photo by grrrrr123
I was reading an article by my friend Roger Goff this morning. He's an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles and he often writes very smart pieces about the ways in which the industry is adapting to new technologies and formats. His article in a nutshell is... no matter how the technology changes, the key ingredient is a great story. This week I also found Seesaw, a new and totally legal way to watch television series on the Internet. As a result I have watched both series of Hyperdrive. An underrated sci-fi sitcom starting Nick Frost and Miranda Hart. The availbillty of whole TV series onto the web, to hire or to watch for free, with ads, is probably going to be at least one of the nails in the coffin of the DVD business. The fact that I can watch a whole series online for free, anytime I want, doesn't make me want to go out and buy the box set. I'm not going to mourn the loss of those scratchy discs of skippiness. Good ridence. In the last year, I have all but given up on buying DVDs... and I can't remember the last time I rented one. Our ancient television hasn't been turned on in ages and these days is really a monitor for the games console. We certainly don't watch television on the television any more. What started for me with BBC iplayer as a way of watching the odd series, has now become the norm. We watch most, if not all of our television via the Internet now. It has become the norm in our houshold. What I see, is the television industry embracing the Internet as a new distribution format, at the same time that the film industry is still treating it like the ogre under the bridge. There is a lot of legal content from television companies on the Internet, now. The film industry content is still almost all illegal pirated content. I genuinely wish I could explain to you why this is. What I do believe is that the TV industry is taking the smarter approach. Having stuff out there legally, connected to advertising revenue, is better than having shonky, pirated content as the sole representative of the industry. However, Roger is definitely right about his key point, regardless of how the content is distributed what draws people in are great stories. I would add a single caveat to that, though. Great stories need great execution... and ultimately audiences prepared to try out something new. That's the interesting thing about Seesaw... because it is archived TV series, it encourages me to binge on old episodes of what I already know. Often, when I'm tired and a bit stressed, as I am at the moment, I don't want new and interesting, I want warm and familiar. I want to watch stuff I can trust to deliver an acceptable level of OKness. There is an important point here for writers and for content producers. It's this: an artist seeks to create something new and innovative in order to fulfil their egotistical desire to leave a mark on the world... an audience often seeks comfort in the familiar, in order to use entertainment as proof that life is predictable and therefore safe. The only conclusion that I've come to regards this, is creating great, original entertainment often starts by taking the familiar and shifting it just a little. This way the audience get something new and delightful, but wrapped up in the comfort of something that they already understand. This isn't about being cynical and selling out, it has more to do with an admission that regardless of my indie credentials, I still watch more mainstream television than anything else. So does everyone else. keep writing and via la revolutionPosted via email from Filmutopia's Sunday Morning Movie Blog
