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Television and Film execs may have hoped the David Fincher and Kevin Spacey drama, House of Cards, would collapse on itself. It has not. Instead, it has ushered in a new era.
Spacey made this absolutely clear in his recent keynote at the Edinburgh Television Festival. For well over a decade, traditional media has been fighting to retain control of how its content is consumed. Spacey has entered the arena – siding with the consumer.
The music business lost this battle first. Newspapers followed. And unless they change, Spacey believes TV will suffer next (see my recent post "Why Broadcast TV Must Go Online").
TV shows and films have been largely protected from the onslaught of the Internet. YouTube scared TV back in 2006-8 when it seemed every show was available on the site for free. So even though YouTube won the lawsuit brought by Viacom, media companies have learned how to use the site more effectively as a promotion channel. And, despite the proliferation of alternative video programming on the Internet, TV is generally doing well.
The reasons TV and film have not been decimated is that the cost of producing high quality content is still high and the number of distribution channels that produce real revenue (theaters, cable TV and video-on-demand) are tightly controlled.
The problem, as Spacey eloquently points out, is that consumers are now consuming media in a myriad of ways – on a phone, on a tablet, on social media, in small bites or, as shown by House of Cards, in huge gorging gulps. To quote Spacey,“If you watch a TV show on your iPad is it no longer a TV show? The device and length are irrelevant." To that end, is it TV if you can watch 13 episodes all at once? Is it a film?
The point is: Consumers don’t care. They just want to watch good stories in whatever manner suits them. They don’t care about business models.
So what are TV executives to do? Is Netflix their savior or mortal enemy?
Spacey does a way better job offering ideas and solutions for the industry than I can in this brief post. Watch the highlight clip embedded below (the longer version is here). What do you think?
Bravo Kevin! I do wonder if, like your character in House of Cards, there is some kind of revenge motivation happening here… 😉
Featured on:Big Ideas & Innovation
Posted by:Mika Salmi
via The Future of TV: Decidedly Not a House of Cards | LinkedIn.
