Entertainment, It's Service, It's Future

Entertainment will always be a service, so treating it as a product sacrifices the integrity of the content and the experience of the audience. The Internet and similar recent technologies have placed the mass media industries in a current state of turmoil, with top executives at major television and motion picture production companies losing their jobs left and right due to their inability to continue to capitalize on their market as they had in the past – but this is nothing new. Barrett Garese, founder of Spytap Industries, which specializes in online business development and social media, stated in his most famous essay, “disruptive technologies always put people out of work…temporarily.” He cites the automobile industry destroying the horse drawn carriage industry, but that “the smart ones adapted their businesses or skillsets, and the others went away.” So looking at these revolutions in entertainment from stage to screen, print to radio, cinema to the home television, and now everything to the internet, the business models need to adapt; not the content creators.

In all of these scenarios, no industry has completely disappeared – they have just reestablished their niche in a changing environment. But the film and television industry has not been able to do so despite their complete recognition of this recursive phenomenon. NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker said that “the industry has gone through more change in the past five years than it has in the previous 50,” and CEO of the independent finance company Film Department, Mark Gill, agrees similarly that “there’s been more change in the last 18 months than in the preceding 18 years.” In the past, major studios and networks controlled the content and distribution of the dominating entertainment, but this is no longer the case.

In film before the 1980s, to be entertained you needed to go to a specific venue at a specific time and pay a specific price all determined by a small group of companies. With home video, you still needed to wait a specific amount of time to buy a specific product for a specific price but you could now view it at your own leisure at home. For television, you needed to tune in to a certain channel at a certain time, or perhaps wait until it could be purchased on home video or DVD. As Garese explained, the business model was based on “scarcity of product; either physical product scarcity or timed scarcity.” But with Internet downloads and streaming, scarcity ceases to exist. Even films still in theaters, and sometimes prior to release as well as television shows from all time periods, are available at any time and place to the consumer – and that last part is exactly the problem. The audience is considered a consumer, and the content created for them is considered a product.

When people went to the theater for the premier performances of Shakespeare’s plays, they weren’t paying for popcorn, bonbons, and over-sized cokes. They were paying for the service of being emotionally, psychologically, and physiologically aroused through the shared experience of the audience and performers. Entertainment is an innate human capacity that has only changed technologically. Sociability is the most basic human instinct that let us progress culturally beyond any species on Earth, so it is no surprise that it continues to fuel our entertainment today. It’s the same as the tribal dance or the reenactment of a successful hunt when we were nomadic cave dwellers. It’s a way of taking a personal emotion or experience and sharing it with the group in order to learn from and bond with your fellows. We enjoy this act so immensely because for tens of thousands of years it groomed us for survival – whether it be a story to learn to succeed or to learn how not to fail. Entertainment and the happiness is brings are services to our psyche, they are not a product you can buy as so many artists, musicians, and philosophers have pleaded for centuries.

Creating something that the largest possible audience can appreciate and share with one another is true entertainment success, regardless of the medium. It’s easy to use James Cameron’s Avatar as an example – because it was physiologically and emotionally arousing through its stunning visuals, but more importantly it was the most watched and talked about feature film in a long while. But how about the most viewed youtube video of all time – Charlie bit my finger – which has been viewed over 170 million times. It’s less then a minute long, the visual quality barely rivals a cell phone camera, but nearly everybody has joked about it with friends. The under looked aspect of entertainment has always been camaraderie.

Slumdog Millionaire is a perfect example of how corporate Hollywood’s ignorance of this camaraderie and perception of their content as a product is destroying them. The story was universally relatable and emotionally stimulating, but when screened to Warner Brothers executives, they turned down the offer to distribute the film theatrically. Thinking it could not sell well, they proposed printing it straight to DVD. So the producers went with Fox Searchlight, an Independent Film company that looks at acquiring just this niche of films that are seen as bigger risks but have compelling stories that deserve to be seen shared with the world. And we all know what happened – it made back over twelve times its production budget and won the Academy Award for best picture. Steve Hickner, animator and feature film director, told me it’s because Hollywood has become an industry based on “no.” He said that those Warner Brothers executives might have kicked themselves in regret, but at the end of the day they still had jobs. He went on to say that the person who may no longer have a job is the person who said “yes” to a film like Gigli or All About Steve.

Jon Horn, Ben Fritz, and Rachel Abramowitz wrote an article last October about this executive firing ‘horror show’ saying that “film lovers may not rejoice, but it might buy the studio chiefs some job security.” Coming next July to a theater near you will be Transformers 3, and films based off the ViewMaster toy and the board game Battleship. And in development are projects based on Legos, the video game Asteroids, and the toy Stretch Armstrong. As hopeful as one could be that Stretch is a rich, deep, relatable character whose compelling plight can be collectively enjoyed by us all, it does not matter – because his toy after the release will pay off any blockbuster blunder. The ‘creators,’ and not artists, behind these films care more about the bottom line than their own artistic integrity. And Pixar’s film Cars, its only critically bashed film in the company’s history, is getting a sequel because how could one possibly pass up a second opportunity to sell more toy cars than Hotwheels?

Enough bashing the poor decisions and lack of trust in artists by the big guys on top, what can they do to adapt their business model? It’s as simple as changing the equation from churning out a product to sell the consumer, into creating content that sells themselves to the consumer – simply put, reestablishing themselves as service providers. Jason Kilar, the genius behind Amazon.com and Hulu, said, “shows are the brands users care about, not the networks that air them.” When Chuck Salter featured Kilar in an article, this was Kilar’s response to the question of why Hulu, a site “owned by NBC and Fox allows you to search for, say, CSI:Miami – and then provide links to take you to the CBS site?” It’s because Hulu wanted to be the online authority on streaming videos, so they needed to provide the consumer with whatever they wanted – the customer is always right.

A majority of income for the entertainment industry today is advertisement revenue – and this is another system that Hulu has redesigned for the changing atmosphere. They limit their commercials for a half hour show to two minutes, rather than the television eight-minute model. But not only do viewers get a quarter of the entertainment disturbances as television, they can choose when to watch the adds, and give a thumbs up or thumbs down to personalize what they see over time. At the same time, this is increasing the advertisement rates by 50-100% per thousand viewers as compared to broadcast television. Essentially, Hulu has created a two-way street for optimization by both parties – consumers get more of what they want with less commercial time, and because they provide demographic information upon registering with the site, the advertisers also get more accurate and valuable market research through feedback. As Kilar explained, “customers won’t tell you what they want, but their behavior will tell you if you capture and analyze it.”

This advertisement adaptation is the first of many that will drive an overall change in the corporate entertainment business model – but still the most important step is reestablishing each entertainment platform’s niche. Because of Hulu and similar websites, along with home televisions capable of connecting to this content directly, the television and Internet media industries will have the toughest battle. Both thrive off of the viewers’ constantly increasing ability of control – and people love being in control of themselves. Television began to thrive on an aspect of flow – shows the lead into each other well with advertisements targeted to their audience, in an attempt to keep the viewer on one channel for as long as possible. But there were always multiple channels, then came remote controls, and cable, satellite, pay-per-view, DVRs, and the list goes on. Because it lacks the participatory culture of a large cinema audience, viewers’ participation and connectivity to the content is routed in their ability to control what they watch.

Outside of Internet-based television programming, the personal computer still has a much more immense capacity for control through constant and immediate interactivity – gaming, applications, and ‘choose your adventure’ style narratives are only the beginnings. Computer programming and web scripting will continue, as it has, to become more and more interactive and ergonomic. And with so much more collected information about its users behavioral relationship to its content, users are directed to more of what they want more efficiently. If television wants the same big-bucks advertisement revenue it once had, it needs to go back to it’s original niche – event programming. People used to tune in at a certain time to a certain channel to see that new episode of their favorite TV show. However, scripted programming is no longer an event because of the flexibility and immediacy of the Internet. The highest watched shows today are live reality programming like American Idol or So You Think You Can Dance, and major sporting events like the Super Bowl or March Madness even out perform them.

And the film industry is suffering not only because its content is displayed on the two aforementioned formats, but also because it no longer provides as unique of an experience. The cinema has always been a spectacle, a big show, and despite the over-flattery, an almost circus or carnival. The screen is huge, the sound is incredible, and large groups of people immediately respond to the entertainment alongside each other. But home theater systems are huge high-definition screens, with surround sound, and a website like RottenTomatoes will tell you exactly what the rest of the audience feels about it. But thankfully, the cinema has a new secret weapon – 3D. It’s not the blue and red anaglyph glasses our parents wore, its scientifically designed to enhance the viewing experience. Cameras with dual lenses shoot alternate views for each eye in exactly the same way we see the world. As David Zaslav put it, chief executive of Discovery Communications, “3D is bound to gain attention because consumers and producers are always striving for what looks ‘closest to real life.’” And in Japan, theaters are already experimenting with ‘4D,’ where the films include smells, wind, vapor, and even seats that slightly stimulate the viewer physiologically. It may sound cheesy now, but experimentation is the only way to improve the viewer’s experience – and these kinds of technologies will appear in theaters long before your home TV or computer.

In all of these respective media niches, the message remains the same – they provide unique services to the audience. As soon as that service gets systematized into a product, the audience will be disinterested – good entertainment will sell itself. As much as we would like to think that the human race is special, we are still all animals – and animals survive off of mutual altruism amongst their species, flock, school, or pride. For humans, entertainment grew from sociability routed in a form of mutual altruism. We entertained each other with stories and they helped us survive by sharing our knowledge and experiences with one another, because a group is only as strong as it’s weakest link. The entertainment that will continue to prosper will be the entertainment that shows and tells us something new, something vital, something real, and is universally experienced in the same innate capacity that it grew from.



Works Cited:

Garese, Barrett. “Scarcity, Experience, And A New Seat At An Old Table.” [weblog entry.] Barret Garese’s Weblog. July 2009. (http://www.barrettgarese.com/post/141270170/scarcity-experience-and-a-new-seat-at-an-old-table)

Graser, Marc. “Digital Format Adopted: Studios, retailers aim for ‘buy once, play anywhere plan.” Variety 4 January 2010.

Horn, John, Ben Fritz, and Rachel Abramowitz. “Hollywood Studios in Midst of Their Own Horror Show.” Los Angeles Times 6 October 2009.

Salter, Chuck. “Can Hulu Save Traditional TV?” Fastcompany.com/magazine. FastCopmany, 1 December 2009.

Stelter, Brian, and Brad Stone. “Television Begins a Push Into the 3rd Dimension.” New York Times 5 January 2010.