Spent most of last week in Santa Monica at the Digital Hollywood conference. No ground-breaking insights into the future of entertainment, though I did meet some interesting and intelligent people there.
Here’s my summary of the DH09 conference: lots of hand-shaking, hand-wringing, and hand-clasping.
First, the hand-shaking. This is a networking conference, no two ways about it. The hotel lobby was always full of people throughout the day. Not a bad thing, but I’m used to conferences where no one wanted to miss a single panel (my background is anything but entertainment in case you haven’t guessed). General tone: Are you someone who can help me figure out this mess we’re in?
Next, the hand-wringing. More than once, I heard a panelist utter these inspiring words: “…and if anyone in the audience has figured this out, please tell me.” General tone: No, I’m not someone who can help you figure this mess out – we’re in it up to our armpits just like you.
Finally, the hand-clasping. I won’t say there was a lot of desperation at the conference, but it was clear that money is drying up in several corners of entertainment. Getting funding for projects is hard. Getting advertising dollars is hard. Times are tough, and since the hand-wringing is still going on (no one’s “solved” digital content delivery/monetization yet), a lot of content creators and distributors are scared about what the future holds. General tone: Please don’t let me go out of business/into bankruptcy before we all figure this out.
I see no immediate silver bullet for online content, no signs that traditional ad dollars will bounce back, and no indications that online ad dollars will approach previous levels of traditional ad dollars. I don’t see Hollywood reversing the tide of UCG that continues to close the gap with commercial content in terms of production or content quality. I don’t see the big media players taking the necessary game-changing plays to leapfrog their competition into the digital age.
Mostly, I continue to see attempts to box the Internet and digital content into old school models in an attempt to make them fit within traditional models of content generation and distribution. Which is a shame, since the large media companies could be leading the charge in developing new models instead of retrenching and denying the inevitable. Instead, it’s the independents forging ahead (often dragging, coercing or convincing the media conglomerates to follow).
