Editor’s Note: Looking to bring a younger perspective to the mobile space, RCR Wireless News has tapped Jeff Hawn to provide insight into what’s on the minds of the tech-savvy youth of today.
Wireless technology and interconnectivity are redefining how mass media and entertainment will be shaped in the future as emerging technologies. Currently, television shows are still built around the idea of capturing all-important ratings by appealing to the broadest number of viewers from as many demographics as possible, although that business model is already on its way out due to the rising popularity of streaming video services. Viewers able to directly access entire seasons of their favorite shows with limited commercial interruption are fleeing traditional broadcast channels in droves. This in turn has empowered streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu to create their own content rather than just licensing broadcast networks TV shows and movies. Although we are still a ways from Netflix having the financial muscle to supplant the established movie studios, I would argue that evolving wireless technology will soon begin to reshape how streaming services create content.
Reality TV, the somewhat distasteful brand of television content which is cheap to produce and garners high ratings, pioneered the involvement of the audience in shaping the narrative story of the season. This worked by allowing audience members to vote for the finalists of shows like “American Idol” and “Big Brother.” The direct text-message voting method has been supplanted of late by the writer/watcher/tweet conversation. For some shows, especially the long ongoing soaps, the narrative is being driven by audience members’ input on what direction they want the story to go.
I believe that combining direct audience input with other technological advances could ultimately establish a new and powerful niche of entertainment – call it an interactive television show. Rather than writing a narrative and hoping that their audience warms to it, studios could use artificial intelligence, 3D graphics and Oculus technology to build a truly interactive narrative that audience members could directly interact and participate in at the individual level. A prototype of this type of entertainment already exists in the form of the most recent generation of role-playing video games. The difference being that games require high-performance graphics cards and platforms solely dedicated to gaming.
Generation wireless wants portable entertainment options
The key – as Facebook, Google and Netflix, among others have already realized – is to create a form of interactive digital entertainment that speaks to generation wireless by running smoothly on a smartphone or Google Glasses. Integrating Oculus virtual reality technology with something as small and compact as Google glasses could revolutionize the streaming services industry. Why cater to the tastes of 5 million people in the United States when you could potentially tailor an entertainment product to billions of people globally, especially while cutting overhead cost? Most money in entertainment is spent on production sets, actors, crew, etc., all of which cost money. Netflix just spent $90 million on its historical drama “Marco Polo.” HBO continues to break records with the production costs of its acclaimed “Game of Thrones” series. Each season of content generation costs more money in order to hit viewer’s expectations. Interactive RPG games, such as the recently released “Dragon Age Inquisition,” may cost $170 million to create, but upon release will generate revenue continuously even after its successor has been launched.
In the near future, we may see studios releasing television shows in which the actors aren’t real people and the sets don’t exist. A computer will generate everything in the production. This has been done and will continue to be done. “Avatar” was 90% CG. Once graphics advance to the point in which studios can cut actors out entirely, they can lower costs enough to create massive amounts of tailor-made content that appeals directly to fans.
This is all, of course, speculation on the future of the entertainment industry, but one thing is for sure – customers will soon be demanding faster and faster data plans. Wireless companies should track these developing technologies and brace for the deluge that is the death of broadcast TV.
Jeff Hawn was born in 1991 and represents the “millennial generation,” the people who have spent their entire lives wired and wireless. His adult life has revolved around cellphones, the Internet, video chat and Google. Hawn has a degree in international relations from American University, and has lived and traveled extensively throughout Europe and Russia. He represents the most valuable, but most discerning, market for wireless companies: the people who have never lived without their products, but are fickle and flighty in their loyalty to one company or product. He’ll be sharing his views – and to a certain extent the views of his generation – with RCR Wireless News readers, hoping to bridge the generational divide and let the decision makers know what’s on the mind of this demographic.
