Insightful articles, opinion and commentary about mobile and web.

Simon van Wyk explores what lies ahead for the YouTube generation.

What lies ahead for the YouTube generation? As the digital revolution takes hold, entertainment will be increasingly polarised between high quality, expensive blockbuster events and plentiful, free amusements that will be worth what you’ve paid for them.

Predicting the future can be a risky exercise. It’s all too easy to end up with egg on your face when reality unfolds over time. I remember as a child the Jetsons-like predictions that by the beginning of the 21st century we’d all be flying around in personal flying cars and wearing shiny one-piece outfits. Instead, we’re still travelling in our cars (albeit in a lot more comfort) underground in expensive road tunnels rather than in the air, while our kids wear fashion better suited to a 19th century gothic novel than a science fiction tale.

When it comes to speculating about how we will entertain ourselves in 20 years, I think it’s useful to look at where we are along a continuum; by looking at how things have changed in the past 20 years we might get some idea of what to expect in the next twenty.

Twenty years ago the world was still assessing the overwhelming effect of television on all forms of entertainment. Attendance and revenue for live events from cinema to theatre to sporting fixtures were all in freefall because it was more convenient and cheaper to watch it all on TV. MTV was starting to affect radio playlists and record sales, as video became an essential part of a song’s appeal.

The World Wide Web, meanwhile, was just a gleam in scientist Tim Berners-Lee’s eye two decades ago. No one was predicting the digital revolution that would sweep through the entertainment industry and which is now overtaking the seemingly unbeatable impact of television itself.

When you think about it, although the Jetsons scenario has not come to pass, we’ve gone through a hell of a revolution in entertainment in the past 20 years. The influence of the World Wide Web and its developments over the past decade, from ordering tickets online to sharing songs through Napster to building social networks and sharing videos on MySpace and YouTube, is changing almost every aspect of entertainment and is in the process of usurping the seemingly impregnable position of television. And it’s not over yet: digital progress will mark the biggest changes to come in entertainment, arts and sports in the next 20 years.

The revolution will not be televised

One of my favourite phrases is, “The revolution will not be televised”. Although it was not coined with the Internet in mind (it was the title of a song by black activist and singer Gil Scott-Heron back in 1971 about the American Black Power movement), it has become a mantra for me in my work in the online media. It doesn’t mean that digital is going to kill television, but it does mean that television is no longer in the driver’s seat. Narrowcasting, not broadcasting, will be the dominant paradigm in entertainment over the next 20 years.

Digital doesn’t just mean the Internet

Digital technology will become the norm within the traditional entertainment media as well as the new media. Movie theatres are already moving to digital – all major movie chains are expected to convert to digital film by the end of the decade. Films will be available on small cassettes rather than huge canisters of film, and every film shown in cinemas will be an “answer print” – only one generation removed from the original (mass release films are currently second generation prints). There will be no problems with wear and tear and no “spatial jitter” as the film moves through the projector.

Digital movies are expected to save the studios more than a billion dollars a year in distribution costs. They will also make it considerably cheaper to show the same movie on multiple screens at the same cineplex. This will further reinforce the current blockbuster mentality – think 25 sessions per day for Pirates of the Caribbean at your local Greater Union, but little else.

That’s not to say that more blockbusters are a bad thing. The incredible special effects in movies such as Superman Returns (such as the buckling metal in the passenger jet as Superman saves it from crashing) are arguably worth the money being spent to achieve them, as long as there is quality storytelling and not just special effects. Blockbusters will continue to become more high-tech and more realistic over the next two decades, making it difficult for low-budget films to compete.

Arthouse cinema will become the long tail

While logic would dictate that this would spell the death of arthouse cinema, I think it will give it a new lease on life. Arthouse cinema will become the “long tail” of movies (more about the long tail a bit further on). As the Internet increases the profile of niche products, arthouse cinema will thrive as it caters to those niche players who still want a group experience. If you like arcane French cinema and you have to look for it now, in the future you won’t have to look so far. Movies pushed out of cineplexes by bigger blockbusters will move to the independents. Cinema will become both deeper and shallower at the same time.

Back at the cineplex, digital technology will be used to extend “live” experiences beyond the stadium and opera house. In the US, a company called National Cinemedia is piping rock concerts from major arenas into cinemas in towns that major bands would never visit. You can’t smoke dope or dive in the mosh pit, but at $15 it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than a concert ticket. At the other end of the culture scale, the New York Metropolitan Opera has begun transmitting live performances to movie theatres and broadcasting more than 100 live performances over the Internet or on digital radio in an attempt to expand its audience.

The blockbuster mentality has affected theatre as much as it has the movie business in the past 20 years – though Andrew Lloyd Webber is as much to blame as television. This trend is likely to continue, as the cost of putting on a show becomes even higher relative to other forms of entertainment. People will only spend $100 on a ticket if they know they are going to see a proven winner like Les Miserables or The Lion King. Families have limited budgets, so it will be harder and harder to justify going to live theatre. Although local amateur theatre will continue, non-blockbuster shows by metropolitan theatre companies will have to change the way they work. They will turn to the Internet to keep their production costs low and to expose themselves to a wider audience. YouTube will become the new Broadway, hundreds of times over. Of course, the easier it is for theatre companies to build a profile online, the easier it is for bad theatre companies to build a profile. The theatre will become both deeper and shallower.

Spyware never sounded so good

If you thought Napster and iTunes represent the pinnacle of personalised music, just wait until you see what will happen online over the next 20 years. By aggregating music choices of millions of users, new online music services will take you beyond what you know you like and move into predicting what you will like. Pandora Radio, one of the first applications in this area, allows you to set up your own radio station, where you tell the program what type of music you enjoy and it selects a menu of songs that include not only the artists you have selected, but music of a similar genre and sound. Another site, last.fm, scans your computer or iPod and makes song choices for you based not only on what you have downloaded but, more importantly, which ones you actually listen to. It then uses an algorithm to create a playlist that mixes your collection with other songs it predicts you will enjoy. And all of this is free as long as you are prepared to listen to some ads amongst the music. As Wired says, “Spyware never sounded so good”.

The stranglehold that record companies and radio stations have had over new music was shaken first by Napster and Kazaa and then by iTunes. Artists like indierocker Beck are taking the next steps in the disintermediation between artists and their fans, providing a model of the disparate nature that music releases will take in the future. His most recent album, Guero, was released in several forms – first as a work in progress leaked onto the Internet, then as a studio CD, followed by a DVD with seven extra songs and professional music videos, and an album of remixes. He even produced homemade music videos filmed by his family members and loaded them onto YouTube. This multimedia approach to music will become more pronounced in the next 20 years.

Unlike television or even other Web sites, YouTube makes it easy for bands and fans to establish a dialogue through video. It’s easy to email video links to friends, or paste links onto individuals’ websites, blogs, or MySpace pages. Posting tribute videos and comments is also easy. The lead singer of OK Go, a band that has built its eclectic reputation through clever videos on YouTube, told Wired, “It sort of provides an infinite information jungle gym for our fans, one that’s always growing and morphing,” constructed as much by the fans as by the band itself.

Virtual concerts

Another way bands will use the Internet to connect with fans in the future is through virtual concerts. Singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega or rather, her computer-generated avatar - recently performed a virtual concert on the SecondLife website, where users create alter egos and interact with each other in an alternate society. Visitors to the site could hear her live performance and watch a rather clumsy digitally created representation of the event; Vega’s avatar struggled to hang onto her virtual guitar and her mouth was rarely in synch with the music. One reporter who attended the concert said, “all this is pretty goofy. But it’s likely the birth pains of a new age of music performance.”

And although the rise of iTunes is threatening to kill album sales in favour of singles, services such as TuneBooks will ensure the album concept won’t die. Customers download TuneBooks along with an album online and then navigate a QuickTime-powered trip through pictures, videos, credits, and lyrics. It will soon be available in a mobile phone version, and will no doubt lead to more eclectic ringtones, ones that will hopefully sell more than the Crazy Frog (speaking of the shallow end of the music pool).

One feature of the digital revolution that is having a strong commercial effect across the entertainment industry is the concept of “the long tail”. Coined by Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, the long tail refers to the fact that back catalogues for just about anything are able to be sold cheaply via digital means, so old and obscure titles are enjoying a renaissance. While bookstores make 95% of their income from a maximum of 100,000 titles, Amazon.com’s 3.7 million titles are all equally available, and half of its income comes from books outside the top 100,000.

Anderson cites the example of Into Thin Air, a recent book about a mountain-climbing accident that, through Amazon’s “also recommended” engine, breathed new life into a 15-year-old title on the same topic, Touching the Void. Sales of the older book ended up overtaking the newer one, and it was made into an award-winning docudrama that drove further sales for the original book. This story is being retold over and over across videos, DVDs, music and all forms of archived entertainment.

More reality TV

What about TV - how will it address the digital challenge of the next 20 years? The current teething pains around digital broadcasting will be settled over time and interactivity will become a much more important part of the TV viewing experience. That means more reality TV, a concept that is driven more by the opportunity to participate in decision-making than the promise that Australian Idol will find the next Elvis or Big Brother will uncover the next game show host.

The relative cost of producing quality drama and sports programming for TV will continue to go up as audiences go down. A couple of things will happen as a result. Name actors and sportspeople may not be able to command the same salaries as they do at present. Many new shows will be available only via services such as YouTube, filmed using low-cost equipment to suit the less polished nature of online video. Of course, the problem with everything ending up on YouTube is that our tolerance for low production values will grow. We’re already getting used to pixellated photos and mobile phone photos – even on the news. We will become pickier and less picky at the same time as we make the time to watch some quality drama on TV, but also consume (usually in bite-sized chunks) the fast food options available online.

As bandwidth becomes less of an issue, video will be added to more online services, making them more like (badly done) television. In the SecondLife vein, a research group at Northwestern University has developed a text-to-speech engine called Buzz that identifies most-searched topics on popular blogs and uses a virtual host to read the information out loud. The next step will no doubt be David Tench summarising and commenting on the web’s top blogs.

Gaming is also going down this route, with games that allow you to put your own face on your on-screen counterpart. Games will also use applications like VirtuSphere, which was designed for military training and lets users roam around simulated environments without being limited by physical barriers. A wireless headset senses the movements of virtual explorers, letting them navigate lifelike situations inside the freely rotating orb. Its makers claim you can run, jump, or crawl your way through anything that happens on-screen without hurting yourself on any actual obstacles.

One guarantee

One guarantee for 20 years’ time is that we will have a much wider range of choice in entertainment. The great unknown is what will be worth choosing.