Apple Shows Television's Future

Now that Apple has convincingly demonstrated that there is a market for pay-for-download TV, might we start to see entertainment industry types act a little more proactively for once instead of whining endlessly about piracy and lost revenues? Every dollar in additional income brought in by the sale of a TV show on iTunes represents almost pure gain on the present status quo, as the cost of re-encoding shows in H.264 format is essentially zero - a single top-of-the-line G5 machine could do the necessary work in a day - while Apple bears the marginal cost of additional bandwidth, and even that could be cut to essentially nothing with the adoption of Bittorrent-like protocols.

The future of television is clear to see - ours is going to be a one-world, one time-zone planet, with the market segmentation and foreign syndication schemes of the past relegated to the dustbin. The TV shows of tomorrow will have few to no advertising breaks, and the revenue loss will be made up partly by explicitly charging for each show, and partly by ever more visible product placement on behalf of companies, with firms wishing to establish a global image underwriting the biggest international hits, and others looking to cultivate niche markets targeting more locally-oriented or specialist fare; TV production companies which were formerly content to cultivate their domestic audiences will wake up to the fact that their content is often compelling to a far larger viewing population than they'd been used to considering, and aficionados of non-English-language TV who currently have to make do with fansubs of shows like "Tokyo Love Story" and "Winter Sonata" will flock to pay for timely, professionally-translated, high-availability downloads of all the shows they know and love. Contrary to the gloomy imaginings of the instinctively protectionist and culturally insecure elites of nations like France, the advent of this new paradigm will not lead to a homogenization and Americanization (which is, by definition, "evil") of global culture, but an unprecedented and breathtaking increase in the diversity of viewing material that will be available to audiences which have formerly had to make do with sheltered and unimaginative local fare, and I'll even venture to say that the biggest long-term winners from this shift will not be the big bad wolves of Hollywood, but all those content creators in places like Korea, Japan and India whose vibrant domestic entertainment industries have as yet been unable to find a home in a West in which it is (wrongly, I believe) taken for granted that audiences will not be able to relate to shows about other human beings who happen not to share their language, religion and skin color. These predictions of mine are by no means as bold as they might appear, as seeing Indian movies and Brazilian shows on TV is already as much a part of growing up in Africa as is watching the latest Michael Bay offering, while Latin American broadcasters have been airing Korean shows for a few years now.

Having laid out this glorious vision, I will concede that there are likely to be quite a few losers from the new dispensation, only they won't be who the typical advocate of entertainment protectionism would guess them to be: it won't be Nigerian "Nollywood"* entrepreneurs and Hispanic telenovela-crafters who'll fare badly, but the stodgy and heavily subsidised public broadcasters of Europe, who rob millions of ordinary citizens to produce "enlightening" and "thought-provoking" [sic] fare those they tax would never willingly watch on their own, as the failure to materialize of the prophecies of "Disneyfication" being made on their behalf by statist politicians along with their content's ever-diminishing share of the viewing audience will make ever clearer just how little justification there is for subsidized broadcasting.

[Via Slashdot.]

*By the way, is it too late for me to extend a marriage offer to Geneviève Nnaji? I think I'm starstruck.

PS: The Korean Wave is even bigger than I suggested above, as it is already washing unto shores as far afield as Hawaii, Turkey, and even Egypt and Nigeria. Those who insist that America's large domestic audience ensures that its domestic productions will always win out over all else are expressing nothing more than their lack of faith in the vitality of their own culture - which I suppose is somewhat justified in a culturally moribund place like today's France, but far from being the case in the rest of the world where swinishly feeding off the public trough in perpetuity isn't mistaken for a birthright by artists and entertainers.

Comments

[Factory]

Hmm if we were to move away from a world of broadcasting as the main method of delivery, the most notable change, IMHO, would be length of the shows. 'Seasons' of TV shows are fitted around broadcasting schedules, whilst if you are selling it direct to customers, this restriction is removed. They'll prolly become more like eposodic movies, or direct to video movie series.

[Factory]

"but the stodgy and heavily subsidised public broadcasters of Europe,"
Hmm I believe the European movie industries also recieve a level of subsidies, so without a change in the overall philosophy of subsidising cultural works, the subsidies will just shift from the broadcast industries.

[Abiola Lapite]

"Hmm I believe the European movie industries also recieve a level of subsidies"

Yes, and look how many Europeans voluntarily go to watch the damn things; if there weren't so many pretentious film-school types about, I doubt most of Europe's subsidized fare would have any audience whatsoever ...

One has only to compare the virtually nonexistent presence of French cinema and TV in the English-speaking world ("Amelie" notwithstanding) with the longstanding success of Hong Kong's movie industry to see what a difference an atmosphere of free competition can make - no government underwrote the success of John Woo, Jackie Chan or Chow Yun-Fat, and Hong Kong's domestic market is tiny (the Chinese mainland is a free-piracy zone which doesn't count).

[dof]

"virtually nonexistent presence of French cinema"

Arguably, most French product reaches the american public through remakes, sometimes comparable to the original: Three Men and a Baby, usually not as good: Point of No Return (Nikita), Sommersby (Le Retour de Martin Guerre) and sometimes disastrous : Pure Luck (La Chevre).

[Abiola Lapite]

Although that would suggest France isn't entirely devoid of creative talent on the conceptual/writing side, it hardly speaks well of native French production quality that Americans see the need to remake everything they do where they don't for other foreign content: "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" raked in $60 million [actually, make that $100 million] in the US box-office despite being subtitled, and Benigni's "Life is Beautiful" did nearly as well, while subtitled Hong Kong movies and Japanese anime do well routinely enough that it's no longer worth noting; one would think France with its much greater cultural similarity to the United States would be able to do at least as well as Hong Kong or Japan in the entertainment export business, but evidently state subsidies and quotas have so dulled the local talent's ability to create material audiences find universally appealing that the only way worthy ideas from France reach the outside world is through remakes.

The saddest thing about this whole mess is that France actually once used to be a contender in the global film business, second only to the United States, before politicians animated by statist paternalism and cultural xenophobia began handing out quotas and subsidies like so many sweets at a kid's party.

http://reason.com/9807/fe.cowen.shtml

[dof]

Actually, the American remake fetish extends to all foreign films, not just the French:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/07/01/korcine.DTL

[Abiola Lapite]

I'm not saying other foreign films and TV shows never get remade - "Survivor" and "American Idol" are hardly original US inventions, after all - the point is that apart from "Amelie", there aren't *any* French films which have done well in America in recent years without being remade.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/film/newsid_1775000/1775885.stm

Let's get real here: why would anybody in his right mind wish to suffer through a typical item of French cinematic fare like the following?

http://bbcworld.com/content/talkingmovies_archive_lff_2003.asp?pageid=665&co_pageid=7

At least with "dumb" Hollywood movies, Japanese anime, Bollywood song-and-dance numbers or Hong-Kong wuxia flicks there's always some discernable effort at an attempt to entertain. If I want to see dull, aimless people doing pointless and irrational things all I have to do is go outside and stand on any busy street.

[cuthhyra]

"If I want to see dull, aimless people doing pointless and irrational things all I have to do is go outside and stand on any busy street."

That is a priceless account of French cinema!

I would also guess that the concept of making people pay for endless repeats will fall by the wayside as once a program is out on the file sharing networks, as a high quality recording, people are not likely to keep paying to watch what they can get for free.