New media: revolution or evolution?

Hewon Yang is director, special projects, Atlantis Releasing, Toronto.

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Cannes, France: Among the statistics from this year’s Milia new media market, held in Cannes Jan. 12-16, there were 7,000 attendants and 690 exhibiting companies representing 45 countries.

Although Milia has yet to graduate to the frenzied rank and pace of either mip-tv or mipcom, this year’s attendance would seem to suggest that a revolution is upon us – a revolution which will force those of us in the traditional production industry to either take up (virtual) arms or prepare for an eventual elimination.

This is the ultimatum with which Bill Gates and every second speaker at the panel seminars would like to hold producers of ‘traditional’ entertainment hostage.

This hypothetical ‘revolution,’ however, should be contextualized against a market backdrop which included archaic overhead presentations during panel seminars, the dedicated efforts of two Milia staff hand-cutting mailbox labels over a two-day period, and a landscape of some truly awful cd-rom titles and software.

Some revolutions, it would seem, take longer than others.

The epoch of digital media represents not as much an overnight revolution as a need for evolution of traditional entertainment products from its categorical definition as static ‘programming’ to interactive ‘software.’

According to a recent u.s. Department of Commerce study, 75% of all u.s. homes will own at least one pc by the year 2000, and there is an increasing trend among hardware companies to ship internal cd-rom drives with their pcs.

This substantial installed base will represent an increasing demand for ‘entertainment’ software of all genres, including children’s edutainment titles, reference and informational software, familiar twitch games, and entertainment software.

The digital media remains, however, mostly an industry in its infancy, and the analogy that it resembles the motion picture industry in the days of D.W. Griffiths and The Great Train Robbery is an accurate one. Accordingly, there is no international consensus dictating (or protecting) copyright; the distribution channels for retail venues have yet to be firmly established; the marketing and packaging of cd-rom titles remains cumbersome and haphazard; confusion still abounds about hardware platforms; and most profoundly, no one has definitively determined what the consumer wants.

Myst, which was awarded the Milia prize for the best game of 1994, is hailed as the top-selling cd-rom title with sales of approximately one million units; considering, however, the worldwide installed base in 1994 of 23 million cd-rom drives, the title still has not achieved mass-market penetration.

There are approximately 2,000 cd-rom titles in publication worldwide. Of this total number, five to 10 titles stimulate 90% of the unit sales.

As with feature films, the new media remains an industry driven, sustained, and glorified by its hits.

Among Atlantis’ objectives in venturing to the Milia market was the desire to gain an understanding and perspective of the international market and to find appropriate technology partners for our Tamara cd-rom.

Milia provided us with a series of seminars which examined the emerging markets beyond the North American border; it also assembled an audience among new media developers, publishers and distributors who had cumulatively experienced the play a hundred times – all of whom had coincidentally arrived at the painful and expensive conclusion that the consumer is not willing to pay $50-$70 for data stored on cds.

In trying to determine the needs and desires of a growing consumer market, many in the new media are now returning to the oldest art form – storytelling.

The precedent-setting unit sales of Myst and 7th Guest were driven not merely by beautiful graphics but their hint at an essence of a story.

Twitch games tend to be exercises in skilled behavioral responses rather than the satisfaction of a basic human need to hear a good story – whether that takes place around a campfire or in front of the pc.

The consumer market will continue to support twitch games (or ‘thumb candy’), but the evolving consensus in the new media is the realization that to truly reach mass-market penetration, cd-rom titles must compel, engage, and engross their audience with good stories conveyed by practitioners of the ancient art of storytelling.

It is much easier to teach technology to artists than artistry to technologists.

Development hell is probably the only production process common to both the film and television production and new media industries. The convergence between those of us in the production and new media communities will entail a marriage of the two disciplines, and will necessitate flexibility among those in the production community to adapt and evolve from a ritualized production process.

If consumers are unwilling to pay $8 to see a feature film starring an actor or actress with traditional marquee value, they will resist the opportunity to see Arnie on their pc at a price tag of $50-$70.

Stories will be driven by both narrative and software which allows and encourages interactivity; scripts will more likely resemble 800-page configurations detailing short snippets of dialogue, game engine programming language, algorithmic patterns, and detailed graphical user interface designs.

The strength of the Canadian production community is our asserted autonomy from the studios that dominate the u.s. entertainment industry, which are fraught with bureaucracy and an institutional inability to adapt to new rules and practices.

By 1996, there will be an anticipated 57 million pcs installed with cd-rom drives. The challenge over the next year is the development, production and distribution of cd-rom software which will claim the attention of an audience of 57 million consumers. This is the challenge which those of us in the production and creative community should address.

It has been easy to dismiss technology in the past as the strict domain of those closeted away in mis departments; the future will insist, however, that we embrace technology as enabling tools which allow us not only to produce for a new medium but also as a communications facilitator.

Distributors dominated the Milia market this year, but as the Internet emerges as the present-day alternative to the hypothetical information uberbahn, the market in 1996 will probably be populated by on-line service providers and commercial networks.

Epitome’s Liberty Street recently established its own multimedia home page on the World Wide Web and afforded us, as distributor for the series, not only the opportunity to produce a cost-effective marketing tool to reach our international buyers and press, but a forum for Epitome to interact with its Gen-X audience so that the series truly reflects their true concerns and their dreams.

The new media remains too immature to qualify as a revolution, but it does indicate an evolution of consumer tastes and expectations, and as with all supply-and-demand economies, those able to adapt and evolve to meet this paradigm shift will flourish.

As Jaron Lanier (musician, scientist, creator of the concept of virtual reality) noted at Milia, there is true artistry in technology and software. What we in the traditional entertainment industry must accept, as part of the evolving paradigm and definition of entertainment, is software and technology in our art.

See you next year in Cannes.