This year’s x|media professional conference was, for me, an incredibly stimulating experience. A range of speakers delivered provocations on the future of media. But as with all good conferences, the real value lay in meeting interesting people doing interesting things, and in allowing yourself the mental space to sit in a theatre for a day and think hard about your own projects while someone talked passionately about theirs.
Unfortunately for this report, and you, over the course of the day I spent a lot of time drifting off in to imaginings of how I can bring the jazzy world of cross-media to feature film scripts, and I also met enough interesting people to ensure that I drank the night away and erased from my memory most of the detail of the day. So with that in mind, what follows is a hint at what each speaker spoke about. I’ve tried to include as many links as I can so you can follow anything of interest.
1. Sophie Walpole – Head of Interactive drama and entertainment – BBC
Sophie Walpole spoke about what the BBC are doing in the area of digital and interactive drama. Some key points she made were:
* Around 1000 people work in new media at the BBC.
* After the London bombings the BBC was inundated with over 1000 pictures of the bomb sites before the BBC had a single professional image.
* Sophie, a young grandma, went through her handbag to point out that the future is now. In a few devices she had access to an expansive array of entertainment, creative tools, and communication. She made the point, though, that the music she listens to on her iPod is pretty much the same music she listened to 20 years ago. The technology had changed, but that didn’t alter her idea of quality. So the upshot of that comment was that solid stories are still, and will always be, the backbone of quality film and television.
*Sophie took us through a case study of the interactive drama Jamie Kane: http://www.jamiekane.co.uk/
Launched in September, Jamie Kane is getting around 200 sign-ups a day. Apparently the kids are loving it and really getting in to the interactive elements. It’s a pretty interesting concept, and sounds like a riveting story - if you are a 13 year old girl. The main character was a pop-star who supposedly died in a helicopter crash, but there is doubt as to whether he actually died, so it is up to viewers to piece the mystery together.
Sophie mentioned one interesting anecdote – that people are requesting Jamie Kane’s songs on the radio – even though he is a fictional former pop-star. So they’ve recorded the songs and you can listen to them online (which I just did – they’re terrible – but I’m not a 13 year old girl).
Sophie also spoke briefly about another interactive drama – Spooks http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/spooks/
General BBC drama site http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/
2. John Wyver Chairman Illuminations Group. Board member of the European Union NM2 New Media Initiative
John Wyver’s company, Illuminations, is an SME producing cultural and educational media - http://www.illumin.co.uk/
He spoke about the departure of television and questioned what the values of public service broadcasters should be in a shifting mediascape. The main theme of his presentation was that television is “shifting”.
* Time Shifting: with TiVo, DVD and the like, people have freedom from prescribed schedules.
* Place Shifting: freedom from stationary device – mobiles, PSP, TiVo To Go, Slingshot…
* Media Shifting: freedom from centrally controlled programming – RSS, etc.
*Shape Shifting: programming that changes shape as you watch and engage – freedom from set forms of programming.
John suggested that the control broadcasters have is breaking down, and he even went a far as to suggest that television is a “transitional” medium. He made a good point that those who have been working in broadcast TV for a long time are not the best people to be in charge of developing new ideas in a digital, fractured, “shifting” mediascape.
John is working on NM2, a collaborative research project working to create tools for broadband production – tools that exploit the production and delivery possibilities of broadband.
http://www.ist-nm2.org/
John stressed that he is not trying to create interactive television, but rather, “shape-shifting” content, and he’s doing that through engaging and thoughtful documentary material – not entertainment. So his focus was on the opportunities digital media open up for new ways of learning.
3. Peter Giles AFTRS Lamp – Head of Digital Media
Peter spoke about the future of cross-platform production. He talked about the decline of free to air television and strategies for cross-platform production. Peter also talked about the idea of “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” - those who have grown up with new media and those who have immigrated.
He spoke of the importance of not trying to re-purpose content for cross-platform distribution. He reckons that audiences want to be more actively involved in their media. Peter had many more interesting things to say, but looking at my notes I think this is one of the times I drifted off in to screenplay daydreams, which I reckon is the most precious gift a speaker can give – space for, and agitation of, ideas.
4. Rob Antulov – Director of Strategy – Fairfax.
Rob talked about Fairfax’s move in to Internet publishing. Some key points were:
* Media fragmenting but consumption increasing.
* Creating content and publishing is easy, but finding an audience is hard.
* The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
5. Mark Pesce – Media Futurist
If you’ve seen Mark Pesce speak then you know it’s always a thought provoking ride. If you haven’t seen him speak, you should. He talked about the death of television as a dominant distribution channel. He spoke to broadcasters in saying that once you air content anywhere, anytime, it is available everywhere, all, and any time.
He spoke in trends, like the three fs – Finding, Filtering, and Forwarding.
Mark charted the trajectory of distribution from broadcasting>netcasting>superdistribution (e.g. napster)> hyperdistribution (e.g. bit torrent).
The crux of Mark’s presentation was the idea of “swarming” behavior in relation to media distribution. In a swarm the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. He suggested that media will be consumed, transformed, and spat out by the swarm. He suggested that in a world of infinite media choices individuals will filter for relevance, and that will occur within communities of users. He asked those wishing to make money from the swarm – can you build a hive to house a swarm?
An essay on this topic is here: http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html
6. Mark Tesoriero – General Manager – Media Zoo
Mark spoke about the future of advertising. Key points were:
* Attention spans waning across all media
* Leaving space for discovery is vital to harness the trust of the digital consumer
* Young people tuning out broadcast TV as they turn to games and the net.
* Despite TV audiences falling the advertising rates are going up, so advertisers are looking for other places to put their money.
* Online ad spend 62.7% year on year growth.
* $488 million in revenue year to June 2005 (Aust)
7. Angela Beesley – Board of Trustees – Wikipedia Foundation. Vice President, Wikia
Having been involved in the inception of the wonderful Wikipedia, Angela Beesley oozes credibility. She basically spoke about various Wiki projects. Listening to her speak made me think that Wiki’s are a great example of Mark Pesce’s swarming idea. However, she did point out that, at its core, Wiki is a smallish community – over 100, 00 people have edited, but only 8000 of those have edited over 100 edits, and of those only 700 have made over 3000 edits.
Some key points of Angela’s presentation:
* Wikis developed in over 100 languages (and that’s not translating the same entries –they’re all different)
* Works on the idea that no-one knows everything, but everyone knows something.
* Wikipedia is in the top 40 websites in the world.
* It contains 2.6 million articles with 6000 new articles per day.
* New project www.placeopedia.com – linking geographic information to Wiki through Google maps.
8. Tracy Fullerton – Associate Professor – Co-director of the electronic Game Innovation Lab. USC Cinema-TV, Interactive Media Division
I found this presentation simultaneously stimulating and frustrating. Tracey’s talk was a theory-heavy spiel on the emerging genre of documentary games. It was a fascinating topic and she took us through some interesting examples, such as:
http://www.jfkreloaded.com/
http://www.eagames.com/official/moh/alliedassault/us/home.jsp
Tracy explored how the documentary form can intersect with games, how creators can do this, and for what kind of stories. She talked about this hybrid form “putting the player in the path of history” to create content that is greater than game-play and more powerful than documentary.
9. Geoff Lowe – Digital Cinema Board – UK Film Institute. Chairman – Filmserve.
Geoff gave us an update on the state of digital cinema. As expected, economics are still the major problem. Projectors are still too expensive for exhibitors who bear the all the costs. But there is movement – apparently 4000 screens will be converted in the US next year, and Ireland has started an initiative to convert all cinemas.
Geoff also talked about new forms of digital entertainment such as interactive cinema using digital platforms to extend an enhance stories. He urged that cinema can do a whole lot more than just feature films. Now, if you’ve read this far I can slip in a cross promotion here – Geoff’s comments will feature in a feature piece I’ve written for METRO magazine’s January issue - it’s about taking film stories outside the cinema and extending them in to mobile devices.
10. Brian Seth Hurst – Producer’s guild of America. Member of the Interactive Media Chair of ‘The Emmys’. CEO of the Opportunity Management Company.
I didn’t think it was possible for a speaker to out perform Mark Pesce in the sheer entertainment stakes, but Brian Hurst did. He was so compelling that I couldn’t take notes during his talk – so here a re a few fragments of an interesting talk.
* IPTV could be the biggest disrupter of content distribution… ever.
See http://informitv.com/opinion/2005/07/raisinginteractivetelevision/
* People in media entertainment think we live in a push world, but we live in a pull world.
* He talked about hybrid forms of content such as the heavy.com style videogame over dubs www.heavy.com and sites like http://music.aol.com/feature/the_biz/show?defaultTab=21
11. Dale Peskin – Co-director, The Media Centre – The American Press Institute.
Dale Peskin outlined The Media Centre’s 3/4/5 schema for looking at and understanding changes in the provision, consumption, and distribution of news and information, which centred around the theme of “trust networks” and the question of how to connect analog people to digital technology. This presentation was perhaps a little simple for the audience. It was during question time when he proved most interesting.
The 3/4/5 schema went like this:
3 Propositions
1. The digital everything
2. Know-trust networks
3. (missed it, sorry)
4 Cultural trends
1. Mobile culture
2. Sharing culture
3. Remix culture
4. Capture culture
5 Forces
1. “We media” – news and information no longer a lecture, but a conversation
2. The fifth estate – citizens become social watchdogs
3. The story – more than reading and watching – interactivity.
4. Rock the news – blurring between entertainment and factual content.
5. Soul – orgaisations ask - Why are we doing this? What are the values? Successful organizations have good values or “soul”
During question time Dale was hit with the stock responses to such a talk – the problems associated with the digital divide. In his talk he spoke about getting mobile phones to Africa, and when quizzed on this he reckoned that the explosion of mobile technology in the next ten years will be in Africa.
Dale also made a classic throwaway comment that I found hilarious - “democracy is very hard – particularly when it involves everybody”.
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