Jiva Technology

Where is this revolution in digital media taking us? Part 2.

At the end of part 1, I signed off in search of a mythical final blog post by Steve Jobs. In it, he outlined his grand vision for the future creation, dissemination and consumption of digital media under the simple title, “So where’s this all going Steve?” As you might have guessed … I haven’t found it. In retrospect, it seems a bit rash to have offered to step in to his shoes and write that post, so perhaps I should add that important caveat: in my opinion (not in Steve’s). Or put another way, here’s what I think and I make no claim for my views other than as a starting point for discussion.

Let’s put a few stakes in the ground. For a start, I think most of the hardware and infrastructure elements are in place and will get incrementally better and cheaper e.g. significantly faster broadband (including 4G mobile), cheaper, lighter, lower-power consumption mobile devices. The iPad/tablet and iPhone/smartphone were hugely important pieces in the jigsaw and a way to popularise the ‘personal media device’; a consumption point for film/tv/books that doesn’t bother anyone else and can be carried with you.

What isn’t in place is a collective vision for what the global digital media marketplace can become. You might question whether or not that’s such a big deal, but in any revolution, there are winners and losers. We have a very few early winners, a few early losers and a whole lot more people really worried about where they will fit in long term. People need to understand how to become winners or at the very least, have an idea of how not to become a loser. Take the many players in the book industry as an example. As the author Richard Wright points out, ‘long tail’ sales don’t really cut it for him, nor will they ever; his concern is that fewer and fewer people will be able to write books as a full time profession. He is less sentimental about the publishers, but I’d argue that they have an important role in curation (of which more later), quality control (try reading an unedited book) and generally assisting, not hindering, the emergence of of a coherent, competitive and open market. Geographic lockout does not create an open market and the recent machinations over so-called piracy and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the USA are a case in point of what happens when uninformed legislators meet scared, entrenched interests. It’s simply not acceptable for the tech industry to say, “trust us, it’ll be okay”, because books, film, music etc; are important to a degree beyond their economic weight, partly because of the cultural importance and partly because of their role in education. The way Google handled the books project should have taught us that.

We have to start with a recognition that whilst in digital form, books, music, film and art all look the same (bits), they need to be treated in very different ways. Even putting aside the notion of their cultural or historical aspects, we have to acknowledge that the way we ‘consume’ them is very different. We don’t generally think of ourselves as consumers of a film or art, but by changing the way we think about the problem, new insights emerge.

When we think about the cost of a book, film, song etc; we normally think about buying it. That could be an outright purchase, a rental or a subscription to a streaming service. But it’s not the only cost we incur when we ‘consume’ media. Think for a moment about the following three elements:

• cost to acquire (how much to buy/subscribe to)
• time to consume (how long does it take to finish it?)
• effort to consume (read, listen to, watch)

To these, you could add a fourth, which is the time you invest to be even aware that an author/artist and their work actually exist. It’s mainly a subconscious process, but once we’re past the age of 25, you actually need to be proactive to search out new music; it takes time and effort (your friends are now too busy to tell you about a cool new band). Take a music download, where the cost to download from iTunes might be 99p, it might take less than 3 minutes to listen to the song and we might be able to go running/drive the car/ change the nappy at the same time. There’s are fairly reasonable search services and a few ‘if you like this, you might like that’ services. For a film or a tv series, the cost to acquire might be higher and it certainly takes longer to consume (watch). I also have to concentrate (in the main) to watch it. Search services are not as good for film, especially if you have a taste for overseas cinema. Finally, think about a book. The cost to buy might be lower than a film, but it takes much more effort to consume (read) and I have it require a high degree of attention. I also need to spend a few years at school to learn how to do it. Harry Potter books are between 76,944 and 257,045 words in length and the average reader can manage about 250 words a minute.

I find this revealing. First of all, it’s not hard to see why piracy is going to be more of a problem for music than it is for books (although piracy is an emerging problem with text books – ones you HAVE to read). Secondly, it indicates that if you make the wrong choice with a song, it’s less of an issue than it is if you make a bad book choice (as an aside, it’s not hard to calculate how many books you can read in your life). Thirdly, it suggest to me that one of the weakest parts of the chain is the first one: how should I be made aware of new work that I might actually like. The very best will always be found; I can’t imagine that the next Beyonce or a new Jack Kerouac wouldn’t come to people’s attention. It also works for the very worst – who cares whether we hear about a pub band that are no good or a vanity author whose only market is friends and family? But there is a huge market in between for artists and authors that appeal to my tastes and not to others. How do we match make in the digital market place. It can’t just be an algorithm – I don’t think those Facebook-like buttons will ever work for me. I’ll give you a real world example. I almost exclusively read non-fiction books related to subjects that I’m interested in: architecture, history and social justice and business. Last year I read a novel about an advertising exec from the favelas in Brazil and loved it? How did that happen? Well, I was in a book shop in Bath ( Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights) and when I was at the checkout, I got talking about books to the guy who was serving me.  After about a 15 minute chat, he pulled out Heliopolis (James Scudamore) and said, “you should read this, you’d like it”. And I did – a book that was completely outside of my normal ‘scope of selection’. It came from left field. It won’t change my mainstream reading habits, but it will make me eager for more left-field opportunities.

Where does this leave us? Well, it leaves me thinking that merely supplying a bunch of popular songs and books as digital files to a nice tablet does not constitute to a complete solution. More thinking is required … in part 3.