Silicon Beach: Hollywood Talks Content Revolution and New Distribution
By Karla Robinson
September 14, 2012
September 14, 2012
- From TV ratings to what happens to your digital content when you are gone, panelists at USC’s Silicon Beach conference discussed how media distribution is changing — and how Hollywood is tackling those changes.
- YouTube’s Mitch Feinman, Qualcomm’s Liz Gasser, Mitch Singer of Sony Pictures and David Wertheimer of Fox Broadcasting talked about where they see entertainment heading.
- One obvious change has been the decline of physical media as VOD and online services have taken away the friction of renting from brick-and-mortar stores. People have also moved away from building libraries of physical media while not entirely trusting the purchase of digital media stored in the cloud.
- Hollywood’s UltraViolet initiative looks to dispel consumers’ concerns about the cloud and meet the demand for content in this digital world.
- Wertheimer discussed multiplatform products that inherently incorporate various content — long and short form video, TV programming, interactive media, etc. — instead of merely having one type with supplementary adds-ons. “What kind of new storytelling experiences can we create with new technology?” he asks.
- Feinman spoke about YouTube’s focus on making multi-screen viewing seamless by allowing devices to interact with one another. Similarly, Gasser talked about connectivity and how devices are moving beyond communicating with users and other devices — to interacting with real world places and things. Such a revolution requires people to rethink how content is owned and managed, she suggests.
- This topic will surely be debated in the coming years as people reevaluate ownership and licensing rights, Singer points out, adding that related laws will need to be revisited.
- The panelists also discussed how software and user interfaces have become more important than the hardware itself, in addition to the benefits and challenges of an a la carte distribution model.
- Still, one thing remains true. “All the technology in the world has not changed the fundamental premise: people want to watch great content,” Wertheimer concludes.
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