Copyrighted material
 

Following on from Tomkat's thread about the closure of oink;

"What future do you see for entertainment media?"

Personally i see a bleak future for copyrighted material. In the future i see bandwith will continue to get cheaper and cheaper. This means that obtaining "information" (e.g. films / music / whatever) will become easier and easier*.

As such the entertainment industry will be forced to rely on "the experience factor".

Films will need to make their money at the cinema (where the experience of going will need to be emphasised).

TV shows will continue to remain interactive. Shows like Big Brother make some money from advertising but i believe they make the majority of their profits from the phone in (voting people off). Even after the recent phone-in competition scandal i see that format being used more and more in the coming years to fund "Entertainment TV". I believe ITV rely rather heavily on it for last years profits (even with an £8 million rebate to participants).

Premier Quality TV Shows have a bleak future in my opinion. Currently they rely on advertising but TV advertising will become obsolete in the not so distant future (15 years or so). That leaves subscription fees but really who's gonna pay to subscribe when a website will stream it to you moments after broadcast for "free". Personally i'd see these possibly going more interactive with multiple possible story arcs planned and people given the opportunity to vote (via phone / text in) to determine the outcome. Possibly money could also be made at managed "events". The shows serve to engage people about the characters. Trade events then offer the opportunity for the fans to meet the stars (and have their photo taken with them / autograph for a rather princely sum). Possibly a resurgence in plays (/musicals) will occur.

Music makers will make their money from performing not from song sales. Songs will just serve as an advertising function. A band who doesn't tour doesn't get paid.

Stories will eventually leave print media. This is a hard one for me to admit to as i want to become an author and be successful and be able to just laze around after publishing a few hit novels (:rolleyes:) but truly i see this as the way things will go. Novels haven't really existed for all that long (a few hundred years). In the past bards would go round telling stories "performing" for people. I see the interactive quality returning. I think that the stories people get involved with in the future will be game story lines. The most successful authors will be those who write for game companies. Games with an online , interactive, aspect to it (i.e. because normal games can be pirated but if you have people paying a subscription to play with other people then that's where the money will be made).

News will have embedded advertising in it (much like online sites such as The Onion do now). I appreciate that this is much as it is now but i feel that newspapers have already gone through their big lurch in having to deal with the new online world.

So in conclusion i see the future as a much more interactive place. I appreciate that i've not backed up my opinions with data. It's just the way i see things going.

So what about you?










*even if copright law still exists it will be easier to subsume as the (cost) barriers to setting up a share site will be lower meaning more people can do it

Re: Copywrited material
 

I think it'll simply shift from a sales model to a subscription model, with everything on-demand over tcp/ip

Re: Copywrited material
 

But once it becomes available to one person it effectively becomes free (that person takes the material and hosts it ... that person only has to pay hosting fees whereas the originator of the material has to pay production costs too. As such the pirate can undercut the producer making it difficult for the producer to turn a profit).

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Funny, cable tv companies dont seem to have a problem with the subscription model and making money. Granted the content also appears up online but its not stopping people from subscribing

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This is fine for pop music where there is a strong emphasis on touring, but how do you expect (eg) classical composers or producers of electronic music to earn money under this model?

I think a donation model is more likely when it comes to non-pop music to be honest; the devout fans of artists/bands are unlikely to feel comfortable continually leeching material without rewarding the creator.

Similarly, this is fine for mainstream hollywood films but how do you expect art-cinema to survive under this model where there is less emphasis on premieres and having a large number of cinemas in showing films during their first X months?

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I'm not saying that this is the way i wish the world to be, i'm saying this is the way i think the world will end up.

As for niche, non-performance related, music. I suspect what may happen (by which i mean the way i'd do it) is that said artiste will create music and gain something of a reputation (this could be after one piece). They'd then have a website listing all their music (which would be available elsewhere for free). They would then ask for donations to commission a piece. Once the fund got to a pre-set level they would compose the piece for their fans. Such composers could target specific benefactors (looking at the old King type model of a wealthy benefactor being associated with a particular artiste).

Now sure enough an artiste could just produce a piece of cack but that's not gonna get him future sponsorship now is it?! This way might even be better for music with musicians making good music all the time and no filler.

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I don't know the figures but does art cinema rely on DVD sales to be profitable? I don't know but i doubt it. I am prepared to be persuaded though.

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I've no idea offhand but I'd imagine so; if you want to watch a film by <some French/Hungarian/whatever director> then its unlikely there going to be a cinema near you showing it.

The whole performance-model only makes sense when it comes to media which is regularly performed

Re: Copywrited material
 

Nodrog, i'm not telling you how i want it to be but rather how i see things developing. You say "but that means X will not be able to survive" but you're not offering an alternative view of the future. Do you think that e.g. the state will intervene (via sponsorship) for minority tastes or what?

Re: Copywrited material
 

I agree with most of what you said, except this:

Only a few years ago, most people watched these shows live, with broadcasting companies making money by selling advertising time. We're now in the middle of a change, because more and more people illegally download shows instead.

The only real chance these shows have is by changing the medium through which they deliver. I expect legal sites to appear, offering the shows for free (quite possibly using BitTorrent), but with commercials. This way people can enjoy the flexibility of illegal downloads (you can watch whenever you want), while companies can continue making money, allowing shows to survive.

On a more subjective note, I intensely dislike your idea of interactive stories. There's a reason so few people are writers, and it's because most people would be incapable of writing a half-decent story if their life depended on it. Putting a lot of idiots in charge of something they know nothing about invariably ends in catastrophic failure.

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I agree with you that most people are idiots and couldn't / can't write. I mean interactive stories in the sense of the choose your own adventure style. The audience can't choose ANYTHING to happen. They can only choose one of two (maybe at a push 3) possible outcomes. Some of those outcomes can loop back in on themselves (to options which had previously been rejected). It also allows the companies to re-"televise" shows as the show itself could (and probably would) change each time.

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Hmm, fair point. The audience would never be given unlimited freedom to decide what should happen next.

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To the person who neg-repped me for the fact that i spelt copyrighted wrongly, fair play. I thought it looked wrong but i couldn't be arsed using a dictionary.


Could an admin type please change the spelling in the title please.

Re: Copywrited material
 

Printed media including books and stories: until decent digital paper arrives to the masses it's fine.
Music: as soon as they cut loose from big record labels and find new avenues the artists shouldn't starve.
TV shows: this is a tricky one because one can already receive streams of shows sans advertising on the internet and although i have no knowledge of the industry i'd suspect producers need a large capital influx to begin. it all depends on if a large enough proportion of the populous move away from their televisions to their computers. i can see university students doing so, but not families.

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I think you can do it yourself. On the OP, click edit, then advanced.

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Yes but if television companies did want to feign an infinite amount of possibilities they merely need to prepare the "lezz it up" option to account for around 85% of all possible requests.

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I missed this originally.

The changes i'm talking about aren't going to happen overnight. I'd say a more realistic time line would be 15 years. First it will be the music industry that goes tits up and then TV. When people realise they don't have to pay for stuff they're gonna stop doing it. That's why i feel such a big deal is being made of copyright protection at the moment by the big companies.

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A massive digital online book depository is being created. Decent digital paper isn't that far away either.


The University students of today are the families of tomorrow (hence my 15 year suggested lag time).

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Fair enough, but when I'm able to pay for something I appreciate through surplus cash I believe I will do so.

Also, I just remembered NBC freely stream the first series of Heroes (for US viewers) and as they gain the majority of their revenues from advertising the system seems to work as far as I can tell. As long as they have a robust enough network to cope with demain and don't go completely crazy with advertising I'd hypothoise most people would rather go to nbc.com/heroes or whatever it is rather than search pirate bay or search google for an active stream. I'm unsure how this will affect DVD sales though but then I don't know how important that is; where do they gain the most revenue, advertising or DVD sales.

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There'll still be a lot of DVD sales I'd say even if based purely on the fact that a large number of DVDs are given as presents and giving someone a bunch of ripped files from the internet says cheapskate a lot more than a boxset.

Re: Copyrighted material
 

All your ideas of how things would change are not only horrible but wrong.

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we already knew he was commitable

Re: Copyrighted material
 

My predictions.

1. There will be more private support for the arts in direct subsidies. This will either be in the form of private patronage (once you're bored with football teams, why not patronise a studio or two?). Even outside of billionaires, if you could buy a sports-car or help fund half a ultra low budget art house movie then....well, it'd depend on you. Either would probably help you pick up chicks at any rate.

How the donation/subscription model works with the rest of the population depends on how affluent people remain. In theory, micro-payments will continue to become more established and transaciton costs will slowly be driven down. If I donated the change in my pocket to whichever band I was listening to most in a day, then I wouldn't notice much effect on my standard of living, but I'd be transferring at least £500 a year (compared to the one CD I've bought in the last x years). But right now it's not convenient to transfer my money magically to VNV Nation or NOFX or whomever. So it goes to the first homeless person who asks for it. Fair dues.

But this presumes people have the money to give. If people's incomes are reduced in the long run in real terms by rising health care costs of housing costs or taxation (insert your social costs here) then perhaps it will only be the very affluent who could affort to give on a sizable level?

2. The costs of movie making will continue to fragment. Technology exerts a downward pressure on a lot of costs - and I can't imagine that decent voice synchronisation is more than a couple of decades away. Once that occurs, if you combined it with a flexible game engine type environment then you'd practically reduce the barrier to entry for film-making to nil (or rather free-time and a computer). This would mean 99.99% of everything produced on this medium would be dross, but that's not far off the average of other production methods. Of course, there will be enormous bias against such "amateur" efforts, and much like even today animated TV shows are seen in some circles as still inferior, you'll get a lot of elitist faggotry for a while.

3. Corporations will increase their support of the arts as indirect marketing. I don't mean simply by making advertising, but by (say) funding a series of short-movies. Corporate censorship is a potential risk, but ignoring that, imagine how much it would cost to make, say, 10 short very low budget movies? Well, Vodafone probably spend that a day on 10 second TV spots. And for large sections of the population, advertising is increasingly ineffective - much better to fund things which people like. Orange's association with movies is a good example of this. I can only see this growing especially when one considers how expensive traditional advertising space is.

4. The big hype movies will still exist, but they will reliant on multiple revenue streams (which in turn will rely on more hype). For example, a friend of mine must have at least three hundred pounds worth of Lord of the Rings tat. Of course there's the box set (sorry, box sets) but that's actually only a small minority of the expenditure. There's models, accompanying books, paintings, jewellery and so on. And yes, he downloaded LOTR on bit-torrent as soon as it came out, but since it simply served as a long advertising for him, why would anyone object?

Re: Copyrighted material
 

I agree with dante on two points in particular. As soon as someone devises a way to pay that's as easy as pressing a key on your mobile phone to give directly to an artist revenue streams will increase for artists. If large media companies remain (I'm not really sure if they will or not but then I'm biased against this kind of centralisation so I'm looking at things in an idealistic way) they will probably increase patronage as positive association with the arts can't be that different from advertisement's current association between attractive man/woman and product; this particularly applies if Jessie Jackson's recent calls to use your currency to enact change catches on.

Re: Copyrighted material
 

direct payment will in a way no doubt increase. you all can be rather dramatic about it however.

Ignorance in the past bred into the generation above us a sort of perverse utopia of individualism. allow me to explain:

Yes technology will allow for direct "to artist" payments but think rationally. Who as an artist would 'cash every cheque'? Observe every transaction. Maintain the website. Enforce faulty payment. Defend against fraud. Or even pay the requisite tax? Would each artist design their own posters? Make their own media statements?

While I enjoy the noble ideals of youth; what you miss is understanding the value of interdependancy. We are all connected and dependents upon each other. There is no inherent evil in record labels.

Instead you need to view every exchange of money as a chain. If there is a link too many then in time the market will correct itself. The delay period in which we await that change need not be thought about in moral terms.

Re: Copyrighted material
 

It's not about destroying the needed bureaucracy but restructuring it so the artist controls it through retention of copyright.

Record labels are evil due to their confiscation of copyright and contractual power. I am not advocating artists also become experts in marketing and law but have the power to make executive decisions if they need to do so.

All ideals and later realisations were once young you uppity shit.

Re: Copyrighted material
 

then i think you need to understand value

Re: Copyrighted material
 

happily i dont see e-books ever becomming better than holding a book in your hands.

like a painting, its first and best format is on an organic material, that has texture and solidity.

Re: Copyrighted material
 

You mean like electronic paper?

Re: Copyrighted material
 

I expect we're going to have a centralised artist donation system at some point, perhaps something like myspace (lol) but with the ability to donate to people making music you like. Use your imagination; a donation model doesnt necessarily entail people sending cheques through the post or every musician/band having to implement a system on their own.

Re: Copyrighted material
 

So in 20 years time will the l33t item by the ibook?

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aside from the fact that donation models never work and are hardly 'new' in any sense my point remains that any system will require the involvement of others

Re: Copyrighted material
 

This is not true. Two topical musical examples would be OiNK and Radiohead. More institutional examples are busking and tipping in general, not to mention charity.


Noone has claimed otherwise. The question is to what extent large record labels are necessary.

Re: Copyrighted material
 

just think about what you've typed.

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Do you know what I think would be useful? A way of reading digital text using a computer but on a format that is not as ridged as laptop screens are at the moment.

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Re: Copyrighted material
 

I like books :( why would you want to replace them

"If it aint broke dont fix it"

Re: Copyrighted material
 

You know what else aint broke? Not having computers. Not posting on these forums. Being two years old.

Re: Copyrighted material
 

touché

Re: Copyrighted material
 

Wouldn't a battery operated book be rather inconveniant though? Would you be able to download other books into your book? What if the book is longer than you digital books, microscopic writing?

Or is it just one page that keeps being refreshed?

Re: Copyrighted material
 

Well, it's just a sheet on which you can put anything you want, so presumeably books would be two of those plus a binding/power source.

Re: Copyrighted material
 

I confidently predict that newspapers will be extinct within the next thirty years, and if there's any justice in the world, then television (at least in the form we recognise) will go the same way.

Re: Copyrighted material
 

A read a while back (on slashdot probably) a Canadian firm created some quite impressive "digital paper". Not heard about it since.