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Viacom Asks YouTube to Remove Clips - New York Times
In a sign of the growing tension between old-line media and the new Internet behemoths, Viacom, the parent company of MTV and Comedy Central, demanded yesterday that YouTube, the video-sharing Web site owned by Google, remove more than 100,000 clips of its programming...
The dispute underscored the tense dance that major media companies are doing with Google, which bought YouTube for $1.65 billion last October. Google hopes to strike deals that will give it the rights to mainstream programming and also wipe away its potential liability for any violations of copyright law by YouTube so far...
YouTube is supported by advertising, but in most cases it does not share that revenue with copyright holders.
These developments are important to note, but the following comment jumped out at me and formed a synergy of thought about intellectual property and property rights in an age where the frontier no longer exists and natural resources of the world have become scarce.
"They choose not to filter out copyrighted content, " said the spokesman, Carl D. Folta. He added that the company apparently had the technology to filter out pornography and hateful material, which is rarely seen on YouTube.
It is no secret that totalitarian governments like the one in China use filtering software designed and sold by western companies, headquartered in liberal democracies.
I am not suggesting that Google’s use of filtering software in the context of this New York Time’s article is totalitarian. It’s not. The thoughts that flowed within me after reading the article and which will follow do not directly relate to the content of the article itself.
NB I do know Google's relationship with the Chinese Communist Party is complicit when Google agreed to filter the Internet in order to secure their place in the oxymoronic "opening" of the Chinese market(s). Who knows? I suspect they rationalize that their decision to do so is part of China's long term transition to liberal democracy brought about by the eventual increase in the economic and consequent political power or the Chinese middle class: in other words, a slow revolution or political evolution. That model is certainly documented in human history. I hope they are right.
In terms of any technology, for example, it is not the knowledge of how to split the atom that creates ill, it is the contextual use of technology that creates both good and evil.
More to my ultimate point, I was more struck by the description of the filtering technology's application and the way in which its reference in the article further illuminated to me my own age and its philosophical dilemmas.
Perhaps, the mention of filtering technology describe within reminded me of how its benign application for Google could be used in other contexts. Certainly, Viacom has the right to protect its intellectual property however it wishes. But what about this notion of intellectual property and ideas itself, the life blood our political and economic discourse?
The rise of fundamentalism and the changing post "Cold War" world order has been studied and described by others more accomplished than me, including Samuel P. Huntington in his "Foreign Affairs" essay and then book, The Clash of Civilizations.
News, media and politics are interdependent organisms...and certainly many political scientists focus on their relationship to one another both in terms of the political cycle of nation states (elections), but also their political economy, in other worlds the market place. The West increasingly depends on sectors like entertainment, research and development, and defense for its continued economic growth, and its overall political economy is direct responsibility for much of the West’s political stability and power.
We live in an age where entertainment and defense are curious bedfellows. For example, entertainment software, as I have said elsewhere on this site, drives the technological development of the processors used by the defense sector.
I have never heard anyone, however, flesh out the dilemma of Locke's notion of property rights in his "Second Treatise on Nature" (the philosophical underpinning of our own democratic republic is this notion of property rights) vis a vis intellectual or abstract property rights, central themselves to our creative economy, the underpinning of the West's continued economic growth.
When intellectual property becomes the central driver of our economy, as it has, and the organs of information that distribute that property are consolidated (as they naturally are. See Creatonomics), what does this mean for the average citizen? For those who poo poo these ideas as too high brow for the mass, or somehow separate mass culture from the philosophical debates of our time, I say, “Forget the forest or the trees, you, my friend, are missing ecosystem of the forest.”
Will our citizen own his plot of land in the media and entertainment landscape, or will he be forced to rent space from the company owned tenement, distribute his goods by the company owned railroad, and buy his supplies from the company owned store? What does self-protection, natural to Locke’s notion of natural rights mean for the individual and social group within society?
More importantly, the growing factionalism of our political discourse and the ceaseless polemics of extremist ideas are not simply a rehashing of polemics from times before. These extreme polemics are manifest because of the underlying conflict and philosophical dilemmas of our time, the repercussions of which are experienced through every organ of society, including its central organs of information and ideas, mass media, entertainment, and art.
There is no save haven or neutral space for the tolerant in a world with less resources and no frontier to escape to. This is the philosophical dilemma of our age and we must understand the dilemma as such. Our liberal democracy depends upon it. Our economic innovation, which drives our nation’s wealth, also depends upon that neutral and open space.
The role of art, information, propaganda, and communication are the new frontier and the battleground in our ‘New World of Information’. Is there an alternative to the increasing space that extremist polemics take up in our nation’s intellectual life? Any alternative must ultimately float the complex tensions of political correctness and fundamental secularism that is equally damaging, in my opinion, to the fabric of our society.
Understanding these questions is the work of my generation and those living whose experience and wisdom can guide our society’s safe passage. There are always consequences, even to inaction, so the focus of those who are interested need not be filled with petitions for the lazy.
When the pilgrims came to North America, they were escaping religious persecution in the Old World. A war of ideas is not new to human history, the epoch that we are in, however, is critical to the very existence of those organisms that we take for granted in the West.
I continue to look to the former dissidents of eastern bloc countries, like the former Czechoslovakian, Vaclav Havel, 'playwright and antipolitican' later president of the democratic Czech Republic, for insight into the post-modern world order.
For example, Havel wrote in the 1981 in his famous essay the "Power of the Powerless” about the post totalitarian state: where ideology is the tyrant (not the Politburo) and how the line of complicity runs through each citizen, including the grocer who puts up his seemingly benign poster which states, "Workers of the World Unite".
All of us live in interesting times, but those of us involved in media have a tremendous responsibility for those who come after us. I look forward to investigating and understanding these questions myself and in the timely work of my generation and others more capable and experienced than me. More on these ideas later.
Cable television is undergoing worldwide expansion, especially in the Arab world.
I have previously spoken on The Second Sight about "cultural crossover content", in other words, the growing market for, say Bollywood movies, in western countries including the United states - first from immigrant and first generation Indian Americans - followed by the trend towards becoming part of mainstream culture. See NYT's article on the red carpet, New York opening for the recent Bollywood release, Guru. American children take globalization for granted. Japanese anime is as much a part of their pop culture as it is to children in Japan.
I firmly believe this trend towards "cultural crossover content" will increase as the game generation ages and media firms continue to exploit emerging foreign markets. I have highlighted some of this under the catagory (of the same name) here at The Second Sight.
More specific to this entry's title, I was recently informed of a wonderful Arab media and entertainment link sahafa.com . More on that market later.
Before I left for vacation last month, I sketch out for you my undigested thoughts on the emerging aethetics of the game generation (35 and under): there is a degrading of image quality and techniques that lower-end digital technologies have supplanted into the aesthetic psyche of many younger viewers – just look at the ads created and aimed at the under 30 demographic. Old tricks. Why is that? Perhaps because these kids are expert consumers of electronic stories and know it’s manufactured.... They are deconstructing the image.
Today Patricia Winters Lauro writes in the New York Times that[s]traight direct-response pitches hardly ever work anymore, and increasingly agencies have turned to spoofing their own industry to attract viewers long enough to deliver a new message...Direct-response advertising as a genre is especially appealing to parody because it’s “so cheesy,” Mr. Jendrysik said. It is an inside joke that the public gets, he added, even the GameTap target audience of 25- to 35-year-olds, who may be too young to recall the ’70s pioneers like Ronco, K-Tel or Ginsu knives.
Mr. Jendrysik said the spoofs were also a good strategic fit for GameTap, which was introduced nationally last year and is trying to build its subscription base.
I will not have access to the Internet between November 4th and the 18th, because I will be traveling on a sail boat from Grenada to Antigua. Please excuse the blog interruption.
I leave you for the time being with my undigested thoughts on the broad and relevant topic “the evolving nature and aesthetics of creative content”.
First, it covers the evolving structures of storytelling via new media. Examples of new media structures are foureyedmonsters.com and lonelygirl15.com; and interactive television content that is created on the web to supplement traditional shows. Reality TV is obviously interactive but LOST is the best original dramatic example of this interactivity; and then of course, their is the growth of user generated content from channels like YouTube and CNN): What do these new storytelling structures look like? How are these structures similar and different to their predecessors?
Television, can have a relationship with the internet that film cannot. I imagine that the nature of going to the movies will still demand High Imaging that allows for suspension of disbelief...but there is a degrading of image quality and techniques that lower-end digital technologies have supplanted into the aesthetic psyche of many younger viewers – just look at the ads created and aimed at the under 30 demographic. Old tricks. Why is that? Perhaps because they are expert consumers of electronic stories and know it’s manufactured.... They are deconstructing the image.
Another thought, I think of Mark Chiolis’ (Grass Valley) remark to me in my interview with him:
"Today there are a number of thought provoking questions that are being asked. What happens when there is a true RGB 4k (there isn't one today) sensor that rivals, if not exceeds, that of today's film stock? One of the arguments for film is that people like the "look" which includes the grain and movement through the gate. What happens when the "game-boy" generation takes over? Having grown up with "video" is this the "look" they want to see? Will they have a different set of standards to compare to?"
Film (theatrical features) is (are) different. I think they will demand even more heighten realism and I suspect that Digital 3D will become increasingly popular in that format in the years to come (an outgrowth of the gamers demand for a heightened experience).
What are the fundamental relationships that the younger generation seem to be exploring via this new media content and traditional content? Some may say the subject matter is generally solipsistic, passive - an outgrowth perhaps of the individuals solitary communion with the anonymous web or with media itself...but look at the bleeding edge technology and science of virtual reality. Look at the studies of the psycho-physical effects of these media tools on users in medical and defense research. Passive is not the right word to describe this relationship. Interactive is better. But with what (media) and whom (other players)?
I say one cannot understand this generation unless they have a MySpace page and love it. Why? There is a freedom of movement in the field of archetype and symbol that enables both artist and audience to observe without disclosure, absorb without acquisition, and create without the demand for conclusion. The repetition of archetypical representation uncovers both artist's and audience's collective mythologies, thereby revealing: The anonymous is personal.
Renowned urban planer Richard Florida notes that the fundamental social and economic changes that underpin the Creative Economy, demonstrate that in “virtually every aspect of life, weak ties have replaced the stronger bonds that once gave structure to society. Rather than live in one town for decades, we now move about. Instead of communities defined by close associations and deep commitments to family, friends, and organizations, we seek places where we can make friends and acquaintances easily and live quasi-anonymous lives. The decline in the strength of our ties to people and institutions is a product of the increasing number of ties we have.”
How have television and new media influenced the sensibility and subject matter of creative content. I see the primary relationship that the younger generation is exploring, is with the media itself (I am not talking about the news media, I am talking about media itself). You may critiqued the passivity of video games...but, perhaps that passivity masks an exploration with identity that is not understood by non-participants and therefore disregarded as irrelevant. I say this exploration is powerful and emergent in movies like Adaptation and I Heart Huckabees. This relationship between identity and media is increasingly portrayed as mystical, interactive, and “high touch”. Their is a propensity for role playing, a desire for authenticity coupled with a disdain of truthiness and even traditional ideology. For dramatic content and docu-reality, they create satire and even sarcasm (the mass may also create cynicism, but I would never characterize this generation as cynical. They know the line of complicity runs through each of them).
In some respects, “reality shows” seem like an outgrowth of this propensity for role-playing, a study of the dramas of personality. In deconstructing the “sit com” and “documentary” and even the “commercial brand”, there appears to be an investigation of topics like truth and being.
Regarding lonelygirl15.com. As one writer I spoke with remarked, “Entertainment is always flirting with reality. It seems that things that don't aim to be thought of as real do a much better job. Verisimilitude, it's what it's all about."
Is there a common thread in the subject and structures explored by newer creative content, a post-post modern sensibility? See the NYT’s article, “Brand Underground”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/magazine/30brand.html?ex=1311912000&en=82edb890b1d6c977&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
There are several larger forces manifesting in the recent development of MTV's Virtual Laguna Beach for example. One of them is the evolution of brand: how the concept has extended itself into the realm of branded communities in the digital age. Gamers (the generation under age 35 and including generations X and Y) have grown up in a world saturated by brand so that the phenomenon is now a vehicle for personal expression and identity beyond the ostensible confines of a corporate mandate (well, except their own). Commentators like Rob Walker (The Brand Underground, NYT) have elucidated the social phenomena well, however, they tend to look at the expression as another failed modernist attempt to beat the system. Hand me the cyanide, the revolution is over and we lost!
Boomers are wired to view creativity as a choice between “selling out” or “sticking it to the man” and the quest for the great society as a dogmatic battle between the mediocrity of relativism and the virtue of absolutes. To use former bohemian terminology, today’s generation does not have that hang up. “They have relatively little generational consciousness,” writes David Brooks, “because this generation is for the most part not fighting to emancipate itself from the past.” The suggestion is provocative considering that while “the baby boom included the largest U.S. birth cohort to date, the game generation will ultimately outdo the baby boom in size, in scope, and presumably in influence,” notes John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade in their study of the game generation’s influence on organizational values in business. “The total size of the game generation is already greater than the baby boom ever was,” and the whole generation of gamers, “including X and Y and letters to be named later-simply approach the world differently than their predecessors.”
I am a broken record, but like dissident antipoliticians from the former Czechoslovakia, who used satire and absurdity to highlight the fact that in a postmodern consumer society the “line of complicity runs through each of us," this new American generation distrusts political grandstanding and even traditional forms of organized politics. Hence, the popularity of so-called no brow satires like South Park, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show.
The playwright Heiner Mueller once remarked that the potency of theater in his native East Germany was based on the absence of other ways of getting messages across to people. "As a result," Mueller says, "Theater here has taken over the function of other media in the West," before now. While the never ending surface chatter of talking points and double speak on both the left and the right continue to erode the value of words, they also inflate the space between the lines.
None of this mentions how the game generation take globalization for granted and the growing crossover of cultural content from other traditions, “bollywood”, Japanese Anime et cetera.
The Second Sight Podcast, © 2006 Alexa D. O'Brien, (26:35)
The Second Sight offers insight and analysis on the media and entertainment industry - an often misunderstood or mischaracterized sector of the American economic and cultural landscape in the midst of its own technological and cultural shifts - from globalization and the emerging creative economy; to digital technology and the evolving aesthetic and nature of content; to the growing technological cross fertilization between media, defense, and medicine.
My name is Alexa D. O'Brien Gault. For the next two months, we will focus our attention towards understanding the evolving nature of the below-the-line training cycle for motion picture technicians, in the face of both digital technologies and newer end to end digital workflows; and the coming of age, so to speak, of the game generation - the older cusp of which, now in their mid thirties, having finally entered their productive years as journeymen technicians and content creators.
Today, we are talking with cameraperson, John Clemens. For seventeen years now, Clemens has ac'ed and operated for directors of photography like Lance Acord (Buffalo 66 and Lost in Translation). His most recent work with Acord was on a Mercedes Benz spot that Acord shot and directed. John has also worked with Joseph Yacoe, known for his commercial and music videos work. Clemens most recent job with Yacoe included a hair product commercial with Penelope Cruz. Director of photography, Darren Lew, who has shot commercials for the likes of Clinique, Versace, Nike, and Adidas, and who began his own career as a still assistant to renowned fashion photographer, Steven Meisel, has said of John Clemens:
"I have never worked with a camera assistant who had it more in his blood than John. He has got a sixth sense for focus and a working method of military precision and consistency, it is no wonder he works with the greatest DP's from all over the world. His skill goes beyond the technical--he quietly contributes to the art of camera work each time we work together everyone else becomes second best after working with John."
John Clemens' credits include Buffalo 66, Naqoyqatsi: Life as War, and Requiem for a Dream. I am honored to have John Clemens on the line for a Second Sight pod cast interview.
Alexa D. O'Brien Gault
Hi, John. How are you?
John Clemens
Good. How are you doing?
In his prescient and aptly titled book, The Rise of the Creative Class, urban planner Richard Florida identifies the emergence of a new economic and social class of "thirty eight million Americans roughly thirty percent of the entire U.S. workforce, whose creativity is the driving force of our nation's economic growth." [1]
The key difference between the creative class and other classes, according to Florida, lies in what they are primarily paid to do. Those in the working and service classes are primarily paid to execute according to plan, while the main economic function of the core of the creative class - which includes people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, entertainment, and the media - is to create new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content - in other words intellectual property. [2] In addition, around this creative core, exists a broader group of creative professionals in business, finance, law, health care and other related fields, who engage in "complex problem solving" that involves a great deal of independent judgment and requires high levels of education or human capital. [3]
The creative class in the United States today is larger than the traditional working class. The service class, totaling fifty five million workers or forty three percent of the U.S. workforce, is the largest of all. The growth of the service class, according to Florida, is in large measure a response to the demands of the Creative Economy. "Members of the Creative Class, because they are well compensated and work long and unpredictable hours," writes Florida, "require a growing pool of low-end service workers to take care of them and do their chores." [4]
I have outlined the work of others as it relates to the creative economy elsewhere on this site. Here is a quick summary of three of its important aspects:
- Creative Economy has Substantial Scope.
John Howkins categorizes the creative economy to include fifteen creative sectors - such as research and development, software, design, and content industries like film, music, and video games - that produce intellectual property in the form of patents, copyrights, trademarks and proprietary designs. The annual global revenue for Howkin's fifteen identified sectors was $2.24 trillion in 1999. The U.S. share represents forty percent of the market with revenue totaling $960 billion. The U.S. share also accounts for more than forty percent of research and development, forty percent of television and radio, and thirty percent of film. Howkins calculates that core copyright industries will be worth $6.1 trillion internationally in fifteen years. U.S. dominance in these segments - more than productivity improvements related to new technology and new manufacturing methods - is responsible for much of the nation's global economic competitiveness since the nineteen-eighties. [5]
- Creativity is Mainstream.
More Americans work in art, entertainment, and design, than as lawyers, accountants, and auditors. [6] In the United States, professional artists, writers, and performers have increased three hundred and twenty-five percent from 525,000 in 1950 to 2.5 million in 1999. [7] Graphic designers outnumber chemical engineers by four to one, and more Americans are directly employed in film production than in the steel industry. [8]
- Creativity is Expensive and Time Consuming. The production of commodities in the creative industries, which include film and television, is said to suffer from "Baumol's disease": Costs in these sectors tend to climb faster than the rate of inflation, chiefly because creativity is dependent on highly specialized human capital and inherently labor intensive. Labor costs in the creative sectors also tend to rise more rapidly than others do.
In many respects, the demands of the creative economy have flattened the business model of most major industry sectors, requiring firms to capitalize on the greater efficiency gained by the creative factory and subcontract manufacturing systems - translate outsourcing. Stephen Barley has noted in The New World of Work that the entire economy has moved towards a more horizontal division of labor and hyper-specialization among firms. "The digital business environment that Kodak is transitioning to is more horizontal in construct" says Antonio Perez, CEO and President of Kodak: "It requires alliances, partnering and, to a certain degree, acquisitions to move quickly into new markets." [10]
A natural outcome of this development is a "horizontal labor market" with people tending to move laterally instead of vertically. "Climbing the corporate ladder is not much of an option," writes Florida: "Perhaps because there isn't as much of a ladder in many of today's leaner, flatter firms - and it is liable to shift or vanish before you're halfway up." [11] In fact, Americans now change jobs on average every 3.5 years. This figure has been declining steadily for every age group. Workers in their twenties switch jobs on average every 1.1 years. [12] The phenomenon is also coupled with a tendency towards hyper-specialization among individual occupations, just as it is among firms. Those "in authority no longer comprehend the work of their subordinates," notes Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Friedman in The Horizontal Society, because occupations themselves have evolved into "clusters of domain-specific knowledge." [13]
The game generation - the older cusp of which are now in their mid-thirties - have come of age professionally and technically in the midst of this evolving labor market, which is evermore dependent on them to act as the "work horses" in their respective creative sectors. "In most Creative Class occupations," writes Richard Florida, "people manage their careers by 'front-loading' - working excruciatingly long and hard at the outset of their professional lives in the hopes it will pay off in greater income, marketability and mobility later." [14] Moreover, people today not only tend to identify themselves with their occupation or profession instead of the company that they work for, but they also bear more of the responsibility and risks for their careers. This means individual workers invest more of their own time and resources into education and skill acquisition now than any other time before.
The trend is particularly acute among new media professionals, who, according to Rosemary Batt and Susan Christopherson of Cornell University, spend an additional 13.5-hours per week obtaining new skills - all of it unpaid. This has become an individual responsibility, "both because the interactive nature of computer tools allows new media workers to learn new skills at their own pace and within their own learning style, and because formal learning programs have not kept pace with skill needs in this fast-changing industry." [15]
In fact, digital technology has transformed 'economies of training', so that "the training cycle is now longer than the life cycle of the devices in use," says Bill Drury Senior Consultant formerly with IBM EMEA, when I interviewed him this year: "That means companies cannot afford these long training cycles any longer." In the new labor market, it no longer pays for companies to invest significantly in developing their people's skills and capabilities.
Consequently, the game generation has different organizational values and attitudes about professional roles than their predecessors. In their groundbreaking book, Got Game, John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade argue that entertainment software itself has shaped the organizational ethos of gamers and profoundly influenced how they approach their work - well beyond the scope of those influential meta-forces mentioned above like hyper-specialization and the flattening of the labor market, both of which have emerged from the creative economy and the obvious technological convergence of digital technology and business.
One first has to comprehend the profound penetration of entertainment software usage among individuals under the age of thirty-five. This demographic has spent "billions of dollars, and billions of hours, in the virtual world[s] created by these machines," and despite the prevailing boomer amnesia on the subject, games, like the television to boomers, "are a universally shared, technology powered experience." [16]
According to the Entertainment Software Association, the average age of a gamer is thirty-three; and despite assumptions to the contrary, thirty-eight percent of gamers are women:
"Adult gamers have been playing an average of twelve years. Among most frequent gamers, adult males average ten years for game playing, females for eight years...The average adult woman plays games 7.4 hours per week. The average adult man plays 7.6 hours per week. Though males spend more time playing than do females, the gender/time gap has narrowed significantly." [17]
Beck and Wade also add: "One survey found ninty-two percent of children ages two to seventeen in the United States have regular access to video games, and eighty percent of U.S. households with children have a computer...And games, unlike computer and Internet usage, are not limited to the socioeconomic elite." [18]
Video games are big business. According to Beck and Wade, "Today's game market is huge because nearly every kid is involved." [19]
"Electronic Arts, now part of Standard & Poor's 500 Index, earned $2.5 billion in 2003 and more than the combined revenue of the year's ten top-grossing movies. [20] Nintendo's Mario series of video games has earned more than $7 billion over its lifetime - double the money earned by all the Star Wars movies. [21] Sony's Everquest, with 650,000 registered players who stay online an average of twenty-two hours a week, at thirteen dollars a month, that adds up to about $101 million a year in revenue from subscription fees alone." [22]
Secondly, according to Beck and Wade, video games are powerful training tools:
"The game's complex, nearly cinematic images and multilayered sound tracks give players the feeling of total immersion. After all, the game responds almost instantly to any action the player imagines, and other players (whether live or computer generated) respond to them in real time. Even the environment shapes itself to match the player's skill level. The game generation grew up in this world of immersion and instant response. Naturally the exposure has an effects. What gamers learned, among other things, was how to manipulate electronic information...Compared to the activities that pregamers grew up with, for instance, the game generation lives in a world that is incredibly responsive. And that's not real life...Yet it is perfect for training. (Even the U.S. military-a culture that knows a few things about training - recognizes this. As far back as the 1980s, on Atari technology, the Army used a modified commercial game, Battlezone, for armored gunnery training. A variant of Doom has been used to train Marines in urban combat.)...The game world is a giant, accidentally created machine for giving kids an enormous number and range of choices and then immediately showing them the consequences of what they choose." [23]
This responsiveness has made gamers more focused on value-added than their predecessors. According to Beck and Wade, "All that experience with video games has made these people passionate about added value. You have to look closely, at first, to see that passion. Initially, what you see is the value gamers put on skill...They understand that their only real job security comes from their capabilities and continued productivity.[24]
A corollary of the authors' argument is that the game generation's propensity for role-playing is partly responsible for the dot com era, just as much as the flawed business models of the firms headed by these 'Sim City" CEOs were responsible for the bubble; for, the game generation believes that as long as they have the right tools, they will can do and be anything. Beck and Wade write:
"The biggest danger, however, is that the game generation's passion for adding value can be so easily misconstrued. When we first started reviewing these survey results, we found the word arrogant coming readily to mind. The tendency of twenty-something gamers to describe themselves as experts for example, can certainly seem that way. But when we connect their focus on skill and expertise with their desire for professional respect and their willingness to be paid only for results, we sense a different pattern." [25]
No industry sector is immune to these developments, including film production and post - although the effects are more apparent in the latter. I would argue that the breakdown of the traditional apprenticeship system in media and entertainment content production is a result of this trend toward a more horizontal labor market, the emerging creative economy and the ethos of the game generation.
Granted, film production has always relied on "domain specific knowledge" between departments. Even intra-departmentally, the division of labor is quite specific, although customarily cumulative in breadth. This division of labor is part of the traditional apprenticeship system. "It's always been an industry of apprenticeship," says Bob Harvey, Senior Vice President of worldwide sales at Panavision when I interviewed him this year, "and people grow up from being loaders all the way up in the camera department, and I think all the departments. I don't know if that's going to continue and that's too bad."
"Many of the individuals who participate in an entertainment production would refer to their skills as a trade, notes the 2001 Department of Commerce Report on Runaway Production, "Traditionally, practitioners often developed their trades in a union environment, which facilitated an individual's development of the necessary learned skills through apprenticeships and on-the-job experience." [26]
The dramatic increase in worldwide demand for cable content coupled with the high production cost inherent in the creative industries, or "Baumol's disease", has lead to an amplified need for cost-effective digital production, a growing trend towards production outsourcing-translate runaway production-and a concurrent rise of non union production over the last fifteen years. These events are transforming the below-the-line labor market from a culture of tradesmen to a culture of technicians.
As I already noted this phenomenon is keener in postproduction, where transition to digital technology has been more apparent and complete. "The changes in the tools that are utilized to perform these post-production functions," notes the 2001 Department of Commerce Report on Runaway Production, "have presented opportunities for new post-production markets to appear with newly trained workforces that have bypassed the historical "apprenticeship" programs that have existed in Hollywood for many years. This new workforce consists of individuals who have attended technical schools or government-sponsored programs that provide the required training to operate the new generation of equipment."[27]
Just as the flattening labor market of corporate America has seen a trend towards self-education, so too has the labor market of below-the-line technicians. Part of this is a result of the increase in electronic acquisition and the advance of digital acquisition and post technologies. "In the past, when you got into the film industry, very often it was from art school, or you went to a school and studied photography or film. You seldom went to liberal arts schools and got into the industry. Some did, but not very many. I think that changed with your generation," said Director of Photography, Michael Falasco to me last year: "Everyone absolutely believes that they can take Avid courses and Final Cut Pro and come out and be editors."
This is evidence of the erosion of the traditional film training cycle discussed above. According to the 2001 Department of Commerce Report on Runaway production, historically
"[T]he learning curve associated with developing the skills to become an on-line editor was substantial. As such an editor was required to understand and work with up to 20 different types of manufacturing equipment, all with different user interfaces working in conjunction with one another to create the desired effect. Today, computers utilize common user interfaces and software tools to combine many of these tasks. This has greatly reduced the learning curves associated with becoming an on-line editor. This reduced learning curve, when combined with formal training through government-sponsored school programs, has allowed many foreign production centers to be able to gain the necessary expertise to staff productions with local workers at a substantially lower cost than having U.S.-based workers travel to the foreign production site. This has increased their ability to attract foreign production, and these trends are continuing today."[28]
Ripples are also felt in the world of production, especially in the cable TV market, where the demand for low-cost content is insatiable. Lower cost digital cameras and editing equipment have made production cheaper and lowered the barriers to market entry. This lowers capital equipment costs and the labor requirements for low-end production. For television broadcasters, the lowering of production costs has made it more economically feasible to produce docu-reality content aimed at narrower audience segments.
In terms of high-end digital cinematography, one of the obstacles towards seeding the future is access to the tools - in other words, getting one's hands on the equipment. "They need access to be able to learn how to use it and how to get the best from it," says Steve Shaw of Digital Praxis, "The most difficult part at the moment is getting hands on experience [with high-end digital acquisition]."
Another aspect of the new training cycle is simply the lack of uniformity amongst the large chip cameras and the increase in variables that affect image quality along the digital supply chain. "When I was coming up," remarks Director of Photography Michael Falasco:
"[C]ertainly everyone knew original negative because we were production people. If you worked in a duplicating house or an optical house, then all of a sudden you had to learn inter-negative, and you had to learn CRI, and you had to learn inter-positive, and black and white pan masters, and every one of them had different gammas, everyone of them had different curves, so that always seemed like a lot....but you only had three or four stocks to choose from, you had three or four duplicating stocks, and then a handful of print stocks so you really could learn all you needed to know about them. Now at any given time a shooter has the choice of a dozen different stocks to work with and the same in duplication, and even now when your making a digital intermediate you have 2K, 4K, and 6K shortly...I just read an article by a European DP and he was talking about why he liked the Master Primes, and he quoted three or four very aesthetic things. There was no specific technical stuff that he quoted about any of them. What that said to me, 'If you took four of these, if you took the Master Primes the Optimo, the DigiPrimes, and the E Series and you shot on any given stock which is so good these days, and you transferred on a Spirit or you transferred on a C-Reality or you laser scanned like Amelie and that was at 2K and now they have 4K and 6K; it's almost impossible, it's imperceptible to say this particular thing is result of the contrast of the DigiPrimes when there are so many other high tech variables that happened within the work flow.'"
Beginning with my generation of film technician, access to viewing film dailies for the apprentice technician decreased in inverse proportion to the increase in electronic acquisition. This fact alone functions as a hole in the traditional film training infrastructure. Certainly one of the biggest misunderstandings about large chip cameras is the fact that one lights them like motion picture film. That requires the expertise of a skilled lighting technician. In most respects the skill sets are transferable. Moreover, people often forget that lighting for motion picture is not merely about exposure, but also an important part of storytelling.
Beyond the changing nature of content brought on by new media, there is evidence of an evolving aesthetic, arising from the introduction of lower-cost digital acquisition and post technologies and the evolving ethos of the game generation in relation to these tools. That fact alone will have a continuing effect on the nature of content and the training cycle of below-the-line technicians: As Mark Chiolis, Senior Marketing Manager of Thomson Grass Valley’s Strategic Marketing and Business Development Group, remarked in an interview I conducted with him earlier this year, "Today there are a number of thought provoking questions that are being asked. What happens when there is a true RGB 4k (there isn't one today) sensor that rivals, if not exceeds, that of today's film stock? One of the arguments for film is that people like the "look" which includes the grain and movement through the gate. What happens when the "game-boy" generation takes over? Having grown up with "video" is this the "look" they want to see? Will they have a different set of standards to compare to?" For now, the subject is outside the scope of my essay, but I look forward to investigating this matter in the coming weeks.
This month we focus on understanding the evolving below-the-line training cycle and the newer end-to-end digital work flow as it relates to acquisition and post. The traditional training cycle of below-the-line technicians has slowly eroded over the last ten years. Now the older cusp of the game generation in their mid-thirties have recently entered their productive years as journeyman technicians and content creators. These technicians and artists came up in an infrastructure married to film but sleeping with video, an infrastructure infiltrated more and more by electronic acquisition and digital post - a result itself of the explosion of world wide cable and the desire to stem the rising cost of production. A corollary of this would also translate to the growing outsourcing of production and post, and the changing nature and aesthetic of content in the form of both docu-dramas, generated by professionals and users alike, and advanced CGI.
I remember having the opportunity to compare formative experiences with Dedo Wingert, inventor of the dedo light, at a lighting expo one rainy winter night in New York City in 2000. No one showed at the event except myself and a few other below-the-line technicians. This fact alone is important to note. One executive at a prominent rental house in New York City recently mentioned to me that attendance at seminars has been declining over the last few years. This phenomena, according to elder technicians, is evidence of the arrogance of today's younger generation. After listening to Wigert talk of his traditional film apprenticeship, I couldn't help but feel inadequate.
Ultimately, the generational myopia and phenomena alluded to above are symptomatic of larger forces and better understood in context: These are the advance of digital post and acquisition technologies, the evolution of the below-the-line training cycle and infrastructure, the emerging ethos of the game generation and its influence on culture and business, and finally both globalization and the creative economy as it relates to media and entertainment.
Today digital cinematography and digital end-to-end workflows are reaching critical mass. The culture war I came up in between film and "video" has given way to hybrid projects with newer digital formats that incorporate the best of both worlds. The change is liberating for me because I am a member of the game generation and the newer tools are more natural to my sensibilities, even as they complicate the creative process with an increase in variables that influence image quality along the digital supply chain.
Rather than inundate you with a dissertation on these matter I have decided to break my thoughts down and post them in easily digestible gruel (just kidding!) courses. By months end you shall understand why monkey brains are a delicacy. And lucky for you, the meal will be topped by an even better desert in the form of pod cast conversations with highly respected below-the-line technicians.
Here's are planned stops along the topic route:
I. The Creative Economy
II. Creativity is Expensive and Time Consuming
III. The Creative Factory - a. Globalization and Convergence, b. Outsourcing Production and Post
IV. The Horizontal Labor Market - a. Culture of Tradesmen vs. Culture of Technicians, b. Art at the fringe vs. Creativity as Mainstream
IV. The Cultural Ethos of The Game Generation - a. Generational Myopia and Culture War, b. Evolving Nature and Aesthetic of Content
V. The Digital Work Flow
There are several larger forces manifesting in the recent development of MTV's Virtual Laguna Beach. One of them is the evolution of brand: how the concept has extended itself into the realm of branded communities in the digital age. Gamers (the generation under age 34 and including generations X and Y) have grown up in a world saturated by brand so that the phenomenon is now a vehicle for personal expression and identity beyond the ostensible confines of corporate mandate. Commentators like Rob Walker (The Brand Underground, NYT) have elucidated the social phenomena well, however, they tend to look at the expression as another failed modernist attempt to beat the system.
I am not suggesting that the gaming generation, of which I am a part, is somehow untethered to history. Instead, I want to emphasize that the boomers polemic between left and right overlooks how truly different this generation is. To paraphrase David Brooks, this generation has simply moved on from the culture war in many respects. Other commentators have illustrated how the game generation has put its resources into transforming corporate America in a similar way its predecessors channeled its own energy into political and social movements. Some, like John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade in Got Game have gone so far as to say that the dot com era was an example of this corporate revolution and symptomatic of the game generation's predilection for role playing, in other words, Sims taken beyond the confines of the console.
The evolution of brand and branded communities is provocative in another respect. Multinational corporations have growing political and commercial leverage that is unfettered from the confines of the nation state. That phenomena presents a challenge to the polis but also changes the way constituents, if only subconsciously, organize themselves. In a commercial world, branded communities, become social organs as much as a commercial one. The notion infuses the gaming generations unique identity and illustrates another way in which they have ostensibly moved on from the polemic that sets art against commerce.
In the new world, media and technology must play to these sensibilities if they intend to reap the rewards of the younger demographic. I would not be surprised in ten years if movie and home theaters became virtual environments equivalent to branded paintball. Gamers demand a heightened sense of reality and want to be engaged with their media in a way far more intense than the boomer's relationship with television. Virtual Laguna Beach is in my mind symptomatic of the beginning of this transformation.
Advertising Age - Digital - How MTV Plans to Let Anyone on 'Laguna Beach'
Excerpts:
"Think of virtual Laguna Beach as a cross between Second Life, the online virtual world community that opened in 2003, and popular computer game The Sims. "
"MTV Networks figures that a single "resident" of its virtual world can translate into $150 of incremental revenue, based on estimates from existing virtual world There.com, whose technology fuels VLB -- or "Virtual Laguna Beach." And that doesn't count revenue from potential advertising. MTV is already in talks with marketers Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, Cingular and Paramount about developing campaigns for the virtual version."
They use the keyboard to walk or run around the island and a toolbar along the bottom of the computer screen offers more functions and can adjust their physical appearances -- from hair color to face shape to complexion. They can go shopping, exchanging MTV dollars for, say, new clothes or a surfboard (they earn MTV dollars by spending time in the world and interacting with brands).
"MTV promises advertising will be much more than billboards on the side of the virtual sidewalk or product placements and said the opportunities for behavioral targeting are "incredible." They also haven't worked out the ad rates -- in part because no one's exactly sure what the ad model will end up looking like."
"'We didn't back into revenue expectations,' said Sean Moran, exec VP-MTV 360 ad sales. 'This is a case of you can't put the cart before the horse.' (For context, however, in the kid- and brand-friendly virtual world Whyville, cost-per-thousand rates range from $6 to $30 and onetime sponsorship setup fees range from $25,000 to $250,000.)"
"Michael Wilson, CEO of Makena Technologies, which created and powers There.com, says the virtual worlds are a breeding ground for focus groups and consumer research."
"'There are a lot of unsafe places online, and we wanted to make this a safe place for our audience and our advertiser partners,' said Jeff Yapp, exec VP-program enterprises at MTV Networks' Music Group."
"MTV developed the project primarily in-house, using about 20 employees over four months. So if it doesn't work, Mr. Toffler said, it's not like the company went out and spent $50 million on an acquisition that bombed. (MTV execs wouldn't outline exactly how much the initiative cost, but earlier this summer Viacom Chief Financial Officer Mike Dolan said broadband channel Overdrive was built with an investment of $5 million over eight months.)"
"VBL is the first step in a series of virtual communities MTV hopes to build around music and lifestyles -- look for a Logo-themed world to launch in 2007, for example."
"Soon VBL will include an e-commerce aspect (the first step will be working with the actual stores in the real Laguna Beach before expanding it out to other national retailers) and launch a second-tier subscription-based service for residents who want the ultimate virtual lifestyle -- who want to live in a waterfront beach house, for example."
Advertising Age - Q&A With the NFL's Lisa Baird: How to Market the Biggest Reality Show
Excerpt:
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Lisa Baird joined the National Football League from IBM Corp. last year at a time of transition: the extension of TV deals with CBS, Fox and DirecTV; a new pact with NBC; and the shifting of Monday Night Football to ESPN -- not to mention a new commissioner who took over on Sept. 1.
Ms. Baird, now senior VP-marketing, took over the top marketing spot after the departure of ex- General Motors Corp. executive Phil Guarascio. As the NFL's big kickoff weekend begins, Ms. Baird took time to talk about matters including the league's future in a digital world.
The NFL is the ultimate reality show: It's unscripted and unpredictable, played out in front of the biggest TV audience each Sunday and Monday night. Mark Burnett couldn't come up with "reality" like the next 21 weeks of our season.
Changing demographics and emerging technologies continue to mystify those companies that are five to 10 years down the road. We're also in a unique brand position with the NFL and the 32 clubs having such massive audiences. We continually need to protect our brand from companies that look to redefine the NFL image to their own advantage.
We've talked a lot about better understanding how our most important constituency -- our fans -- interacts with the NFL, consume media and spend their time and money, particularly given changes in American demographics.
We hold the keys to some of the world's most valuable content -- NFL games. We need to keep finding compelling ways to deliver our content, while protecting our network packages which have been the underpinning of our league and what makes us unique.
MySpace cowboys - September 4, 2006
Excerpts:
With Murdoch's backing, the site has an astonishing number of projects underway: a Google pact to sell text ads on the site; a MySpace Records label; a VoIP feature to let users call one another; international sites in Britain, Australia, France - with nine other countries in Europe and Asia coming soon. DeWolfe counts 20 new products in the development pipeline. "We think we can extend MySpace around the world and it can be a major force globally," says Murdoch, whose Internet ambitions have helped drive News Corp.'s stock up 18% this year.
PC Pro: News: Google wants its MTV
Google and MTV have begun a flirtation by signing a deal to distribute MTV clips through the Google network. The Official Google blog says that clips from MTV and its associated channels such as VH1, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central will start appearing on a site near you that is part of Google's AdSense programme. It is only a toe in the water but may be the prelude to a much bigger alliance.
It is only recently that MTV has woken up to the threat posed by YouTube. It was widely expected that the new 'Flux' web site would be a rival to YouTube. However, at the moment Flux is merely a shop for selling ringtones and pictures. By teaming with Google, MTV may be hoping to use the Internet giant's muscle to challenge YouTube's encroachment into music video.
Business Week writer Catherine Holahan elucidated the pitfalls of brands like Viacom's MTV in a digital age with its lower barriers to market entry. The big question is if and how MTV will maintain its hegemony over the younger demographic, especially with increasing competition from the likes of online content distributors like YouTube and MySpace.
Excerpts and Highlights:
Major Internet players—from search engine Yahoo! (YHOO) to startup video site YouTube—are striking deals to broadcast music videos over broadband. Their hope: The same strategy that won Viacom's (VIA) MTV Networks cult-like control of the 12- to 34-year-old audience two decades ago will prove just as successful today on the Web.
Reality television is a result evolving market forces. Certainly, the rising cost of production and the demand for content with the worldwide proliferation of cable is one obvious driver. Reality television especially of the type that is integrated with the Internet or with direct viewer response is also part of the evolving trend towards interactive media with the younger demographic. Interactivity is also part of the gaming generation's fascination with role-playing. Sims in the world of traditional television content is found in the form of reality television. According to John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade, in their study of the gaming generation's attitudes towards business, entertainment software has trained this generation to expect a heightened relationship based on immediate rewards or consequences with media and the world at large. I believe this ethos towards role-playing and interactivity is seen in the form of reality-based shows like "American Idol" and the "Apprentice".
With advertising in turmoil on broadcast TV, reality shows - like American Idol or even Tommy Hilfiger's less successful "The Cut" - take product placement well beyond a can of Coke enjoyed by our favorite television show's character. "Idol was simply a marketing tool for me to sell records," says Simon Cowell on "Larry King Live." "The show was one thing but it was actually my record label, which was the most important thing. So, my background is I run a record label, and I still run a record label and that's really my passion.
The real winner of "American Idol" is Cingular Wireless. Cingular has an exclusive deal with the show's producers that let customers text their votes instead of trying to call in on busy lines. In Season Four last year, 41.5-million text votes were sent in; Cingular charges between $19.99 per month for a text package with 2,500 messages included and 10 cents per message on a pay-as-you-go plan, meaning the company raked in as much as $4.15-million in text messaging fees from American Idol votes alone last year. When the Apprentice was at its peak, Ad Age writes, Yahoo's product placement was a solid success, "After the ice cream challenge during the second season, viewers were told to go search Yahoo, and “Within three hours of the end of the show, the term ‘Apprentice Ice Cream’ was the third-most-searched term on Yahoo that day. By 5 o’clock the next afternoon, the ice cream was sold out,” says Yahoo VP Jim Moloshok. And the results kept coming. After the Levis challenge, “[f]our days after that episode ran, viewers were still searching Yahoo avidly for ‘Apprentice Jeans’ to get a copy of the catalog. And "Apprentice Jeans" was still ranked No. 1 among Yahoo Web searches,” AdAge reports. Using secret tracking devices, Yahoo discovered that “The core demographic for the ice cream was 21 to 34 years old. For the jeans, it was 35 to 44.” Yahoo VP Moloshok says, “If you can complete the loop, product placements like Mark Burnett is doing are one of the most effective ways to get people engaged with a product.”
Now CNN like MTV Flux are taking "reality" one-step further implementing an infrastructure for user-based content.
Advertising Age - MediaWorks - Dell to Sponsor CNN's 'Citizen Journalism'
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- At a time when much of the digital media world's focus is on how to monetize user-generated content, CNN has signed Dell as a major sponsor of its foray into citizen journalism -- iReports and the CNN Exchange program.
Guardian Unlimited Business | | MTV hooks up with Google
MTV is to supply segments of its programmes to the thousands of websites and blogs affiliated with search giant Google.
MySpace a launch pad for next-gen media biz
Excerpts:
It's too soon to know the future of paid content downloads on MySpace, having recently launched its first offering: $1.99 downloads of the Fox series "24," sponsored by Burger King. However, paid search represents a considerable revenue-generating opportunity for MySpace and a search partner.
News Corp. sculpting bold plan for growth
Excerpts:
News Corp. in the past 12 months has been forging media's future by buying and riding the likes of social networking leader MySpace.com and video gamer IGN to meteoric heights while also enjoying record performance levels at its core broadcast and cable television, film and print operations, even as they struggle to reinvent their business models.
FT.com / Companies / Media & internet - News Corp to sell films online
Excerpts:
News Corp’s internet properties, including MySpace.com, are to start selling Fox films and television content on a download-to-own basis in an effort to create a foothold in this potentially huge new digital market.
Advertising Age - MediaWorks - MTV Wants to Be Marketers' On-Ramp to the Web
Here are some exceprts:
Around the Google deal, it really is the first time where anybody in the content business can use video and create a new content economy on the internet by marrying a video to an advertisement and allowing smaller owners to place that on their sites. It promises to be a groundbreaking way for content to be distributed and monetized on the internet. We brought this idea to Google. Eric Schmidt and I negotiated the deal and it's the first of many [MTV will] be doing in the digital media space.
Realism is, hands down, the holy grail for game developers, and their journey towards photo-realistic gameplay is getting a very nice boost courtesy of ATI. ATI is showcasing a new technology called Parallax Occlusion Mapping at its booth on the show floor. For those of you somewhat familiar with graphical terms, think of POM as a variant of bump mapping or normal mapping, but with actual depth -- not the "simulated" depth other technologies create with fancy lighting effects. To show off the technology to me yesterday, ATI loaded a 3D representation of a cobblestone street in which each stone had a significant height raised well above its setting in the ground. The stones were not, however, shaped individually by a 3D artist; rather, the whole walkway was modeled as a perfectly flat, two-polygon surface (one polygon is a triangle, so just two are needed to make a rectangle). The POM technology gave the walkway actual depth, making it seem as though thousands of polygons were used to create a vision actually modeled with only a couple. To really show it off, an employee at the booth panned the camera down and swung it between two cobblestones -- something utterly impossible with normal mapping's "simulated" depth, which is revealed as truly flat at such ranges and angles. POM looks to be singularly awesome, and it's already hitting the streets on the XBOX 360. Gamers, cue your drooling.Tomorrow's Treasures, Day 2 - SIGGRAPH 2006 - Computerworld Blogs
I watched as users opened multiple instances of the same map, resized and moved the windows to partially overlap each other, set each instance to display the single map differently (one topographically, another politically, etc.), and then effortlessly scroll, rotate, and zoom the map, watching as it dynamically shifted to their easy touch.
To put it short and sweet, this is exactly the kind of technology that would be positively awesome to see in a future kitchen. Forget posting pictures on the refrigerator -- just bring them up on the wall, scale them, crop them, cut them, rotate them, and organize them at your leisure. Stop buying post-its for use in to-do lists; just use the integrated wall-keyboard to tap out animated notes for your loved ones. Need to check a map before heading out? I couldn't imagine an easier-to-master interface.
Tomorrow's Treasures, Day 3 - SIGGRAPH 2006 - Computerworld Blogs
Though graphics and animation are obviously the overriding themes of SIGGRAPH 2006, there are several sub-themes that unite the various showcased technologies into mini-groups. For example, there are numerous innovative touch interfaces throughout the conference, both in the Emerging Technologies hall and on the main floor (the Multi-Touch Wall I mentioned yesterday being one of the stronger contenders in the area). One sub-theme of the conference is, unsurprisingly, game-related technology; considering the fact that computer and video games so often drive the development of video tech, many companies on the show floor are using games to show off their individual products, while others are simply showing off their games.
One of the booths I stopped by yesterday was run by Linden Lab, the creators of the massively multiplayer online community known as Second Life. Jeffrey Ventrella, one of the technical developers for the game, invited me to take a gander at a player-driven animation technology he was working on, and I must admit that I was impressed, despite the fact that I don't play the game. Apparently, players will soon be able to pose their online avatars by moving and manipulating body parts through a very intuitive, point-and-click interface. Not long afterwards, they'll be able to create personalized animations using the technology, saving them for hotkey-use in future sessions.
LucasArts, the gaming arm of George Lucas's development kingdom, is also sharing some new technology at the show. The company showed off a technology yesterday called euphoria (all lowercase, because apparently that makes it look modern) by Natural Motion Ltd. euphoria is being used in LucasArts' upcoming Indiana Jones title, driving much of the animation of the game using a set of predefined rules rather than scripted keyframes. When something smacks our good friend Indy in the back of the head, for instance, euphoria determines how he'll be jarred forward, will attempt to recover his balance, and then either stay up or fall over, creating all the animations on the fly. Thus, almost every time anything animates in the game, the movements are subtly different. It's a step in the right direction for realism.
Realism is, hands down, the holy grail for game developers, and their journey towards photo-realistic gameplay is getting a very nice boost courtesy of ATI. ATI is showcasing a new technology called Parallax Occlusion Mapping at its booth on the show floor. For those of you somewhat familiar with graphical terms, think of POM as a variant of bump mapping or normal mapping, but with actual depth -- not the "simulated" depth other technologies create with fancy lighting effects. To show off the technology to me yesterday, ATI loaded a 3D representation of a cobblestone street in which each stone had a significant height raised well above its setting in the ground. The stones were not, however, shaped individually by a 3D artist; rather, the whole walkway was modeled as a perfectly flat, two-polygon surface (one polygon is a triangle, so just two are needed to make a rectangle). The POM technology gave the walkway actual depth, making it seem as though thousands of polygons were used to create a vision actually modeled with only a couple. To really show it off, an employee at the booth panned the camera down and swung it between two cobblestones -- something utterly impossible with normal mapping's "simulated" depth, which is revealed as truly flat at such ranges and angles. POM looks to be singularly awesome, and it's already hitting the streets on the XBOX 360. Gamers, cue your drooling.
Tomorrow's Treasures, Day 4 - SIGGRAPH 2006 - Computerworld Blogs
One of the more frequently-used technologies in the realm of VR here at SIGGRAPH is a subsonic noise-based tracking system developed by a company called InterSense. Though several booths were showing off giant VR screens for various marketing purposes, they all used InterSense tracking systems to allow users to interact with their virtual wares. The tech works by implementing a set of three tracking bars on the top and sides of a given VR screen (itself little more than a rear-projection screen about 10 feet diagonally). Each bar both emits and receives sonic waves to and from a pair of wireless devices: a glasses-mounted sensor to track eye position (and thus modify a projected VR image on the fly to align it perfectly with the user's eyes) and a handheld sensor attached to an interacting pointer device. In order for the pointer to emit a virtual beam on the screen, giving it a presence in the virtual world, InterSense's sensors must track its location and orientation so that its virtual reflection can be displayed to match.
Thus, when a user pops on a pair of stereo glasses and grabs the pointer, a virtual beam of light is "emitted" from its tip, perfectly aligned no matter where the user is standing or the device is held. Given a virtual representation of a human heart, for instance, a user could hold the pointer horizontally, casting its beam in front of the heart, and then literally step forward, swing the beam around, and cast it through or behind the heart. The effect is startlingly convincing, as though you're moving a handheld pointer around and behind an actual three-dimensional object, pointing at (or modifying at will) different parts of it.
Different VR projectors are provided by different companies and paired with different kinds of eyewear, even though InterSense's technology is used for tracking purposes almost universally. There are two different kinds of stereo projection techniques: passive and active. Passive stereo is what you're probably used to: two projectors simultaneously emit images to the screen, but each projector emits polarized light at different angles. A user wears a pair of polarized glasses to view the image, so that each eye is fed a view from a different projector. Assuming that the distance and angle of the two projected images are calibrated correctly to each other and the viewer (helped along under optimal conditions by one of InterSense's glasses-mounted trackers), you end up with a very decent 3D image. IMAX uses such technology to full effect every day; here at SIGGRAPH, Purdue University is using passive projectors to drive a VR flythrough of its entire campus.
Active stereo, however, takes things a step further than their counterparts. A single projector emits a flip-flopping image to the VR screen, toggling back and forth between the view designed for one eye and the view designed for the other. The user wears special glasses that have tiny shutters in the lenses, opening and closing in time with the projector (which, as you can imagine, is far too fast for the eye to notice). The left shutter opens to view the left image exactly when the projector displays it, and then the process shifts to the right eye. Back and forth, dozens of times a second, and you end up with a 3D image that doesn't suffer from the slight hazing that passive stereo is so often plagued with. InterSense itself is using active stereo at its booth here at SIGGRAPH, as is Barco -- though the latter company has taken things a step further than anyone else by providing six-sided VR cubes for highly immersive experiences.
Tomorrow's Treasures, Day 5 - SIGGRAPH 2006 - Computerworld Blogs
As the final day of ACM's SIGGRAPH 2006 graphics and animation conference rolls around, I wanted to sit down and examine three different technologies showcased at the Boston convention that, given just a bit more development time, could theoretically be used together as the veritable Voltron of virtual reality experiences.
In order to create that experience, we would need technology that could fool the senses into suspending disbelief. Dismissing the olfactory and gustatory systems (smell and taste, respectively), we'd still need to replicate sound (which is easy), sight (which is pretty darned difficult to do convincingly), and touch (which is nigh impossible to accurately simulate). If we wanted to immerse someone -- let's call him Jimmy -- in an environment, we'd need to give him the ability to hear it, see it, feel it, and finally, traverse it.
Hearing, as I said, is a piece of cake; give Jimmy a pair of headphones and a decent sound card and we're set. Seeing is a little harder, though, which is where the good folks at Sensics Inc. come in. Sensics is demonstrating their piSight head-mounted display at SIGGRAPH, which boasts an incredible 150-degree viewing angle -- just an imperceptible smidgen beneath that of human eyesight. The piSight uses multiple OLED-powered displays focused into the eyes with twelve lenses per eye; combine it with InterSense's tracking technology, which I mentioned yesterday, and you get a pretty convincing, fully-3D visual. The level of detail and quality could certainly use a bit of work, but it's unquestionably the best head-mounted display I've ever heard of, much less used.
Immersion is the company responsible for force-feedback technology, so if you've ever felt the rumble of an XBOX controller in response to a game or felt a joystick buck in your hands, that's them talking to you. They produce a product line based on their CyberGlove, which can monitor hand and finger motion. Combined with an exoskeleton they develop (it's ugly as heck, but Jimmy will have his headset on, so he won't notice), the CyberGlove can deliver actual feedback and pressure to the hand, meaning Jimmy could be stopped by a wall in front of him, could pick up and feel a can of soda, could feel the weight of a brick or a suitcase, or could trace the outline of a sculpture with his finger. Let's slip those on Jimmy: not only can he see everything around him, but now he can interact with it all too.
Finally, we need to give Jimmy the ability to walk around in his environment. I'm talking about actual foot motion -- forget about using buttons on the hands to float through virtual space, the only way to be immersed in a VR experience is to be able to walk through it at your own speed and leisure. For that, we have to turn to Hiroo Iwata at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, and his dully-named Powered Shoes, which he presented at SIGGRAPH's Emerging Technology exhibition. The Powered Shoes are literally a form of roller skates whose wheels are actuated by motors. If we were to slip them on Jimmy and he were to walk, the wheels would counter his movements and roll just enough to keep him in one spot. A lot of work still needs to go into the shoes -- changing direction is a little awkward, and you can't run yet -- but the concept is sound, and it works well enough already; it just needs a bit more time to reach perfection.
LONDON - MTV's college network mtvU has acquired Y2M, the largest interactive network of online college newspapers in the US.
Excerpts:
Off-Broadway? Try online. That's where you'll find Absolut Ruby Red: The Evolutionary Musical, an oddball animated production by Stockholm-based agency Great Works that trumpets the Swedish vodka brand's newest flavor. The word "surreal" doesn't even begin to describe this interactive musical, which puts viewers in the director's chair by allowing them to choose the narrative path of a heroic grapefruit as it evolves from a simple fruit into a glorious alcoholic beverage—all while encountering flying sharks, anthropomorphic camels and other similarly bizarre characters along the way. After completing the musical "choose-your-own-adventure"-style, viewers can download their masterpiece onto their PSP or iPod. And for those who'd rather play composer than director, the Song-O-Gram feature lets you pick the words and genre for a personalized musical shout-out to all of your unsuspecting friends.
The Brand Underground - New York Times
Moving homes today...more soon.
Ultimately, television can have a relationship with the internet that features cannot. “Features have been able to grab on to what internet can do for marketing and publicity,” says Megan Wolpert, executive vice president of Spyglass Television, when I interviewed her in January this year: “However, TV can do what movies can’t with that relationship, because they don’t need to add a step. They don’t need to say come see us. They just show it. You can show a memoir, a travelogue, a serialized anything on the internet. I think even if you just look at the act of watching a movie versus watching television, it’s more analogous to the act of watching a computer.”
Certainly, the popularity of Reality TV is the outcome of the game generation trend towards interactivity. What is happening more recently, however, is an extension of the relationship between television and internet with show like Lost and VH1 Webjunk. Now MTV introduces MTV Flux a combination social networking portal/television channel.
Excerpts:
Moenk's piece on the game generation's social application of technology and its influences on Web 2.0 design is both insightful and uniquely refreshing. While everyone is talking about marketing on MySpace, Moenk focuses on the effect of the MySpace ethos on business culture as the game generation matures into their productive years.“They have relatively little generational consciousness,” writes political columist David Brooks about the game generation. Why? "[B]ecause this generation is for the most part not fighting to emancipate itself from the past.” This suggestion is provocative considering that while “the baby boom included the largest U.S. birth cohort to date, the game generation will ultimately outdo the baby boom in size, in scope, and presumably in influence,” notes John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade in their study of the game generation’s influence on organizational values in business. In fact, “the total size of the game generation is already greater than the baby boom ever was,” and the whole generation of gamers, “including X and Y and letters to be named later-simply approach the world differently than their predecessors.”
This generational amnesia is partly the result of the movement away from traditional forms of social capital towards weaker, and more numerous ties. Renowned urban planer Richard Florida notes that the fundamental social and economic changes that underpin the Creative Economy, demonstrate that in “virtually every aspect of life, weak ties have replaced the stronger bonds that once gave structure to society. Rather than live in one town for decades, we now move about. Instead of communities defined by close associations and deep commitments to family, friends, and organizations, we seek places where we can make friends and acquaintances easily and live quasi-anonymous lives. The decline in the strength of our ties to people and institutions is a product of the increasing number of ties we have.” Continues Florida:
"What appears to be self-indulgence to conservatives or devices of corporate oppression to liberals in fact turns out to be the result of the rational evolution of economic forces. Changes in taste and lifestyle that at first glance seem superficial and unrelated turn out to be rooted in widespread, fundamental economic change.”Excerpts and Highlights from Moenk's article:
While much of the discussion regarding social networks in the business community is focused on word of mouth marketing and user generated content, this trend has even greater ramifications for the way it will impact businesses internally.
Many analysts are of the opinion that applications of the future will be increasingly web based. While this idea has been met with much skepticism, Microsoft has aggressively begun to shift gears in order to adapt to these developments.
The timing for this is impeccable as Google is currently threatening to eat into their Microsoft Office market share with free web based solutions such as Google Writely and Google Spreadsheet.
Given that there are now web based alternatives to much of the productivity software that we use every day, how does this new generation of tools differ and improve upon what’s already out there? The answer lies, believe it or not, with social networking services like MySpace, social bookmarking sites like Yahoo’s del.icio.us, and peer to peer social networks like the blogosphere.
The most successful of these services are designed to be intrinsically social, while focusing on the utility they provide to individuals. Thus the web not only becomes a great place for individual productivity, but also real time group collaboration and community building around the information that is being interacted with. This balancing of needs between that of the individual and the group perhaps gives us an indication of what was missing in enterprise ‘groupware’ of the nineteen nineties.
In the past few years there has been a fundamental change in the way teenagers socialize which can be credited with two developments: the proliferation of cell phones, and the rapid adoption of the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook. The most profound ramifications of Web 2.0 won’t be fully felt nor understood until the MySpace generation begins to enter the workforce in the next few years. The current level of connectivity between students in high school and college is drastically different from anytime in the 20th century or even the first three years of the 21st.
In the Information Age where the adage "it’s not just what you know but who you know" is increasingly relevant towards maintaining a competitive advantage, today’s teenagers are learning and largely influencing the development of new networking practices that are foreign to current business professionals.
While the old paradigm of the web is focused on static information, the new web is developing into a dynamic collaborative medium where the social network is ubiquitous with content creation and information flows from person to person more efficiently with the individual in control of what they see and whom they interact with.
Email may currently be the most used application for collaboration because it is what the first generation of web users are familiar with, but as the MySpace generation begins to enter the workforce they will rapidly influence the adoption of tools that embody the collaborative social practices to which they are growing accustomed.
Fox News Corp has a brand. Unlike their competitors, they haven't relinquished it to stars or shows et cetera. They are also the exception because they understand market retention. You may have a political bone to pick with Fox News, but only because you are aware of their brand. MySpace has market retention too, because, well frankly, it's quite addictive. It's the internet version of tobacco.
This idea of market retention is foreign to media firms in an age where most are hyper-focused on "capturing" markets. Media firms spend millions of dollars on marketing only to toss away their branding in a nano-second. All of this is applicable to Fox News Corp. and MySpace. News Corp's acquisition is on the digital ball. Viacom is not far off, but they are trying to build from scratch (with MTV's new social networking site Flux) what Murdoch had but to acquire. While other media firms are looking in their rear view mirror, Murdoch and Myspace are the perfect and timely diagonal expansion. More on that later. In the meantime...
Marketing on MySpace | ForBiddeN fruit | Economist.com
Excerpts:
MTV Think News - Marines Totally Want To Be Your MySpace Friend — And Recruit You
Excerpts:
The courting of the MySpace generation — the site now claims more than 96 million members — is a nod to the importance of tapping the potential of the Internet to reach America's wired youth, according to Major Wes Hayes, Marine Corps Recruiting Command spokesperson.
The site, which features a selection of downloadable Marine wallpaper, also has links to recruiters and, so far, boasts more than 13,000 friends with handles like Promiscuous, Leatherneck and Tha Rock.
"The Marine Corps is always looking for new and innovative ways to make sure our target audience, young men and women ages 18 to 24, are informed about the Marines," said Hayes, adding that the reach into MySpace was not related to the kind of missed recruitment goals some branches of the armed services have experienced in the past few years.
Given the string of highly publicized incidents involving child predators trolling MySpace to meet underage children, the Army pulled its banner ads from the site earlier this year, according to Louise Eaton, media and Web chief for the U.S. Army Accession Command. But the Army kept in touch with MySpace in the interim, and after the site recently issued new security guidelines and assured the Army that MySpace was more secure, the Army is prepping a return of the ads as well as a profile page. "The purpose [of the Army profile page] is to let young people know about the opportunities Army offers," Eaton said.
And why MySpace? "Because young people are there," she said. "We have to go to where young people are." The Air Force advertises on MySpace but doesn't have a profile page, and the Navy has no presence on the site at this point. The Army's profile page is being worked on now by its ad agency, and Eaton said it should be up soon.
"The Internet is a very powerful tool and we see it as a new and innovative way to reach our target audience," Hayes said.
Murdoch surprised by MySpace growth | Tech&Sci | Internet | Reuters.com
The Hollywood Reporter interviewed Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of The News Corp.
Excerpt:
The Hollywood Reporter: DO YOU THINK THAT WILL BE A CHALLENGE GIVEN WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN UP AGAINST BEFORE?
Murdoch: Probably not. It will be a little bit different in each country. The English-speaking world will be easy. We will have to think about going with a slightly different model or architecture in Japan or Germany or some other countries. It will be driven by exactly the same principles. Young people are the same everywhere. They are curious. They want to take control of things. They want to live in their own world.
The Hollywood Reporter: THIS IS A REMARKABLE TIME. YOU HAVE CALLED THIS THE GOLDEN AGE OF MEDIA. WHAT WILL IT EVENTUALLY MEAN TO THE INDUSTRIES YOU ARE IN AND TO YOUR COMPANY?
Murdoch: There are new capital advantages to get things done. You go to these conventions and see all the new technologies being rolled out. But they are all meaningless unless they have content. There is going to be more and more demand for content, and there will be more ways for us to develop more content. And we've got to use these platforms to monetize all of our existing content.
New York Times published a piece today "Studios Shift to Digital Movies, but Not Without Resistance" by Scott Kirsner:
The product market for digital cinematography has established first entrants like Panavision and Thomson Grass Valley ( and Arriflex), but writes Scott Kirsner:
"[M]any new cameras are on the way, from established companies like the ARRI Group of Germany and a start-up, Red Digital Cinema."
Also cited:
“We’ve reached what may be looked at, five years from now, as a tipping point in the use of digital cameras,” said Curtis Clark, a cinematographer who is chairman of the American Society of Cinematographers’ technology committee."
Aside from technological advances in image quality vis-à-vis 35mm, I would add that digital acquisition is reaching critical mass as the gaming generation of below and above-the-line creators and technicians enter their "journeyman" or productive years. Unlike their predecessors, this generation does not have the residue of the long-standing infrastructural culture war between film and "video".
The cost savings of newer technology are often emphasized by OEM's, and certainly the viability of digital technologies arises primarily from the growing emphasis on solving the endemic vagueness and inefficiency in Hollywood financials. This trend is ultimately a result of the emerging Creative Economy. The engine of economic growth in the developed world is sustained creativity and the production of high-value intellectual property whether pharmaceuticals, video games, or movies.
In the shift to digital, infrastructure is often overlooked by commentators; while emphasis is frequently placed on the efficiency and aesthetics benefits of newer technologies. As the gaming generation matures, the industry will continue to develop a culture of technicians with dramatically different training cycles and models then its traditional and waning culture of apprenticeship. OEM's, however, are not in a rush to push out traditional acquisition technologies, unless they rely solely on digital for revenue streams. In fact, revenue streams inform the marketing strategies and angle of manufacturers when it comes to their positioning on newer digital technologies. Are they still making money from traditional technology? Then why disparage film. Are they a diversified? Then why not emphasize their choice. Common wisdom in business is that the most profitable years in a technological lifespan are the last years when there is less money invested R&D. Then, it's pure profit.
Here is a summary of upcoming pieces in my four part series on digital technology and emergent media trends for 2006:
The second installment will focus on the changing nature of our industry’s below-the-line labor market vis-à-vis digital acquisition and post, and how newer technologies are transforming our industry’s culture and training cycle. I will illustrate how our industry is moving from a culture of apprenticeship to a culture of technicians, and how this development fits into the larger context of globalization and the creative economy.
The third piece will focus on growing demand for greater clarity and efficiency in the way that Hollywood and other creative industries do business. I see the viability of digital technology as part of an emerging trend in Hollywood towards solving the endemic vagueness around creative financials that are symptomatic of our outmoded ideas about creativity.
The fourth piece will focus on emerging markets and the changing nature of content that is resulting from these newer technologies and other generational and economic trends.
Cheers,
Alexa D. O'Brien
A specter is haunting America - a specter of the
creative economy. Its expressions
are the lifeblood of our nation's economic muscle, and the metamorphoses of our
social and economic organs are symptoms of its manifestation. Yet, we are largely unaware of its
existence, and its ideation remains unarticulated in our public discourse -
obscured as it were by the rapping bare knuckles of narrow-minded extremities
on the left and right hands of our cultural divide. The more opposable of left-handed thumbs
call the phantom menace capitalism
and condemn the corporatization of art and the commodification of culture. On the right, all fingers - except
pinkies - point to the sun setting in the West and call the umbrage Hollywood. For
it is better, that one of your fingers should perish rather than have your
whole hand cast into Gehenna.
I have reduced these analogue dubs into binary code
- comprised of the numeral zero and - for the increasing number of this
magazine's bilingual readers - the numero
uno. I then filtered out
discordant noise using compression algorithms that preserved each sound bite's
ideological fidelity, but I scrambled the signals so that left and right
channels reversed stereophonic polarity.
Presto change-o! At zero
decibels, the human ear perceives near silence - or the sound of both hands
clapping for the "no brow" culture of today's youth.† The canine ear, however,
would still detect the looping chant of hippies asking if that is freedom rock
they hear, and if so, that the volume be turned up.
Friends, country/city men/women! Before you hand cyanide to the old
man behind the curtain - excuse me, 35mm camera - or have postmodern nightmares
of movie executives screaming, “What are our theaters now if not the tombs and
monuments to Film?” Before you condemn the blasphemy of Technicolor's "technology
agnostic" e-cinema rollout; or become a digital Bolshevik, shooting at the
heart and mind of film's aristocracy with your web clips of skateboarding dogs;
before you write that long-procrastinated blog manifesto on the weak social
capital of myspace friendship; or, better yet, one to educate our Prince de’
Medici; keep in mind: This is no joke.
Call it what you will, but the creative economy is here, and our
nation's and your region's wealth depend upon it.
Our means of production is no longer capital,
natural resources, or labor, declares economist Peter Drucker. It's
information.
Yet, one in four IT jobs and ten to twenty percent of financial
services jobs in the United States and Europe will be offshored by 2010. Forrester Research estimates that from
2000 to 2015 some 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages will
shift from the U.S. to lower-cost countries like India, China, and Russia. Manufacturing bore the brunt of outsourcing
in the past. Today, the service
sector, which employs four-fifths of the labor force, is increasingly affected.[1]
“In the old days," says computer scientist
Vernor Vinge, “anybody with even routine skills could get a job as a
programmer. That isn’t true
anymore. The routine functions are
increasingly being turned over to machines.”[2] Appligenics, for example, a small
British company, has created software that writes software. The application is "up to 500,000
times faster than human programmers and completely error-free," says Jim
Close, the company's business development director: "That means whereas a
human would consider four hundred lines of computer code a good day's work, our
software writes that in under a quarter of a second."[3] Even online à la carte legal services have made inroads into the legal
industry. Analysts say, "As
online resources grow, the demand for traditional services force lawyers to
lower fees."[4]
More provocative than outsourcing, is the magnitude
of convergence between telecommunications, digital technology and
industry. This development has
hastened the transformation of our economy from one based largely on
information and knowledge to one driven principally by creativity. John Howkins categorizes the
creative economy to include fifteen creative sectors - such as research and
development, software, design, and content industries like film, music, and
video games - that produce
intellectual property in the form of patents, copyrights, trademarks and
proprietary designs. The annual
global revenue for Howkin’s fifteen identified sectors was $2.24 trillion in
1999. The U.S. share represents
forty percent of the market with revenue totaling $960 billion. The U.S. share also accounts for more
than forty percent of research and development, forty percent of television and
radio, and thirty percent of film.
Howkins calculates that core copyright industries will be worth $6.1
trillion internationally in fifteen years.
U.S. dominance in these segments - more than productivity improvements
related to new technology and new manufacturing methods - is responsible for
much of the nation’s global economic competitiveness since the
nineteen-eighties.[5]
The creative economy suggests more than
technological progress or the growth of media and entertainment. However, the latter development is
important to emphasize. Most of us
are oblivious to the considerable role that content industries play in job and
wealth creation - not only in terms of regional economic development and
growing high-tech industry, but also in terms of our nation's global economic
competitiveness. In fact, the media,
entertainment, and cultural copyright sectors create new jobs at a rate three
times faster than the remaining economy.
In 2002, these sectors employed 5.48 million workers and accounted for
six percent of U.S. gross domestic product. These sectors also generated $89.26
billion in export revenue - surpassing every other category including
automotive, aviation, agricultural, as well as chemical and allied products.[6] Foreign sales of motion pictures alone
totaled $17 billion in 2002. The
motion picture industry is the only U.S. sector that boasts a surplus balance
of trade with every other country in the world; and the international sale of
filmed entertainment plays a significant role in our nation's overall trade
surplus in services.[7] U.S. sales of entertainment software
also totaled $8.2 billion in 2004, and U.S. game designers exported an
additional $2.1 billion the same year. [8]
Deutsche
Bank forecasts that global revenue for game software will grow at thirteen
percent annually over the next four years, while PricewaterhouseCooper projects
that the U.S. media and entertainment industries will be worth $690 billion by
2009.[9]
U.S. regions are increasingly unable to compete
against places like Bangalore, India or other lower cost localities for the
routine information and knowledge jobs considered to be the holy grail of
economic development. Emphasis is
frequently placed on attracting and growing high-tech to the exclusion of all
else. In reality, the high-tech
sector does not grow in a vacuum.
It certainly will not grow without the creative forms of the content
industries that drive technological advance for fields as diverse as real
estate and medicine, and that also add high-value to technology products and
consumer goods in today's glutted marketplace. “You can’t have high-tech innovation
without art and music," writes urban planner Richard Florida: "All
forms of creativity feed off each other."[10] Ultimately, high-tech requires a
creative social milieu - what Florida has termed "the creative
ethos". This chief ingredient
underpins the entire creative economy and those fertile regions that establish
tangible high-tech hubs.
Even firms cannot compete exclusively with
technology in today's global market.
Technology is cheap and ubiquitous until it acquires the
high-value-added context of creative forms like branding, content, and design. “At Sony, we assume that all the
products of our competitors have basically the same technology, price,
performance, and features," says Norio Ohga, former chairman at Sony.
“Design is the only thing that differentiates one product from another in the
marketplace.”[11] Global competition has pushed quality so
high and prices so low that the pressure to add value is intense. “We can’t compete with the pricing
structure and labor costs of the Far East," remarks Paul Thomson, director
of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City. “So how can we compete? It has to be with design.”[12]
Stock from companies that place a heavy emphasis on
design outperform their counterparts by a wide margin.[13] For every percentage of sales invested
in product design, a company’s profits increase by an average of three to four
percent.[14] In 2001, Whirlpool introduced its Duet
line of washers and dryers. By
2003, the company had nineteen percent of the front-loading washer market, up
from zero, two years before.
"If you looked four or five years ago, the average life of a
washing machine was something like thirteen years," says CEO, Jeff Fettig:
"We're surveying owners and finding out a lot of people are replacing
their washing machine with the Duet after five, six, or seven years because
they want it, not because their old machine broke or wore out."[15] Coleman Coolers was long considered the
industry standard until competition began to erode the company's market
share. In 1999, Coleman redesigned
its coolers. Two years later, the
company's cooler sales increased by forty percent and Coleman led its product
market for the first time in years.[16]
“Jeff Grady, CEO of Charleston based DLO,” remarks
Director of the Charleston Digital Corridor, Ernest Andrade, “was smart enough
to figure out that you've the iPod, but you don't have the little accessories
to go along with it.” Design also
has the powerful capacity to create new markets - whether for ring tones,
medical devices, or cutensils.
“Abundance, Asia, and Automation turn goods and services into
commodities so quickly,” explains business writer Daniel Pink, “that the only
way to survive is by constantly developing new innovations, inventing new
categories.”[17] “Every product from sneakers to software
is constantly being upgraded," writes Florida, “and everything from mutual
funds to potato chips now comes in an ever-proliferating variety of types -
because the Creative Economy is largely based on selling novelty, variety, and
customization.”[18] "Design has expanded its definition
to include creating, recognizing, and developing opportunities to build business,"
says Tim Brown, president and CEO of IDEO, a design firm based in Palo Alto.[19]
While the creative economy does not represent the
first time application of the high-value-added context of creative forms to
technology products or consumer goods, it does embody the large scale and
pervasive use of this methodology - what Virginia Postrel has termed the
"aesthetic imperative" - and the considerable bearing that this
approach has on the profit margins of every major industry sector. “Manufacturing and technology generate
wealth only when they make matter and information serve human desire,"
writes Postrel: “Desire is the true source of economic value.”[20] When The
New York Times asked GM Vice Chairman, Bob Lutz how his approach differed
from his predecessors, Lutz responded, “I see us being in the art
business. Art, entertainment and
mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide
transportation.”[21]
Branding, like design, can distinguish a product
from the glut of global competition, but firms today cannot succeed with a
brand strategy based on awareness and identity alone. “Mastery of design,
empathy, play, and other seemingly, 'soft' aptitudes," explains business
writer Daniel Pink, is “the main way for individuals and firms to stand out in
a crowded marketplace.”[22] "It may seem odd to hear a designer
discuss brand positioning," writes John Tanz in Fortune: "Get over it.
No longer the wacky freethinkers whose work may never exist anywhere
beyond their sketchpads and computer screens, designers are developing serious
business chops, becoming better versed in the concerns of the manufacturing,
finance, and marketing departments."[23]
When I asked media-christened branding expert, Rob
Frankel, how companies protect brand in the digital age with its lower barriers
to market entry, he responded: "Most of these guys confuse 'brand' with
identity or product. Identity is one small fraction of brand and products are
merely 'proof' of your brand's promise." Frankel distinguishes himself from
"old school" marketing consultants like Jack Trout and Al Ries
"by redefining brand in a way that impacts the bottom line." "Branding," Frankel continues,
"is not about getting your prospects to choose you over the
competition. It's about getting
your prospects to see you as the only solution to their problem. Everyone makes
a PC, but why do some people insist on a Mac, when it costs more and ostensibly
has less software?"
When you look at the size and scope of the global
advertising industry, you can appreciate how creativity factors into our
economy. Zenith Media estimates
that global expenditure on advertising totaled $403 billion in 2005.[24] According to economists Deidre McClosky
and Arjo Klamer, persuasion, advertising, counseling, and consulting account
for twenty-five percent of U.S. gross domestic product.[25]
Economist Gillian Doyle also notes that when “expenditure on advertising is
calculated as a percentage of GDP, the pattern that emerges indicates that as
the national economy has grown over time in real terms, advertising has not
just grown in parallel, but has grown even faster. So the amount of advertising activity in
an economy is related to the size and growth rates of the economy itself, and
advertising has tended to account for a progressively more significant portion
of GDP as time goes on.”[26]
The convergence of digital technology,
telecommunications, and industry has also eroded product market
boundaries. Sectors that were once
distinct and unrelated now overlap through their shared use of media and
information technology. "What
we do in medicine now relies on digital imaging. It also relies on high-resolution,
high-speed data processing," says Dr. John Raymond, Vice President for
Academic Affairs and Provost at the Medical University of South Carolina. So do digital cinema and entertainment
software. "MUSC was one of the
first institutions in the U.S. to have a sixty-four slice CT scan that gives
amazingly high-resolution pictures of the heart," continues Dr. Raymond,
"Some people believe that this technology may even supplant doing cardiac
catherizations for diagnosing cardiac disease. But trying to enhance the images, learn
how to use computer algorithms to read them correctly, or transfer the data
rich files to a distant site to be read by an expert; those are issues we have
to deal with, that we haven't dealt with adequately."
The CELL based Mercury Computer blade server is a
perfect example of a direct technology transfer from entertainment software to
medicine. Video games rely on
powerful CPUs for the high-speed data processing required to render 3D images
in real time. As gamers demand a
more heightened experience and greater realism, the data rich digital graphics
and audio require more processor speed. Advanced scanning techniques - like the
one described by Dr. Raymond - lead to huge amounts of data. Using a traditional computer processor,
reconstructing an image takes two seconds per slice, or over five minutes for a
full image, but using the CELL processor, a central processing unit developed
and optimized for gaming and broadband by Sony, IBM, and Toshiba, an image is
processed in seconds.
Digital cinema technology has repercussions for any
application where the display and transmission of high-speed high-resolution
data rich images are required: for example, high-resolution satellite imagery
or telemedicine. Consequently, the
National Institute of Standards and Technology developed scientific measures
and test materials to assess image quality and the effects of compression for
the display and transmission of digital content in collaboration with the
Digital Cinema Initiatives LLC - a consortium formed by seven major movie
studios to create a digital equivalent to 35mm film. Before a cinema can screen digital movie
content, the presentation is compressed using high-speed high-resolution
algorithms, encrypted, and transported to theaters via satellite, broadband, or
hard drive. In the end,
"networks don't care what kind of data you are sending over them,"
says Bob Gibbons, Director of Marketing and Communications at Kodak Digital
Cinema.
Military surveillance, targeting, and weapons
testing also use technology that was developed for motion pictures and
entertainment software. The U.S.
government currently employs Panavision's 300x compound zoom lens for military
surveillance. The lens made its
television debut during ESPN's coverage of the Mercedes Championship in Maui
this year. Applying Panavision's
lens technology with a high-speed high-resolution digital camera like the
Panavision HDMAX - that incorporates the QuadHD CMOS sensor - detailed images
of test missiles or objects of interest can be captured for analysis or target
verification. The Mercury
Computer’s CELL based blade server can also handle the requirements of sonar
and radar computation for military or scientific applications, because of its
ability to process real time data streams.
“The Cell BE processor was originally designed for the volume home
entertainment market," says Craig Lund, chief technology officer of
Mercury Computer Systems, "but its architecture of nine heterogeneous
on-chip cores is well-suited to the type of distributed, real-time processing
that will power tomorrow's digital battlefield.”[27]
Hollywood and video games drive the development of
high-speed high-resolution digital image capture, management, transmission, and
display that have implications for fields where these advanced technological
applications would be economically unviable to develop on their own. Digital Light Processing technology
(DLP) from Texas Instruments uses Digital Micromirror Device light modulators
(DMD). DMD technology has made
significant inroads into both the home and theatrical digital projection
display markets, but the technology also has applications ranging from
volumetric display, holographic data storage, lithography, scientific
instrumentation, and medical imaging.
Entertainment software has lead to faster introduction and deployment of
processors, broadband networks, and high definition disks like HD-DVD and
Blu-Ray. The “media richness demanded by gamers and game developers drives
progress in graphics and audio for the entire PC industry,” notes John C. Beck
and Mitchell Wade in their study of the game generation's influence on
organizational values in business.[28] “IBM places value on chips made for
entertainment software that goes beyond revenue and profits," says Dr.
John Kelly, senior vice president and group executive for IBM Technology Group:
"These chips help drive technology in other areas." Online gaming and game downloads are one
of the fastest growing uses for bandwidth connections, and entertainment
software stimulates the demand for third and fourth generation cellular
telephony with broadband speed capability. PricewaterhouseCooper projects that
wireless games in the U.S. will grow from $142 million in 2003 to $2.8 billion
by 2008.[29]
Despite a prima
facie assumption regarding technology's cardinal role and inherent value in
our local and national economies - technology, while an important catalyst, is
not the central driver of long-term economic growth. Although, we are not used to
"thinking of ideas as economic goods," writes economist Paul Romer,
"they are surely the most significant ones that we produce." Unlike
traditional goods such as raw materials or machines that diminish or
deteriorate with repeated use, ideas offer us increasing returns and actually
grow in value the more they are used.[30] The increased competition and shorter
product cycles of the global market, however, have made time a scarce
commodity. As Florida writes,
"Time is literally worth more than it use to be."[31] Therefore, sustained and consistent
creativity is the keys to deriving durable economic growth in today's
economy. The "only way for us
to produce more economic value-and thereby generate economic growth,"
continues Romer, "is to find ever more valuable ways to make use of the
objects available to us.”[32]
The changes in our economic, social, and cultural
organizations that have been developing for decades and define the landscape of
the creative economy are not the result of new forms of technology. Technology, innovation, and creativity
are the products of these broader and deeper shifts; because, it is these
structures, and not technology, that consistently support and elicit the very
conception, production, and transmission of ideas that generate economic
wealth. The “most important ideas
of all are meta-ideas," writes Romer, “ideas about how to support the
production and transmission of other ideas.”[33]
Creativity is expensive and time consuming. The production of commodities in the
creative industries, which include film and television, is said to suffer from
"Baumol's disease": Costs
in these sectors tend to climb faster than the rate of inflation, chiefly
because creativity is dependent on highly specialized human capital and
inherently labor intensive. Labor costs in the creative sectors also tend to
rise more rapidly than others do. [34]
Conventional creative sectors - like high tech and
entertainment - have always fallen under the traditional research and
development model with its characteristic high production and low replication
costs; intrinsic risk; and dependencies on intellectual property and human
capital.[35] Once the first generation of a
pharmaceutical like Lipitor or a movie like Episode
III: Revenge of the Sith is produced in its expensive and lengthy R&D
phase, it costs comparatively little to reproduce and supply it to extra
customers. In the United States,
the period from development, to FDA approval, to market for a new prescription
medicine is ten to fifteen years, and typically costs $802 million.[36] While corresponding data for the time it
takes an average feature to make it to market varies, the industry slang
"development hell" is frequently used to emphasize the notoriously
long periods projects can remain in development before they are finally
scrapped or "green lit." Spiderman, for example, was announced as
a film in 1986 but not released until 2002. In 2005, the cost of an average feature
released by MPAA members was $96.2 million. About thirty-seven percent of, that
was spent on marketing. The norm
for expenditure on an hour-long television episode is $2 million, not counting
development costs.[37] Console game development costs between
$3 million to $10 million per title,[38]
with time from inception to market ranging from one to four years.[39] Meanwhile, costs are projected to rise as
demand for third party intellectual property becomes more desirable to game
companies looking to mitigate escalating risks from fewer profitable
titles. Along with the increase in
licensing fees from proven sports and movie franchises, development costs for
three dimensional graphics, artificial intelligence, and enhanced voice and
sound effects for the next generation game consoles are also projected to rise.
Creativity carries tremendous risk. Only five of every five thousand
medicines tested, according to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of
America, make it to clinical trials.
Based on research by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development,
only one of these five is eventually approved for patient use. Of the roughly
forty thousand feature scripts that are written on spec in any given year,
three thousand are optioned and a mere fifty actually made.[40] In 2005, new releases totaled five
hundred and forty-nine. One hundred
and ninety-four or roughly thirty-five percent were released by the majors and
the other three hundred and fifty-five or sixty-five percent by independent
distributors. According to media
analyst Christopher Gasson, only two out of every ten films made by even the most
successful Hollywood studios, make a profit. [41] Most films lose money. "It’s a very frustrating
process," remarks Megan Wolpert, Executive Vice President of Spyglass
Television, "In terms of television very little work is done on spec. Development has a seventy-five percent
failure rate every year and that’s part of the game. You buy eighty projects knowing that
fourteen will be good enough to shoot.
Then of that fourteen, six will be on the air, and the rest just go
away." In 2004, three percent
of PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube titles accounted for 30 percent of the
firms' combined 2004 revenues. The
total market for games included 1,751 separate titles, of which 91.3 percent
sold fewer than 500,000 copies.[42]
Writers like Thomas Friedman and others have
referred to the flattening or horizontal effect of globalization on
business. The trend is
fundamentally a direct result of the emergence of the creative economy. Urban planner Richard Florida notes how
the formal venture capital system, high-tech startup phenomenon, and rise in
research spending have now combined with the creative factory and
subcontract-manufacture systems - translate outsourcing - and a new creative
social milieu to form an “age of pervasive creativity that permeates all
sectors of the economy and society.” [43] Focus on creativity, while
outsourcing or automating production, provides firms with the most efficient
division of labor. According to
Timothy Sturgeon of MIT’s Industrial Performance Center, this model has another
benefit; subcontracted manufacture can also capitalize on risk spreading and
economies of scale. “I think that quality wins in the
long run. Now, quality can also
mean that it is downsized that means that you may be the best but you’re not
the biggest," says Bob Harvey, Vice President of Worldwide Sales at
Panavision: "I believe that Panavision is the best but we are not the
biggest. We manufacture everything
here in this country for the most part.
That isn't fair with digital obviously, but we design everything
here. That is fair with digital.”
Despite our old-fashioned notions about creativity
as something relegated to the fringe, or worse, the elite, creativity is
mainstream. More Americans work in
art, entertainment, and design, than as lawyers, accountants, and auditors.[44] In the United States, professional
artists, writers, and performers have increased three hundred and twenty-five
percent from 525,000 in 1950 to 2.5 million in 1999.[45] Graphic designers outnumber chemical
engineers by four to one, and more Americans are directly employed in film
production than in the steel industry.[46]
Corporate recruiters visit graduate art schools
looking for talent, and design schools emphasize corporate skills along with
draftsmanship. Northwestern's
Master's program in product development at the McCormick School of Engineering
and Applied Science includes courses in basic accounting, marketing, conflict
resolution, statistics, and ethics. Design programs at Stanford and the
Illinois Institute of Technology are also adding business courses to their curriculums.[47] The “MFA is the new MBA,” writes Daniel
Pink, because, in today’s Creative Economy, “the high-concept abilities of an
artist are often more valuable than the easily replicated [left brain] directed
skills of an entry-level business graduate.”[48]
Meanwhile, firms in the gaming industry, the
fastest growing entertainment sector, search for gifted grads with degrees like
Carnegie Mellon’s new Masters of Entertainment Technology or MET. “The larger FX houses are constantly
asking us about our students," says Professor John Kundert-Gibbs, Director
of Clemson’s Digital Production Arts Program - whose alumnae work for the likes
of ILM, Pixar, EA, and Nintendo. As
one game developer put it to columnist Tom Loftus, “Changes in the way games
are built indicate less of a future demand for coders, but more of a demand for
artists, producers, story tellers, and designers.” [49]
Film and video games are to this generation what
journalism was to Bob Woodward’s.
Media and art programs are busting at the seams. Enrollment at the Savannah College of
Art and Design has increased fifty-two percent in the last five years. “When I arrived at USC in 2000,” says
Susan Hogue, Media Arts Instructor at the University of South Carolina and
documentarian, “there might have
been two-hundred and twenty majors in Media Arts, and now it’s over four
hundred.”
In his prescient and aptly titled book, The Rise of the Creative Class, urban
planner Richard Florida identified the emergence of the new economic and social
class of “thirty-eight million Americans roughly thirty percent of the entire
U.S. workforce,” whose creativity is the driving force of our nation’s economic
growth.
[50]
The key
difference between the Creative Class and other classes lie in what they are
primarily paid to do. Those in the
Working and Service Classes are primarily paid to execute according to
plan. The core of the Creative
Class includes people in science and engineering, architecture and design,
education, arts, entertainment, and the media whose economic function is to
create new ideas, new technology, or new creative content and intellectual
property.[51] Around this core, exists a broader group
of creative professionals in business, finance, law, health care and other
related fields, who engage in complex problem solving that involves a lot of
independent judgment and requires high levels of education or human capital.[52] Today in the United States, the
Creative Class is larger than the traditional Working Class. The Service Class, totaling fifty-five
million workers or forty-three percent of the U.S. workforce, is the largest of
all. The growth of the Service
Class, according to Florida, is also largely a response to the demands of the
creative economy. “Members of the
Creative Class, because they are well compensated and work long and
unpredictable hours," writes Florida, “require a growing pool of low-end
service workers to take care of them and do their chores.”[53]
Our collective blackout about the central driver in
our economy flows partly from the intoxicating polemics of the previous
generations’ culture war that eclipse most public discourse about the shifting
boundaries of our social geography and economic life. On the left, critics bemoan the
commodification of art and corporate America’s cooption of the symbols from the
former bohemian and newer alternative counterculture. “Hip is how business understands
itself," writes Tom Frank, suggesting that the emerging culture is just
another aspect of capitalism.[54] On the right, detractors echo related
themes about the devolution of society.
David Brooks describes the members of today’s generation as “The
Organization Kid," part of the “Future Workaholics of America, obsessively
career conscious and deferent to any authority that will get them
ahead." Brooks argues that the
game generation lacks defining concepts of “character and virtue," because
they have "been reared in a country that has lost, in its frenetic seeking
after happiness and success, the language of sin and character-building." "When I asked about moral questions
they often flee such talk and start discussing legislative questions,"
writes Brooks: "These young people are not part of an insurrection against
inherited order. They are not even part of the conservative reaction against
the insurrection. It's not that
they reject one side of that culture war, or embrace the other. They've just
moved on.”
[55]
Yes, they have, and the notion illustrates a
fundamental difference between today’s generation and the boomers. The latter are wired to view creativity
as a choice between “selling out" or “sticking it to the man”, and the
quest for the great society as a battle between the mediocrity of relativism
and the virtue of absolutes. To use
former bohemian terminology, today’s generation do not have those
hang-ups. Perhaps like earlier
dissident antipoliticians from the former communist Czechoslovakia, who used
satire and absurdity to highlight the fact that in a post-modern consumer society
the “line of complicity runs through each of us," this new American
generation distrusts political grandstanding and even traditional forms of
organized politics. “Ideology is a
specious way of relating to the world,” writes Vaclav Havel former antipolitician
later turned President of the democratic Czech Republic - especially when it
fails to find solutions that arise organically outside the limits of its
proverbial box. “All of us,” writes
Virgina Postrel, “must give up the cultural baggage we've inherited from the
romantics, who set art against tech, and feeling against reason; from the
modernists, who treated ornament as crime and commerce as corruption; and from
the efficiency experts, who valued function while disdaining form. We must abandon our prejudices regarding
the sources of economic value. The production of wealth comes not simply from
labor or raw materials or even intellectual brilliance. It comes from new ways
to give people what they want. By matching creativity and desire, the economy
will renew itself.”[56]
The
discussion continues online. For an
in-depth look at this and other related topics, visit
http://www.alexaobrien.com/TheSecondSight.
If you would like to share your thoughts with me, or if you are a
Nigerian official seeking to bequest the estate of a distant O'Brien relation
who died unexpectedly without an heir, my email address is
email@alexaobrien.com.
†
The
term "no brow" is attributed to writer John Seabrook, Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the
Marketing of Culture (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2000).
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[3] Software
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[6] Copyright
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[17] Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005): 81.
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[19] Jason Tanz, Online. Available: http://www.mutualofamerica.com/articles/Fortune/Decemb03/fortune2.asp
[20] Virginia Postrel, "The Aesthetic
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[21] Danny Hakim, “An Artist Invades
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[22] Pink, A Whole New Mind, 34.
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[24] Ad
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[30] Paul Romer, “Ideas and things,” The Economist (11 September 1993).
[31] Florida, 151.
[32] Paul Romer, “Ideas and things,” The Economist (11 September 1993).
[33] Paul Romer, “Economic Growth,” The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics,
David R. Henderson (ed.) (New York: Time Warner Books, 1993) 33.
[34] Doyle, 80.
[35] Colin Hoskins, Stuart McFadyen, Adam
Finn, Global Television and Film: An
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[36] Backgrounder:
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[37] Meg James, "Warner Bros.
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[38] Cost
of making games set to soar. BBC News, 17 November 2005. Online. Available:
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Gregory Sidak. Video Games: Serious
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Martin's Griffin ed edition, July 1999).
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2004). Cited in Crandall and Sidak,
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[51] Florida, 69.
[52] Florida, ix.
[53] Florida, 9, 71.
[54] Tom Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme capitalism, Market Populism, and the End
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If you watch television or go to the movies, you have already seen Grass Valley™ brand products and their Emmy® award-winning technologies at work. Mark Chiolis is the Senior Marketing Manager of Thomson Grass Valley’s Strategic Marketing and Business Development Group, based in Burbank, California.
Alexa O'Brien
How does the Viper FilmStream fit into the marketplace against digital cinematography cameras like to the Panavision Genesis and the Arriflex D-20?
Mark Chiolis
Both the Genesis and the D-20 are using single CMOS based sensors that are capable of using legacy 35mm cine lenses. The benefit of a single sensor is that you eliminate the prism but there are trade-offs in having to split out the Red, Green and Blue signals from the single sensor. Our philosophy on the Viper is to utilize three high-quality patented Frame Transfer (FT-DPM) Digital Pixel Management CCDs that take advantage of today’s latest design technologies in optics, providing a combination that yields what we at Grass Valley believe is the highest quality digital image available in a production camera today. The Viper also has four distinct modes of operation which makes it the most versatile of the digital cameras. Depending upon the project it is possible to shoot in the “raw” 4:4:4 FilmStream mode, a fully color corrected and processed 4:4:4 mode, a semi-processed 4:2:2 mode (which is perfect for cost conscious television work) and of course “regular” fully processed 4:2:2 HD mode. Additionally, because of our unique ability to reconfigure our sensors to different formats, the Viper is the only digital camera that is capable of shooting widescreen (2.37:1) aspect ratios that use the full vertical resolution of 1080 lines. Because other digital cameras are not capable of reconfiguring their sensors they are forced to “chop off” the top and bottom of the picture creating a faux widescreen image. This lowering of the vertical resolution can really display itself especially when going back to film for release.