MONDAY, 29 January 2001
Breakout: Business
DV: Old Wine in New Bottles? A Portrait of the Digital Media Landscape
Amy Johns, Moderator
This is the business track, and we're looking at what's changed in the digital video landscape and whether it is old wine in new bottles or actually new wine in new bottles.
Peter Hamilton, media consultant
Factual television is an absolutely huge sector and it's growing like gangbusters. This is a testament to the value of the documentary sector if you look at the combined assets of all the productions and distribution companies. This sector has grown from about $100 million in 1981 to an estimated $18 to $20 billion today. This growth raises two questions. One, will this growth continue? Two, will it open up new opportunities in the digital era for independent creators or will the opportunities still concern only the existing players?
| "Factual television has grown from about $100 million in 1981 to an estimated $18 to $20 billion today." PETER HAMILTON |
To understand this sector, I've developed a research framework that lets us segment the whole documentary realm into manageable chunks so that we can analyze each sector and figure out what are the key drivers of success. First, I look at three levels: premium or blue-chip entertainment (which includes big-budget television, in particular the big sporting franchises, Hollywood movies and so on); general or human interest television entertainment (this includes made-for-TV movies); and popular television formats (including reality programs, cooking programs and so on). Second, I introduce into this framework seven leading factual TV genres: natural history, adventure, people and places, science, arts and culture, history and life style. These seven genres are then referenced across the three TV levels – blue chip, human interest and popular.
Blue-chip programming is extremely high-budget – an example would be David Attenborough's series "The Life of Birds." But it is also a very threatened area of programming and the nature of the threat is important to independents. When we talk about human-interest documentaries, we're talking about the natural history area: for example, Julia Roberts goes to Mongolia; these documentaries deploy a certain amount of expertise, a certain amount of deep knowledge of the subject, but the story's driver is either a personality or a human-interest factor. The popular television entertainment formats are produced on a factory model and include quiz shows, magazine programs and so on.
The opportunities for growth are in the areas between the genres and formats. This is where producers and creative people tend to find ways in. A good example would be forensic science, one of the hottest genres in cable TV. It's a genre that overlaps with crime, history and science. Another example of the creative overlap between documentaries and general television entertainment is the reality show genre, e.g. "Survivor." A lot of recent successes in the documentary field have been where there has been this fusion of genres and fusion of categories of entertainment. Many of these exploit digital production technologies in order to deliver a really persuasive product at a much larger cos
t.
David Wallace
I work in what a previous speaker described as "a walled garden" – making programming behind a big marketing front. We, the internal program makers, view ourselves as indie program makers; we are like a little cottage industry competing for funds from a large organization. In terms of the costs of operating inside a big organization, I think we're in many ways much less efficient that the average independent mediamaker – and they have a lot of advantages in this domain.
The BBC is a very large organization with a distribution (BBC Worldwide) and an archiving organization (BBC Archives), among other units. We have been interested to determine how we could begin to address the issue of new price points. In the past, we tended to make programs, edit them, complete them and then chuck the rushes at an archive and say, it's someone else's problem now. Now, we've changed our production pattern by bringing the whole process of cataloging and classifying into the production space. We digitized the images and created a matrix that outlines a value chain.
For example, in the past, if you were looking for tapes inside the BBC Archives it could take ages, and we had researchers working for days finding tapes, spooling through them, annotating them and trying to communicate them to the producers. They'd work off the VHS tapes, then they'd go back and the Beta-SP tapes and then the Beta tapes would be logged, digitized and then we'd have to go back and find the original digital master – because we tend to shoot on film. The whole process was incredibly complicated. Then, adding to this, we'd try to work out what the business benefits were of doing this sort of thing, and go about measuring this inside the BBC.
Moving to digital master, especially with online access capabilities, can save a lot of money and time. When we went and looked at our analog rushes library, we found hundreds of tapes and we noticed – and this will be no surprise to most of you here today – duplicates and duplicates of these tapes. If you create a digital master at the very beginning, you don't need to go through all the old rigmarole. We could save money simply on storage; we could also save on staffing costs, researcher time for compilations, the hiring of professional editors, the leasing of post-production facilities, and all the attendant paper work at the end of the project. If you work with a digital master, you'd probably do a lot of your conforming inside a computer rather than a linear or nonlinear suite – which are major cost savings. Finally, having the digital master allows the adding of metadata to hold the archived materials and program materials together.
Warrington Hudlin, DV Republic
The topic is old wine in new bottles. The community that I work with, the community of color, have actually never been involved fully in producing the old wine because the media gatekeepers really frame control – not only public discourse, but public perception – to exclude people of color. This control, and the resulting distortion of our lives, is disturbing not only to people of color but to all Americans who do not know their own history. For example, there are stories like "Amistad" which appears to be progressive, but is really a victim narrative in which the protagonist is not the enslaved Africans – and thus the film turns out to be an African "Free Willy."
| "Does the new technology paradigm shift – i.e., lowering of cost by virtue of digital media – provide new opportunities for people of color?" WARRINGTON HUDLIN |
So, we enter the media discussion being disenfranchised and disabled. The question for me is pretty straightforward: Does the new technology paradigm shift – i.e., lowering of cost by virtue of digital media – provide new opportunities for people of color? My gamble and my hope is that the media we try to create for this underserved, disrespected community, once we're up on the net through DVDs or any other mechanism which the gatekeepers don't control, will find audiences that are looking for us and will therefore support us. This could create an economic relationship that can become self-sustaining. I've learned an important lesson over the last few years: there is a difference between "content" and "community." It's not exclusively content. One of my partners in dvRepublic was Urban Box Office, a well-capitalized dot-com. However, it didn't have a community. Look at BlackPan.com, which is not really a content provider but is a community place: it's mostly chat rooms and other kinds of programming which costs no money yet has a huge number of unique visitors – it's an extremely sticky site. So, the challenge for me – and the charge for all of us as independent media creators – is building an audience for programming that we think can help develop a coalescing community.