Category Archives: The Mediascape

Short film is dead. Long live web series!

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I have made over 40 short films.

Today, to me, making a short is like painting a picture in the park on a Sunday afternoon. Pleasant, but unchallenging.

With this in mind, I recently read an old posting by Mike Jones at No Film School.

In it he argues that the short film is dead.

“There are two ways of looking at how a Short Film serves the emerging and aspiring filmmaker. The first is as a Learning Exercise, the second is as a Calling Card.”

He then proceeds to debunk both beliefs and concludes:

“As with many long-entrenched elements of filmmaking, the tradition of the short film needs to be let go of and seen as the antiquated anomaly it is; a tool of a bygone era. A good short film can be great work of art but emerging and aspiring filmmakers need much more than a short work of art to build a career. The short-format, online, episodic webseries is the most dynamic, audience-driven, self-publicising, learning vehicle indie filmmakers (in film school or not) have ever had access to.“

My take: I’m warming up to this idea. I’ve been toying with a concept that could be realized as a dozen episodes. 2016 will be a great year for me to launch it! Stay tuned!

Media empires in Canada

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ClutchPR has published a fascinating infographic on the concentration of media ownership in Canada.

Their self-admitted non-exhaustive list is Toronto and Ontario-centric but nevertheless does a great job of illustrating various TV, Radio and Print media empires.

The companies listed are:

  • TorStar (Toronto Star, Hamilton Spectator, Waterloo Region Record, Guelph Mercury, versions of commuter paper Metro in Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Halifax, and 116 community papers)
  • Woodbridge (Globe and Mail, Thomson Reuters)
  • Postmedia (Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Regina Leader-Post, Vancouver Sun and Windsor Star, in addition to tabloid Sun family: Toronto Sun and others in Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, Winnipeg and Vancouver’s The Province, magazine Financial Post Business and Canada.com)
  • Rogers (Rogers TV, OMNI, Shopping Channel, OLN, Sportsnet and City, SVOD player Shomi (which it co-owns with Shaw,) 53 radio stations, including 680 News, Kiss 92.5 and 98.1 CHFI, plus magazines Canadian Business, Chatelaine, Maclean’s, Today’s Parent, Marketing, Flare, Glow and Hello! Canada)
  • Bell (CTV and CTV News, CP24, MUCH, Bravo, Comedy Network, Space, E! and HBO Canada, radio stations NewsTalk 1010, TSN Radio, 104.5 CHUM-FM and 999 Virgin Radio and Sympatico.ca)
  • Newcap (all but two radio stations in Newfoundland, 22 in Alberta and Toronto’s Flow 93.5 and Boom 97.3)
  • Shaw (Global Television Network, along with BBC Canada, Food Network, History, HGTV, Showcase and Slice, among other stations)
  • Corus (YTV, Teletoon, Treehouse, and Canadian versions of Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Disney channel, W network, Oprah Winfrey Network Canada and 80 percent of Cosmopolitan TV, radio stations Talk Radio AM 640, 102.1 The Edge and Q107)
  • Zoomer (Zoomer Radio 740AM and Classical 96, and TV stations Vision and One)
  • Quebecor (Le Journal de Montréal, Le Journal de Québec, TVA Group, Vidéotron and TVA Publishing)
  • CBC (CBC and CBC News networks, and CBC Radio 1, 2 and 3, other assets including Radio Canada International and 40 per cent of Sirius Canada)
  • APTN, TVO and VICE

My take: it looks like only a dozen or so companies own the vast majority of media outlets in Canada. What’s missing from this list is Internet Connectivity: Bell, Rogers and Shaw also control the bulk of that.

Mobile is where it’s going

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Benedict Evans of Andreessen Horowitz asserts that “mobile is the future of technology and of the internet” in his year-end review 16 mobile theses.

A sample:

“We should stop talking about ‘mobile’ internet and ‘desktop’ internet – it’s like talking about ‘colour’ TV, as opposed to black and white TV. We have a mental mode, left over from feature phones, that ‘mobile’ means limited devices that are only used walking around. But actually, smartphones are mostly used when you’re sitting down next to a laptop, not ‘mobile’, and their capabilities make them much more sophisticated as internet platforms than PC. Really, it’s the PC that has the limited, cut-down version of the internet.”

The topics he covers are:

  1. Mobile is the new central ecosystem of tech
  2. Mobile is the internet
  3. Mobile isn’t about small screens and PCs aren’t about keyboards – mobile means an ecosystem and that ecosystem will swallow ‘PCs’
  4. The future of productivity
  5. Microsoft’s capitulation
  6. Apple & Google both won, but it’s complicated
  7. Search and discovery
  8. Apps and the web
  9. Post Netscape, post PageRank, looking for the next run-time
  10. Messaging as a platform, and a way to get customers
  11. The unclear future of Android and the OEM world
  12. Internet of Things
  13. Cars
  14. TV and the living room
  15. Watches
  16. Finally, we are not our users

Regarding search and discovery, Benedict says, “The internet makes it possible to get anything you’ve ever heard of but also makes it impossible to have heard of everything.”

We moved from browsing to search but today how do the iOS and Android platforms affect discoverability? Is there still room for curation? He ends with the age-old question: “How do you get users?”

Regarding the next ‘run-time’ he says,

“Really, we’re looking for a new run-time – a new way, after the web and native apps, to build services. That might be Siri or Now or messaging or maps or notifications or something else again. But the underlying aim is to construct a new search and discovery model – a new way, different to the web or app stores, to get users.”

Hear Benedict in this presentation.

My take: It’s been a dozen years since video first appeared on the Internet. Since then, the mediascape has been in transition. I admit I find it more faceted and confusing than ever. Benedict’s summary illustrates some of the fundamental shifts now taking place.

The Most Technologically Advanced Book Ever Published

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Chuck Salter writes in FastCoDesign about a publishing company that continues to innovate in the personal book field.

First came ‘The Girl Who Lost Her Name’ and ‘The Boy Who Lost His Name’. Now comes ‘The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home’.

“This time, a lost boy or girl navigates his or her way from outer space back home. Spoiler alert: to the reader’s actual home. The wayward space ship swoops into his or her city and arrives in the child’s neighborhood. The image, the book’s big reveal, incorporates the corresponding satellite photos. That degree of personalization required even more algorithms and developers than Lost My Name’s first book, along with help from NASA, Microsoft, satellite makers, and other unlikely children’s book partners.”

The creators are Lost My Name of East London. What a wondrous book and a steal at $30.

My take: I love this concept and the marvellous execution! (The new book does remind me slightly of Arcade Fire‘s Chrome Experiment, The Wilderness Downtown, which may or may not be still working.) Now imagine this in the video realm. I see no reason, with the state of CGI, digital production and online streaming, that my likeness could not be inserted into productions and animated, for my entertainment only. Maybe not in real-time initially and probably not voice. But imagine your own channel on Netflix, starring or co-starring you! That might be fun.

Issues in digitizing history

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Fast Company recently published The Trouble with Digitizing History.

Tina Amirtha claims “The Netherlands spent seven years and $202 million to digitize huge swaths of AV archives that most people will never see.”

She interviews Tom de Smet, head archivist of the Sound and Vision Institute, and Gene DeAnna, acting chief of the recorded sound section at the Library of Congress’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center.

‘”It doesn’t make sense to digitize everything,” de Smet says in his office at Sound and Vision. “You have ask yourself, ‘Who are you doing this for?’” Researchers may be interested in a narrow set of media, while the public may prefer a skim of the archives. “Honestly, only a little bit of the funding should go towards digitization and the rest, towards digital preservation,” says de Smet.’

The problems are many:

  • high costs
  • limited copyright clearances
  • indexing and meta-tagging needs for search retrieval
  • differing audiences: researchers and general public
  • media platform choices: in-house hosting or Youtube

Future considerations include:

  • securing pre-licenses to kick in after 25 years
  • donations of lesser known works by media companies

A major concern is that, over time, systems impose technological barriers to access. For instance, who still has a U-matic deck or even a VHS player?

My take: this is the paradox of the modern information age: whereas paper-based documents can last hundreds of years, digital works may be corrupt within a decade and obsolete within two decades. Is digital a Faustian bargain?

Legacy media companies face dilemmas

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Richard Greenfield from BTIG Research recently asked “Can Netflix Be Stopped? If Not, What Can Legacy Media Do?” at Neuehouse, NYC, on November 23, 2015.

His entertaining half hour overview of the modern mediascape and the dilemmas the TV industry faces is highly insightful.

Well worth watching; here are three takeaways:

  1. The problem is not so much the content but the medium used to distribute it. The TV model, even TV Everywhere, is losing dominance.
  2. In addition, viewers are simply turning away from interruption advertising any way they can.
  3. Viewers are moving their monthly video dollars from Cable TV to Subscription Video on Demand services, like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Now and Showtime.

My take: Richard even predicts an ad-free future in which most if not all content is paid by subscription. See his take on the future for film companies.

Portrait mode video lures advertisers

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Even though a mock Vertical Video Syndrome PSA first appeared in 2012, it seems as if portrait mode video is making a big splash.

According to Snapchat (as quoted in Long Considered an Eyesore, Vertical Video Is Now Being Embraced by Mobile Marketers on Entrepreneur),

“Vertical video ads are nine times more likely to be viewed to completion than their horizontal counterparts.”

There’s even a platform dedicated exclusively to vertical videos. Vervid plans to become the Youtube for “thoughtful content” shot in upright mode on iPhones. They write on Medium:

“We hold our phones vertically 90% of the time. Thanks to Snapchat and now Meerkat and Periscope, this behavior is becoming even more normalized as more and more content is being shot natively in portrait mode. So rather than having to constantly switch between how we naturally hold our phones (vertically) to the way most media has traditionally been formatted (horizontally), users are now able to enjoy content the way they’ve secretly always wanted to — upright, up close and personal.”

My take: even though purists might decry this state of affairs, I think it’s only a natural evolution. Consider that over 50% of Youtube views now come from mobile. Those mobile viewers will gladly watch in portrait orientation, saving themselves the time to rotate their phones horizontally. And though almost all movies are shot using horizontal aspect ratios, Xavier Dolan went 1:1 for Mommy!

The CBC joins with Fullscreen

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“Evolve or die,” says the CBC‘s executive director of multi-platform media sales Mary Kreuck, when it comes to digital strategies.

To that end, on September 23, 2015, the CBC announced a partnership with Fullscreen, one of the largest Youtube multi-channel networks. As an MCN, Fullscreen provides services to its 70,000 individual creators, such as Rooster Teeth, Fine Brothers Entertainment and shane.

The CBC | Fullscreen Creator Network will be a new way for advertisers to connect with millennial audiences. As Mary said,

“What are we offering? Custom content created for your brands, developed with your brand, its use by key influencers, and amplified across multi-media. So the result then is endless possibilities in a safe and proven environment.”

Read their media releases here and here.

My take: the CBC wants to remain relevant to their advertisers and to Canadian millennials. Recognizing that they have little expertise in the mobile video arena (and other online outlets such as Twitter, Snapchat, Vine, Instagram, etc.) they are partnering with Fullscreen and inserting themselves as an ‘agent’ for all of Fullscreen’s Canadian creators. In addition, the CBC might be hoping to “up-level” at least one of the Canadian Youtubers to network television. (Not sure, though, how this fits into Fullscreen’s plans to launch a mobile SVOD service later this year.) I’ve got to admit, I’m a little confused about what’s in this for the Canadian-based creators in Fullscreen’s stable. Maybe more subscribers? The Internet sort of erases distance and borders, so nationality is just not a big factor to them.

The improv branch of the new media tree

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Nick Fortugno, CCO & Co-Founder at Playmatics, and Lance Weiler, Director at Columbia University Digital Storytelling Lab, recently presented at Power to the Pixel, in London, England.

Nick began by reading a manifesto of sorts that concluded with:

“I stand here with the resolve that this is an amazing time to be a storyteller and we collectively hold a unique opportunity to innovate the industry we would like to see.”

They reiterated the necessity of story at the heart of innovation and then led the audience/collaborators in a story/creation of Sherlock Holmes & the Internet of Things.

The session was recorded: the pair present for the first half of the video and then launch into the simulation/group activity at 16:30.

Read about it on Hackpad.

My take: this seems to me to be an elaborate improv game. More of a parlour entertainment than a sit-back experience. I think that’s their point — the definition of media and audience is expanding.

57 million channels (and nothin’ on)

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The excellent CMF Trends welcomes Barbara Chazelle of France Télévisions with a guest post titled TV / video: finding content still as challenging as ever.

Referencing Ericsson’s TV and Media 2015 report, she says:

“Half the linear TV viewers questioned confirmed that they “can’t find anything to watch on TV at least once a day.” The figure climbs to 62% for those 35 to 54. Once in front of the screen, 40% viewers still turn to the TV guide, with only 29% of those satisfied with what they find.”

Moreover:

“Those consuming non-linear TV are equally dissatisfied with what they’re finding when it comes to content. Many feel that the current crop of recommendation features is neither intelligent nor personal enough to meet their needs, to surprise or inspire them in their choices.”

The full Ericsson report is worth reading as a global yardstick with which to measure the Canadian experience.

My take: this reminds me of Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice. Does too much choice paralyze you? When it comes to your media, would you prefer curated suggestions, so you can maximize the ‘lean back experience’ after work?