Movie Ecology: A little blitz

No depth here at all, & nothing new. I just want to get it out in a short ‘graspable’ statement.

When my parents were young (1st half 20th century), movies were coming online as major mass entertainment. There were a lot of movies, everyone went to them, and fairly often. Radio, of course, was coming online as well; and newspapers had been around and prominent for over a century.

Movies were paid for by the audience. Radio existed on advertising, and newspapers existed on advertising, plus some audience payment.

In my own youth (3rd quarter 20th century), things were changing. TV arrived. Now people could see moving images in the privacy of their homes. Movies began to feel the pinch, but were still quite popular, and still had to succeed on audience payments; TV was free to audience (like radio) and made money on advertising.

Then along came pay TV (cable). Slowly things changed. And home video recorders, with movie programming (& then TV?). More changes.

Now we have the internet, where EVERYTHING is available in one way or another. Movies are a very different business from what they were in my parent’s youth, or even mine. Much more depends on the blockbuster. & the movie-going demographic is narrower, much more youth oriented. Just WHAT do in-theater movies have to offer in a world where you can get anything and everything through the net? A big screen and a crowd to sit with you – that’s it. They’re still financed by audience payments, those these payments now come from different sources: theater admissions, DVD sales, DVD rentals, cable & satellite views.

And NOW intellectual property is a BIG issue, much more significant than it was in my parents’ youth or in mine. Just WHY is it an issue? Because we have a distribution mechanism, the web, that is difficult to ‘fence off’ and police.

So how does anything get paid-for?

Through this story we’ve got institutions created at one stage persisting into the next stage and attempting to impose their economic ‘profile’ in the next stage.

Movies are expensive to make, and so their costs must be spread across lots of small fees – admissions, media sales and rental. But digital tech is driving many costs down, even as James Cameron spends c. $300M on Avatar (much, I suppose, on R&D).

Where’s this going? Will there be as much change in the next century as there has been over the last? What kind of change? Much of the change over the past century has been supported and driven by technology. What’s future tech have in store?

On that last issue it seems to me we have to add something to the picture: games. Back in my youth we had pinball machines, relatively simple electromechanical tech. Merge that with board games and digital tech and you have a whole new world, a whole new ecology. One that, I’m told, grosses more than movies.

Digital tech is approaching the point where anyone can create anything and make it available to anyone, all relatively cheaply. What’s there for tech to do but get internally smarter. And that means games, no?

Should we ever hit the SINGULARITY, then all of this becomes meaningless. I don’t think that will happen. But perhaps something WILL happen that’s even STRANGER than the Singularity. After all, the singularity, by now, is becoming quite familiar.

There, enough. Too long, perhaps graspable. Holes all over the place. What would it take to do better? By which I mean even shorter, more graspable, and more accurate?