Thursday May 04, 2006
The Quest For Three Screens (Part 3)
Today I want to focus on the content creators. I want to look at
the types of content creators and also explore how the content is made
available to consumers.
For this discussion, I classify content creators into three
types. The first is the studios. I am using this in a
fairly broad way. This is the set of folks that have budgets for
production and marketing. They have distribution deals.
Basically, this is the content you get on the tv, theater, plane,
etc. The scale of this content is fairly large, but also fairly
centralized. Marketing and distribution deals make sure that a
consumers ability to find and experience the content - albeit in silos
(see part 1), is pretty well understood.
At the other extreme is the personal content creators. This is me
creating my vacation videos and photos and sharing it with the
world. The number of people that consume my content is pretty
small - in the dozens at most. But, from a storage and
infrastructure perspective, it is huge. Millions of people
needing a place to store, access, and play their content. This is
a huge store and access problem, but a relatively controllable
organizational problem. I can organize all of my content how I
see fit.
The third type of content creator is the one I want to spend some time
on, because this is the gold. I will call these folks the
semi-pros. They create fairly slick content, but are aimed at
pretty niche markets. There is a common sarcastic remark about
cable/satalite which goes something like "500 hundred channels of
nothing on". This refers to the problem that current tv content
is limited by bandwidth, so only certain amounts of content can be
distributed. This causes something I'll call mass market niche
content - which basically means no one is happy. There are a lot
of examples of content where as a collective, we have agreed to accept
it as "good" - Harry Potter, Star Wars, Friends, CSI, .... But,
the fact is that humans are individuals, and we are driven by looking
for content that we want as individuals. This is what has driven
the participation age.
The participation age has spawned massive amounts of content, most of
it consumable by a very small number of people - ie: see personal
content. However, it has also spawned a lot of these
semi-pros. I'll use my favorite subject - Disney - as an
example. There are thousands of hardcore Disney theme park fans
out there that have an unquenchable thirst for all things Disney theme
park - from rumors to behind the scenes to construction to trivia and
more. I am of course a member. :^) Well, podcasting,
blogs, and even before that DVD and web technologies have allowed these
semi-pros to flourish in providing content. Here are a couple of
my favorites. The Window
To The Magic podcast specializes in high quality audio theme park
experiences. They even have a game called "Where in the park"
where you listen along and try to figure out where the audio is taking
us. Another semi-pro is the
Club where they use their own shot video and even old (really old)
home videos to capture Disney theme park attractions and era's.
They create DVD's that contain this content. And for the truly
extreme, Relive The Magic
produces an 18 DVD set which captures almost every attraction, show,
and hotel at the Walt Disney World resort. The volume of
consumers looking to experience this content is pretty small,
relatively speaking. So, Disney is very unlikely to produce this
kind of content. But, for a semi-pro, this is a great
opportunity. I'm sure that all of the semi-pros are doing it
because of a great passion, but they have found their niche market as
well. And there are millions of these niche markets out there,
and the internet and participation age are letting them explode.
Which brings me to one of my main points. Organizing and
presenting these three forms of content is still a huge problem.
The only way for me to look for this kind of content is to search - A
LOT. Or, by some fluke, viral marketing makes it known. I
would love for a service that could somehow take all of my interests
and scour the web looking for all these types of content and give me
options on how to consume it. There are nuggets of technology
that are starting to scratch the surface of the problem, but they still
have a long way to go. Not picking on Amazon, but I really don't
need to know about the greatest new teenage girl product because I
bought a relative a gift three years ago. Most things out there
today require me to be the initiator of the search, and that only works
if I know what I am searching for. The really great stuff is the
stuff that I don't know I am searching for.
Next, I will try to wrap this up with some thoughts on how the players
(see part 1) seem to be positioning themselves to solve the content and
three screens problem.
Posted at 10:52AM May 04, 2006 by dtwilleager in General |
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