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Tuesday Dec 05, 2006
Side-stepping the studios
Attending the Digital Hollywood conference in London about the digital future of broadcasting last week I was struck by the fact that, despite all the technological change, the major Hollywood studios are still very much in charge.
The success of a new technology, whether it be video on demand or mobile TV was measured by speakers according to how many studios were on board.
Services like BitTorrent might have tweaked the media megaliths’ tails, but increasingly they are being brought into the mainstream media fold (see YouTube, for example).
So, even though it’s now possible to make feature films for micro-budgets, and more and more people (especially young people) are not watching TV, the same execs seem set to determine what turns up on our large and small screens. The broadcasting networks decide the TV schedule. The Hollywood studios, with a few exceptions, dictate what’s showing at the multiplex.
A glimpse of how things could be done differently came at the Digital Hollywood conference from one Tim Sparke. He’s the managing director of Mercury Media, a company that, along with Aggregator TV, is setting up a new broadband documentary channel called joiningthedots.tv. He told the conference that he felt people had become bored with mainstream media and were looking to broadband for an alternative. When they launch next year, he hopes to attract around 15,000 subscribers. Not only will they be able to get a wide range of documentaries online, they will also be able to invest in programmes that have not yet been made – what Sparke calls “the democratisation of finance”.
If joiningthedots.tv succeeds it could be replicated to provide other types of programming. We’ve got used to interactive media. Why shouldn’t that extend to being involved in actually commissioning and financing films?
Posted by Tom Green ( 10:57 AM ) Link to this post Comments[0]