on that – they haven’t sold a DVD or Blu-ray for every download but sales have unquestionably gone up.

“We put that [donation link] up at the urging of some of the downloaders with the message ‘if you have watched Ink online for free and would like to contribute what you can, click here’,” Kiowa explains.

Incredibly it has stayed as one of the top 200 movies in the world for the last two months, a feat that would have been impossible without the extra exposure.

And like “Ink” the results are looking good:

Thus far The Inner Room has done “great” on BitTorrent resulting in the much anticipated buzz. Just a few days after it was pirated the movie saw a huge bump on IMDb’s movie meter where it’s currently ranked 250. And although the exposure is nowhere near that of “Ink,” the makers are content with the publicity BitTorrent pirates have given them thus far.

Bittorrent exposure, and free copies, are great ways to promote a project as long as there is a business model to capitalize on the publicity and promotion.

Since ultimately, it’s been brands that have financed Television from the first, I’ve long wondered why it’s taking them so long to realize they no longer need the middle man – the networks or channels – because they can take their message directly to the viewer. Mark Pesce set out the basic proposition in his 2005 article Piracy is Good? which sets out the basic Hyperdistribution philosophy: create the advertising content in conjunction with the program so it is sympathetic and integrated, then distribute it as widely and as far as you can, by whatever method works because the advertising message is integral to the program, and – presumably – targeting the same audience, avoiding the “irrelevant advertising” problem I have.

Now this survey examines what people – potential customers/audience – think about brands sponsoring entertainment:

With further innovation in TV so clearly in demand, we asked consumers if new providers could enter the market, appearing on our internet-connected screens, and if today’s brands would still be relevant, by 2020?

Many consumers agreed that there are “brands that could do a better job at providing TV than some of the TV providers and channels we have now”: 39% agreed, and only 8% disagreed. In the eyes of our viewers, there is clearly room for new entrants to be successful in this market – in particular, major internet, technology and film brands.

Interesting, very interesting.

An interesting research result from a source that isn’t fully bought and paid for by the Studios, that is, a report that may have some chance of relating to the real world rather than the fantasy land that MPAA/RIAA “research” reports come from.

Recently, Senator Ron Wyden asked CRS if it could explore the state of the movie industry today as compared to 1995 on a variety of different criteria. You can read the full report embedded below, but here are a few key points. First off, despite the industry’s regular attempt to play up its contribution to GDP and employment, the report found that the combined GDP contribution of both the “motion picture and sound recording” industries was a whopping 0.4% in 2009. Back in 1995… it was also 0.4%.

Emphasis is from TechDirt.com.

As for employment, Hollywood loves to claim that it employs millions of people. One popular number is that 19 million people have jobs in “IP-intensive industries.” Of course, we’ve discussed how misleading a term that is, as they lump in all sorts of jobs that have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with copyright. So, how many people are actually employed in the movie industry? Not that many. 374,000 in 2010 — and that includes both full and part time workers. And that’s really not much different from the 392,000 in 1998. So it’s not like the industry has been losing employees in droves as they imply. Furthermore, that’s only slightly more than the number of jobs that Facebook’s app platform alone is estimated to have created. Hell, we’ve seen reports that have said eBay alone created 750,000 small business jobs. Perhaps Hollywood isn’t as big a part of the economy as it likes to claim.

I like that last line, and this time I’m going to add the emphasis: Perhaps Hollywood isn’t as big a part of the economy as it likes to claim. 

The article goes on to consider Box Office Gross (higher than ever before), so once again I have to ask: Why do we need the Internet destroying, Constitutionally difficult pieces of nasty legislation as PROTECT IP and SOPA?  O right, to give “Hollywood” ultimate power over the Internet without challenge, due process, or recourse.

Once again it really is a case of protecting the MPAA and RIAA from themselves. Every new technology they’ve challenged and hated over the last 100 yours has turned out to benefit their own business. Idiots. That’s all, they’re just plain idiots. Especially the hypocritical Chris Dodds (now head of the MPAA). Now as head of the MPAA he is totally in favor of a “Great Firewall of China” for the USA (government censorship of the Internet) to protect the MPAA.

“When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn’t do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites.”

But just a few years ago as a potential Presidential candidate, he seems to have a whole different opinion:

Tell the Chinese government that Google.cn will no longer censor information with Google’s consent. And should the Chinese government not find that acceptable, then Google.cn would shut down its operations. I understand that you’ve already moved all of your search records out of China, to prevent them from being turned over to the Chinese government. But what better way to affirm Google’s commitment to the free flow of information as a human right, than to send this message to a nation with the largest population in the world?

You can view that video on YouTube. So, is Chris Dodds a lying hypocrite, just incredibly stupid or a politician who’ll say whatever they want to get elected, but ultimately follow exactly what their finical sponsors (aka donors) tell them to do and say.

“How do you know if a politician (future, present or former) is lying? There mouth is moving.”  How true that remains now.

The biggest barrier to Google and Apple’s desire to create a new television distribution network has been the intransigence of the content owners to disrupt their own business model while it’s still profitable. So the obvious answer is for them to invest in content directly.

Then, yesterday evening Google announced that it was launching more than 100 new YouTube channels with exclusive content from big-name celebrities and news organizations.

Google is directly funding this content with more than $100 million in advances, and it’s probably just the beginning. The company has also explored buying Hulu, and a deal is not off the table even though Hulu has stopped considering other bidders.

In other words, Google is seeding the explosion of video content on its own massively popular online video network, where it sells advertisements and makes money. Then, it’s providing an interface that puts that content on equal footing with the TV shows provided by the traditional TV industry, where Google’s presence is minimal. (Not for lack of trying — Google has a program calledGoogle TV Ads that lets advertisers buy ads on traditional cable networks like CNN. So far, it does not make a material contribution to earnings, whereas YouTube is probably a billion-dollar business.)

While we haven’t seen Apple show signs of investing directly in content, they have the means to simply bypass the Studios and Networks and go directly to the show runners and producers directly. Google has started what I hypothesized about in Dec 09.

Studies from the MPAA or RIAA tend to be laughably unscientific, to the point of even drawing the opposite conclusions than the data supports. Rarely are the methodologies exposed (an essential step for scientific analysis) nor the raw data ever shared. For scientific rigour, a study needs to be published so that anyone else in the world could reproduce the study and get the same results.

Studies from the “AAs” lack any of these things, and should be laughably dismissed, not used as the basis for bad law.  All real research shows that there is little – if any harm – caused to copyright owners from unauthorized distribution. (I reiterate my call for any study that has been peer reviewed that shows economic harm from unauthorized distribution. There are none.)

The research challenges conventional wisdom that removal of DRM restrictions increases piracy levels; the study shows that piracy can actually decrease when a company allows restriction-free downloads.

“Removal of these restrictions makes the product more convenient to use and intensifies competition with the traditional format (CDs), which has no DRM restrictions,” Vernik said. “This increased competition results in decreased prices for both downloadable and CD music and makes it more likely that consumers will move from stealing music to buying legal downloads.”

One sure way to determine if you’re looking at a genuine scientific study or a piece of corporate PR is to look at who (really) funded the research. Usually it’s some closely allied associate of the “client” who give exactly the report that they’ve been paid to produce. This research was funded by Rice and Duke universities.

Oh, as evidence of the extreme harm unauthorized distribution has done, look at the financial disaster that is “Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of All Time“:

rank	movie	± downloads	worldwide grosses
torrentfreak.com
1	Avatar (2009)	21 million	$2,782,275,172
2	The Dark Knight (2008)	19 million	$1,001,921,825
3	Transformers (2007)	19 million	$709,709,780
4	Inception (2010)	18 million	$825,408,570
5	The Hangover (2009)	17 million	$467,483,912
6	Star Trek (2008)	16 million	$385,680,446
7	Kick-Ass (2010)	15 million	$96,188,903
8	The Departed (2006)	14 million	289,847,354
9	The Incredible Hulk (2008)	14 million	$263,427,551
10	Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007)	14 million	$963,420,425

Just shocking how these movies performed. Perhaps the only heinous crime here is that none of these movies have yet made an official “profit”. Now that’s a crime.

Other than legal constructs that make them different, in practice a download with embedded ads and a real-time broadcast with embedded ads should be the same thing. And yet, no-one in the TV industry has even thought of the possibility, despite it being a very old idea.

For years, I’ve been referring to Mark Pesce’s Hyperdistribution model – both here in the blog and also in some of my public presentations – as one viable alternative to the current situation that would allow more consumption flexibility without changing the economics.

The responses are mixed. There are, certainly, a lot of people who insist they would never do that because they hate all advertising. I still think those people really just hate bad advertising, and don’t realize that they actually like good advertising (for example, the TV shows they download? They’re just “advertising” for other episodes of that TV show). But there are two types of answers that stand out and are seen throughout the comments. The first are that some people would agree to do this, having no problem supporting the TV folks. The second are people who say they hate commercials and wouldn’t do this, but that they would pay for a similar thing without commercials.

I generally dislike advertising, although more correctly I should say that, like others, I dislike irrelevant advertising, so I’d prefer to pay the equivalent (not the inflated prices attempting to be charged via iTunes et. al. ) but might be prepared to receive relevant advertising. Now, I don’t have children, am happy with my current car and already know what will replace it, not planning on going out to dinner or movies anytime soon, really don’t buy many clothes, don’t buy cosmetics…  I am a little non-consumerism, so just what advertising won’t be horribly intrusive and irrelevant?

Both book publishing and film/television are industries that were built on scarcity, that are being disrupted n an age of non-scarcity. That’s not to say that there isn’t success and money to be made in the traditional businesses, but book publishing is an interesting place to look for parallels to television (particularly).

In “olden” times book publishers approached writers, offered them an advance against royalties, to write a book. Somewhat more dramatically than the budgetary pressures on television production, the advances offered to writers in the video technology and techniques space have dropped to about 20% of what was being offered as an advance a decade ago.

Given that even those advances really didn’t cover the time it took to write a book, book writing was done for profile/career rather than from the publisher. In fact an author makes more from the Amazon affiliate commission (for sales in a State where Amazon still has affiliates) than from the publisher for the sale.

I went for “self publishing” a few years ago, starting with some PDFs of Final Cut Studio tips and on to some more serious book writing: most recently Conquering the metadata foundations of Final Cut Pro X. I’m selling both PDF versions and print versions (thanks to Amazon Createspace): pdfs directly and print via Amazon itself.

Now, I’ve written before on what you need to know and handle for yourself if you’re going to self publish, but for me it’s worked out well, with returns commensurate with the time invested in writing the book, so I get both a decent financial return and the profile/career boost as well.

The television industry, like print before it, has many levels between creative and customer – in fact it confuses the customer relationship because the broadcaster and cable companies’ customer is the advertiser, not the audience. These levels cost the consumer, but when the technology limits supply (of airwaves or cable channel real estate) it can be justified.

Until technology bypasses the control and allows print authors to go directly to customers, and still have access to the biggest book distribution channel in the world for physical books (and increasingly their digital equivalents). Although nowhere near as complete, we’re seeing a similar disruption to the television and film industry that will play out over the next decade as the print industry transforms ahead of it.

All the things that a publisher (substitute network mentally) provided for me as an author now have alternatives. As I wrote in the article referenced above, you will need to find an editor to peruse your work (unless you’re supremely confident) and someone to lay it out, but there are tools for that, or services at very reasonable prices. Even cover design can be done by template or service (through Createspace). The other things a publisher did for an author – printing, access to distribution and publicity – are things I can do myself or through Createspace and its competitors. Print happens on demand (and for very small number provides an interesting PR tool); by filling in some web forms the book appears in the Amazon catalog and publicity really fell to the author beyond the publisher sending out a press release at the time of publication and organize some interviews: things any competent author can do for themselves.

And without a large upfront investment required, funding the book is nowhere near the problem it was. Now, with film or TV production there’s generally a crew to fund as well, so the numbers will be bigger, but ultimately I think the same type of disruption will affect studiio film and television production.

Thanks to technology (and some work on my part) an independent has had the best selling Final Cut Pro X book in Amazon for June, July and August 2011. (Because there are no other print books being sold for Final Cut Pro X!)

After a slow start – and still controversy over exactly what format video will be supported in “HTML5″ – is the Flash era finally over?

Colleen Taylor writing for GigOm discusses recent data on HTML5 and how Apple’s position on HTML5 and Flash has – as I predicted several years back – pushed the adoption of HTML5.

As is often the case in business, where there’s a winner, there’s usually a loser. HTML5 could largely replace Abobe’s proprietary Flash technology. And HTML5′s swift ascent could render Flash irrelevant in short order. “I think the disappearance of Flash is closer than people think,” ABI senior analyst Mark Beccue said in a press release accompanying the data.

HTML5′s projected growth is all the more impressive considering that the actual standard is not officially expected to be completed until 2020 2014, according to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body. But that won’t stop companies and independent engineers from developing and deploying HTML5 features now, ABI said.

Full HTML5 interoperability isn’t expected until 2014 but we’re already a long way in, and will get further thanks to, somewhat ironically, Adobe.  I’ve long advocated that Adobe were in the best position to create an HTML5 authoring tool, and indeed they have now shown one in Adobe Labs – Edge. AppleInsider has a first look at Edge.

[Update] One day later Flixmaster launched another HTML5 authoring tool

PROTECT IP is a badly worded, very vague Bill being bought and paid for by the MPAA and RIAA that many think will break the INternet and criminalize normal behavior like embedding a video. The problem with vague Bills is that they tend to be interpreted to suit the enforcer of the day.

Trouble is, those that are supposed to balance all the needs of society before passing laws seem to not even have any idea what PROTET IP is actually about!

When these serious questions are raised, the MPAA puts its fingers in its ears and goes “nah, nah, nah, won’t happen, nah, nah” and never addresses the actual issues. Sadly, the Representatives have been bought and paid for and unless all voting Americans get to their Representative, it could pass and really, really screw up the Internet, and your life.

However, the guys who wrote the white paper have been speaking up lately trying to get our elected officials to recognize the consequences of passing PROTECT IP as is. But the really funny part is watching the technically clueless MPAA try to brush off these concerns. It’s almost laughable. Basically, the MPAA stamps its collective foot, and insists that it couldn’t possibly break the internet, and then suggests that “America’s technology community” can fix any problems:

As for the clueless Repreentatives: half of them have no idea what the Legislation is even about, thinking it has something to do with “immigration” or “the Internet Kill Switch” (it is neither).

Last week, we wrote about how Rep. Anna Eshoo (whose district covers much of Silicon Valley) is apparently so incredibly out of touch on what PROTECT IP is about (despite it having a huge impact on the economy of her district) that she thought it was really about immigration. We were willing to chalk it up to a busy staffer sending out the wrong form letter, but there’s growing evidence that our elected officials simply don’t know what PROTECT IP is about at all. 

David Segal from Demand Progress was kind enough to pass on that they’ve been watching the responses from elected officials to letters sent via their form about PROTECT IP and nearly 50% of them seem to be about things totally unrelated to PROTECT IP. Are Congressional staffers really that busy or are our elected officials just clueless? 

As an example, they sent over this letter, sent in response to someone who wrote to Senator Kristen Gillibrand protesting PROTECT IP, which, you’ll note, has nothing to do with PROTECT IP, but is instead about the “internet kill switch.”

Big Media pretends to speak for artists but in reality they are only in the business for themselves and frequently take money out of artists pockets, quite deliberately.

Now we have a stud y of 4000 artists have shown a contrary opinion forming. At least they’re not hypocritical about it as they generally download other artists works without permission:

One of the results that stands out directly is that artists are pirates too. Not all of them of course, but a healthy percentage. Of all the respondents surveyed on the subject, 22% indicated that they had downloaded copyrighted works without the owners’ permission in the last 12 months. Another 71% told the researchers they hadn’t downloaded anything without permission during this period, and the remaining 7% didn’t know, or didn’t want to answer the question.

Even so, a relatively low percentage think that unauthorized download have harmed them:

One of the questions dealt with whether the artists think they are being financially harmed by file-sharing. Interestingly, only about 12% of artists completely agree with the statement that file-sharing hurts them (~16% agree). The majority of the artists are not convinced that file-sharing is doing them any financial harm, and some actually think the opposite is true. What’s worth nothing is that higher educated artists in particular believe that file-sharing is doing them no financial harm.

So if it’s not hurting them, what is it doing??

Instead of hurting their wallets, the majority of the artists believe that file-sharing helps to promote their work. Little over 50% of those questioned responded affirmatively to the question of whether file-sharing helps to get their work known among the public, while only 5% completely disagreed with this statement. In particular the younger artists (< 25yo) recognized promotional benefits, as more than 80% thought file-sharing increases the popularity of their work

TorrentFreak alerts us to the news that he’s posted yet another blog post on the subject about howhe “loves pirates” and how people underestimate that artists can and do get paid, even when their work is being shared in an unauthorized fashion. In fact, he’s selling more books now that he’s actively offering up more “pirated” copies of his own work than ever before.

That parallels my own experience. While I know there are unauthorized copies of most of my books available, I’ve made sufficient from each work to be happy with the results.

Kevin Smith announced that he would auction off the rights to Red State after a Sundance screening and then infamously sold them to himself, leading to a rant about the state of distribution for independent movies.

He planned on doing a series of screenings-with-director events leading up to an October theatrical release.  Well, according to reports he’s already close to, or achieved, payback of the $4 million budget.

Kevin Smith’s latest passion project Red State has already paid for itself, six months before it actually sees full theatrical release. Thanks to an ambitious multi-city road trip in which Smith traveled to screenings of the movie and spoke with audiences afterward, Red Statehas already made back the $4 million budget production company SMODcast Pictures invested in the film.

Now Kevin Smith comes with a built-in fan base that he’s cultivated over the years (and that is indeed part of any success in this new paradigm – first Connect with your Fans) but it’s not only working for Smith:

That said, Smith isn’t the only filmmaker experimenting with new types of distribution. Edward Burns, for instance, distributed his latest feature film, Nice Guy Johnny, direct to iTunes, VOD and DVD last year, skipping theatrical release altogether. Indie filmmaker Sebastian Gutierrez distributed his Girl Walks Into a Bar directly to YouTube. And Pixar CTO and independent film producer Oren Jacob used a mix of social media and food banksto boost the profile of his documentary Ready, Set, Bag!

I’ve been sitting on this article for a while, waiting for a gap in the Final Cut Pro X “noise” to post it.

Yes, it is true that we’ve just had one of the best years for documentary ever. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t also more negative issues for the mode than ever before. The thing is, there are so many kinds of non-fiction films and so many kinds of doc enthusiasts that we all have very different answers for the following question: what one thing could change for the better for documentaries?

With that starting point, author Christopher Campbell, asks that very question and got an interesting variety of answers. Docs need to be:

• more entertaining;
• without the stigma that “documentaries” aren’t entertaining;
• sold based on the stories that unfold within the doc, rather than that it is a documentary;
• embracing “value added programming”;
• seen more in commercial theaters;
• financed by studios more (or Netflix);
• more facile at strategic screenings;
• used to fight corporate legal pressures;
• have less dependency on interviews;
• comprised of fewer “illustrated essays”;
• seeking more objective consultants.

There are variations on these topics in the article and there it’s possible to also see who made each of the suggestions.

If I had to make a guess, I think version one of Final Cut Pro X may be better suited to “documentary” production than narrative. I wouldn’t have wanted to cut a feature on Final Cut Pro 1 either!

Terence and Philip consider the changes to the financial dynamics caused by Netflix’s funding ofHouse of Cards. Is Netflix a new studio model?  Where’s the opportunity for innovation in programming if everything is data driven?

Philip’ NAB session on “Growing and Monetizing an Audience” is mentioned. If you want to go and haven’t yet registered register at http://bit.ly/NABSM08 to get the discount automatically, or at http://www.nabshow/register using the code SM08.

Ethan Kaplan was recently heading up Warner Music’s technology efforts, particularly their digital side. His insider take is hard to set aside, despite its bottom line that the highly profitable monopolies have gone away, and that’s a good thing. Ethan puts it exceptionally well, so I’m only going to make one quote. Read the whole article if you care about the future of media.

And for a lot of people, longing for a time long gone is more comfortable, and easier, and more profitable in the selfish sense than reducing salary down to a dollar and going for broke to change. It’s much easier to keep the cow alive and fed than to kill it. Killing it is sad, scary and irreversible.

But die it must. And it will be a freeing day once it happens. The music industry won’t be the same and it won’t be as big. Many other sacred cows — label imprints, multiple subsidiary companies with independent staffs, multiple offices, separate A&R staffs, to name but a few — might die. But it will be an industry, and a business and revert back to being about talent and artistry instead of fear. About discovery and passion rather than past tense myopia. An actual business rather than a hollow nostalgic simulation.

The question isn’t so much that Big Media is giving way to New Media, but rather that the era of Big Media – i.e. mass media, is a historical anomaly.

Before mass media all media was small, serving local audiences or (with books) very slowly distributed over wider territories. Then came an era of mass capital and limited airwaves that allowed broadcasters to build mass audiences, up to the 130 million Americans that saw “Roots” during its first broadcast.

The movie studios once owned all the production technology, talent and distribution channel – the movie theaters. That structure was forcibly broken apart, but the broadcast industry has fragmented due to the proliferation of cable channels, and now direct Internet distribution.

The cited article covers the why in detail and proposes:

Put very simply, if we take today’s early adopters as a sign of where things are headed, the structure of people’s lives has changed such that no one content creation OR distribution company takes up the bulk of a person’s day. Instead, time is spread very thin across a number of outlets of not only media, but other activity too. Work, social life, travel and family, now spread out over both space and time as more and more people live in cities, occupy more of a person’s day.

To wit: people’s lives are no longer organized in a way that will allow media to dominate someone’s days for hours. Media can no longer be as dominant because of the strange situation in which it is both everywhere and nowhere all at once.

The article continues with some great ideas on how the whole nature of “work” and “non work” is changing (among the leading/bleeding edge consumer) which will lead to inevitable changes to mass media because of the way the structure of people’s lives change.

What will it look like? In a day, a person might use a personalized news service, check a social network, watch a TV show – but never in the same place and from the same content company. And because more and more people will live in the city – where a multi-faceted day in which people move around, go out and are just ‘busy’ more often – less and less people could watch four hours of TV a day or spend 2 or 4 hours a week at the movie theatre.

And so for that reason and many more, big media companies will just have to accept that they will never be massive companies again.