Having spent most of my career trying to educate media companies from the inside about the effects that disruptive technologies will have on the future of our business, I’ve long thought about the changing patterns of consumption. This report from Morgan Stanley doesn’t repeat anything new, or tell us anything we haven’t heard before from either other reports or casual conversations with youth.
But it’s still an important reminder that even though we can easily be pulled into the cultural zeitgeist of a phenomenom like Twitter, it’s still important to place things in the right context. Certainly there is much to be impressed with about what Twitter has been able to accomplish, but one thing it hasn’t accomplished, which is echoed in this report, is modify the behavior of teens.
What’s amazing to consider for those folks in media who cling to the holy box is just how disruptive things like the iPhone will be on future consumption behaviors. A quick scan of YouTube will find lots of videos of toddlers and babies watching TV on their parent’s iPhone – even knowing how to navigate. It should be painfully clear that a child who grows up with not only vastly different understanding of “tangible” – what average teen today cares about buying CDs – and who grows up using devices like the iPhone as a primary interface for viewing video will most certainly not look at the “box” in the same way.
The most interesting thing will be when we, as programmers, really start to program to these new devices. Right now we’re still just repurposing TV content on other devices. The internet does work very well as a distribution medium, and certainly Hulu shows this well; however, there is so much more power in the internet for programmers than just as a distribution medium.
What happens to programming when you’re no longer just pushing linear time based stories over a simulcast network. What happens when you’re creating narrative environments in a multicast network where every viewer is addressable as an individual? What will “stories” look like in the future? Just as advancements in editing and filming technology changed the types of stories filmmakers were able to tell – evolving from single stationary cameras will little to no editing to what we see today – we, as storytellers, should be very excited about embracing the internet as more than a distrubtion medium, but as an environment that will enable us to tell stories in ways that we’ve never been able to before.
